International Activities Planning Commission
International Activities Task Groups

International Task Group I: UVA and Faculty Students Abroad
(Presented at the April 22 Meeting)
Minutes

DATE: April 21, 1999

TIME: 3:30 - 4:55 PM

PLACE: International Studies Office, Minor Hall, Room 109

CALL TO ORDER - Julie Novak, convenor, Theo Van Groll, Len Schoppa, David LaRue, Gordon Burris, Kim Hawkins(Program Assistant)

OLD BUSINESS

A. Approval of minutes/report -

Len's report (see email for full report) - UVA benefits for faculty travel: incentives and/or disincentives. Goal: Eliminate disincentives. University pays pension, life insurance, and disability if travel is during academic year. As long as the faculty member takes one semester per calendar year, the faculty is not penalized. Faculty member is penalized if gone 12 months/ both semesters in same calendar year. Anyone who goes for 12 months or less can arrange with Qual Choice to avoid interruption in coverage. Typical arrangement: full year 1/2 pay or 1/2 year full pay. UVA will pick up cost of QualChoice on a Sesqui. Fringe pool will pick up share of cost if university picks up part of salary. Even with Qual Choice, if overseas and have an injury, the person may have to come up with cash to pay for medical costs and wait to be reimbursed. QualChoice does not pay for medical evacuation. Suggestion: Modify/expand QualChoice services or create a pool of cash to tide people over to get their medical treatment rather than having to come up with the cash OR contract with an international medical insurance provider that is well accepted internationally. S.O.S. is used by some universities as a plan for international travelers Evacuation coverage is recommended for all UVA students who travel abroad. Recommendations for faculty are no consistent across grounds.

The cost of maintaining continuous coverage. If the S.O.S. coverage costs less than Qual Choice, should explore further. QualChoice cost may be $637.00/month for international coverage for faculty member and family to be covered which is a disincentive for faculty travel. May be too generous to pay 100%, but should look at 50% coverage of their portion of the health insurance coverage or at least maintain the university's portion while out of the country. Tax implications: If going overseas for less than 183 days, you can be excluded from the foreign government.'s tax law; can earn income and pay no foreign taxes. Must evaluate tax treaty between foreign country and US. (e.g. US/German tax treaty). David LaRue offered to write a booklet on this topic.

Other reports- Theo Van Groll - A small task group was convened to determine needs of the International Living/Learning Center. They will put together a package of information that is pertinent to Sprigg Lane about what modifications are necessary. Needs: minimal office space, library, kitchen, meeting space.

Julie - APT committee and dean evaluation of international work. Data collection in process. Responses thus far: international work is evaluated under service component of mission unless research project or part of coursework. Need to poll deans.

Gordon - Evaluated international alumnae prospect pool totals by country for fundraising and program development. More than 1,997 UVA alumnae or shorter-term UVA students are living internationally. Population data of graduates and their locations (alumni/resource pool) for fundraising internationally was provided. e.g. Australia - 165, alumni directory shows only 73. The lower is "true" alumni. New Zealand is 53 on sheet and 32 in the alumni directory. Mexico is 48 "true" alumnae and Puerto Rico is 47. Gives information re: alumnae in other countries. Present Capital Campaign ends December 30, 2000. Commissions must identify needs, justify needs and make recommendations for future direction following Capital Campaign. Dec. 30, 2000-2004: fill fundraising needs that have not been targeted in past campaigns. Fundraising needs will be identified by commissions and recommendations will be made to Deans, Vice-presidents, and President. "Wish list" should be identified to follow Capital Campaign. Identification of goals now will affect future course. Certain criteria and interests will match "wish list". Prioritize needs with justification and make recommendations to the deans and VPs. Justification of fundraising needs critical. Where do we place our emphasis? Possibility of purchasing international campuses is being explored. Do not know which task group is discussing this.

NEW BUSINESS: Task Group Report

General Task; create incentives and avoid disincentives for faculty and student international work and study. Focus areas thus far: faculty and student health insurance; faculty benefits maintenance; departmental identification, evaluation, approval, and advisement regarding international programs for students; current initiatives, fundraising (alumnae and corporate sponsor data base); International Living and Learning Center.

Significance; relationship to other task groups - in process of determining this; subtasks (other groups that overlap - institutional agreements). Goal: help students make better choices. Avoid disincentives/Create incentives for study abroad.

B. Specific projects

Current opportunities, ongoing activities, "low-hanging fruit."

Ongoing projects. "Low hanging fruit" : International Learning and Living Center on Sprigg Lane, QualChoice expansion of international health services or identify international health insurer, creation of data base of funding opportunities and international prospect pool, creation of faculty booklet re: income tax information, summary of data re: APT.

Comparison universities or programs. Stanford, Yale, UNC, Duke.

University of Michigan--well developed fundraising program, need to explore other aspects. Berkeley has a full time fundraiser in Japan. Should the university hire a full time international fundraiser? Yale has regional international fundraisers. A number of universities have been very successful in purchasing property abroad then developing programs internationally.

Plan: Talk with Courtland Lee re: comparison universities. Gather data for "benchmarking" faculty and student international experiences.

Also update and maintain Web page on international studies. Need resources to accomplish this and provide ongoing support for success. It all comes back to priorities and the resources to fund the international program. What is the level of commitment?

Task metrics

Empirical measures of success and deficiency in this area. Develop and coordinate outcome measures regarding student and faculty satisfaction with international experience. Avoid redundancy of data collection across grounds. Collect data on Web page similar to Amazon.com format. Identify proportion of faculty that went abroad, the proportion of students who went abroad, % who are fluent in various languages. Determine level of satisfaction with UVA facilitation of process and programs in which they participated. Develop feedback loop so that satisfaction data is readily available. Work on international programs before summer orientation so that students get comprehensive re: international programs information in the beginning.

IV. Next meeting: Wednesday, May 5, 1999, Commerce School, Mobile Room

Task force # 2, Internationalizing the Curriculum
Report of meeting on April 1, 1999

A few recommendations for rapid implementation: The on-line course offering directory, and general on-line information offers a whole host of internationalizing opportunities.

1. Courses can (also) be grouped according to geographic area, say, all courses on China, or South East Asia, or Africa, can be brought together.

2. Faculty by geographic area can be grouped together.

3. Faculty by language ability/use can be grouped together.

4. Faculty email lists by area, language.

More difficult, apparently:

5: Cross listing of courses. Is this something that is more difficult here than in other Universities? If so, why? Might something be done about it.

Other thoughts:

6. The need for a state of the art language lab. Other universities, Virginia Tech, apparently are way ahead of us in this regard.

7. The formation of a group of faculty from all the language departments to coordinate efforts, learn from one another. Currently, there is little communication across language departments. The communication that does exist tends to be exclusive to matters of technology.

8. The creation of one credit language maintenance courses for students who have taken the 101-202 sequence and want to keep up with the language. Apparently, Spanish has such courses.

9. A more focused program of graduate student teacher training, perhaps in the summer prior to initial enrollment.

10. Focus on language/literature in translation as an integral part of an international curriculum.

11: Focus on translation via technology, television, to hone language abilities.

Major concern:

An appreciation of language teaching and learning is needed. It is labor intensive, inefficient by nature, requires small classes, and thus cannot be enrollment driven. This is especially true in the "smaller" languages. Language learning is incremental and requires sustained exposure. The University needs to change its outlook toward language teaching.

International Activities Planning Commission
Subject: Meeting 4-22

Task Group 3:Subcommittee on International Students and Scholars

1. General Task

To investigate systematically the experience of foreign students and scholars in order to ease their entry in the Academical Village and to facilitate their academic and professional goals.

2. Specific projects.

A. International Living and Learning Center

The International Studies Office has formed a committee to work forthe approval of their International Living and Learning Center; they would like to attach themselves to our subcommittee. Thus we would be a conduit between them and the larger commission.

B. International Students at UVa

We are looking into surveying exit surveys done of graduating seniors as well as some of the qualitative information collected by the Office of Institutional Assessment. Julian Bivins has located and ordered a survey of international students at American colleges and universities which we think may help us identify peers and benchmarks.

C. English as a Second Language

We have been encouraged by several people to look seriously at how the university could revise its program for teaching ESL. It seems to be most necessary for graduate students and it may be that there is a need for more work on communication skills-that is, helping teaching assistants listen more carefully and explain themselves more clearly.

3. Issues still to be defined:

A. What can be done to make it easier to invite international scholars to visit the university or collaborate with our faculty?

B. What institutional commitments would be required if we were to increase the numbers of international students in our schools?

C. We still have not identified peer institutions or metrics.

International Activities Planning Commission
Report of Taskgroup 4, Institutional Agreements, of 2020
April 22, 1999

1. There are many useful institutional agreements already in existence.

2. Our purpose therefore is not to propose MORE institutional agreements as such but to propose agreements that advance

CENTRAL strategic goals of this Commission.

3. The activity of our Working Group is, as a consequence, deeply dependent on that of the other groups in the Commission, especially those dealing with curricular and exchange issues.

4. What might appropriate strategic goals be? This is an issue that the Commission as a whole has to decide, so it is important for us to make clear now some of the assumptions under which we have been laboring:

A. That it is a major interest of the University that as many students as possible have a realistic opportunity to spend some time abroad during their academic career.

B. That the University should have a significantacademic presence in every major world region.

C. That there should be a reasonable correspondence between the distribution of U.Va. study abroad programs and the pattern of foreign language study at the University itself.

Questions that arise in this respect include:

i) Do we have a study abroad infrastructure in the Spanish-speaking world that corresponds to the fact that about half of our undergraduates take Spanish as their foreign language?

ii) Might consideration be given to strengthening the foreign language requirement to include passing an oral fluency test? (Such fluency is generally best and most rapidly acquired by living abroad, thereby introducing synergy between curriculum requirements and study abroad programs.)

iii) Is it an interest of the University to place students in foreign internship situations? This would clearly be a labor-intensive enterprise, with implications for administrative arrangements.

5. Consequently, we should want to propose ties that will open up BROAD connections for students and faculty, beyond the individual programs now in place. (Another Qatar program, while spectacular and even appropriate per se, does not really correspond to our needs here.)

A. As an example: Might we devise a social sciences and humanities counterpart to the consortium arrangement that the Engineering School has developed with seven European Union and two other US universities? Is some such arrangement imaginable in the Spanish-speaking world, e.g., Latin America?

6. Consider the attraction of "American Studies" at U. Va. in terms of what we can offer our counterpart institutions. (There is a USIA program to fund foreign scholars for American Studies programs at US universities which could be considered as a funding source.)

7. TASK METRICS

A. What are relevant institutions for comparison and aspiration?

i) Public universities with notable international accomplishments, e.g.: UCLA, UC/Berkeley, UNC., U. of Maryland/College Park, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U. of Florida (re. Latin America), inter alia.

B. Among the tasks to accomplish are:

i) establish the number of students abroad as compared to the student body;
ii) how broadly is the given institution represented across world regions?
iii) how does the distribution of study abroad programs relate to the pattern of foreign language study?
iv) Are there significant foreign internship programs in place? What does it take to administer them?
v) Where do our own DEPARTMENTS want to be in 2020?

7. Finally, some of us might visit the following organizations over the summer: the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, the Interamerican Organization for Higher Education, the Association of African Universities.

Respectfully submitted,

Allen C. Lynch

International Activities Planning Commission
Task Group 5
4/22/99

The Nature of Internationalization: Task Group 5 sees internationalization of the University as encompassing the development of both foreign and domestic institutional relations, such as the Qatar initiative, the promotion of student study abroad programs, the encouragement of faculty international activities such as research and faculty exchanges, the development of resources for international activities, and the promotion of overseas alumni relations.

PROPOSED POSITION: Vice President for International Affairs

RESPONSIBILITIES:

The Vice President for International Affairs would oversee/coordinate/initiate the following:

• Institutional Relations, both foreign and domestic, e.g. Qatar initiative
• *Student study abroad programs. Promote interest in international studies to students, facilitate school and department procedures to enable students to take advantage of international opportunities
• International research initiatives including international private sector activities associated with the University (e.g., the University’s new research park)
• Faculty exchanges
• Resource development initiatives/fundraising for international activities
• Overseas alumni relations
• Associated international educational activities (e.g., the Jefferson Center for International Scholars and the Miller Center)

QUALITIES DESIRED IN VP FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS:

• Must be an intellectual leader
• Must be an advocate for international activities
• Must be a fund-raiser (internal & external)
• Must be willing and able to travel (be willing to meet with and cultivate overseas alumni)
• Must be able to survive a possible change in the University presidency to an individual who may not be committed to international activities

POSSIBLE CANDIDATES FOR SUCH A POSITION: ( must be a scholar/internationalist who can maximize resources and be alert to fund-raising opportunities) Possibilities might include:

• A former diplomat
• Someone with international corporate experience
• An international NGO executive
• An international scholar with administrative experience
• A university administrator with international experience (e.g., the president of the overseas branch of an American university)

*It is suggested that student study abroad programs should be given the number one priority. Such programs would have a quick impact. The VP for International Affairs should work with faculty and staff to establish a goal that all undergraduate students will have a study abroad experience.

Additional Considerations:

• The VP for International Affairs should be supported by possibly a five person staff
• The endowment of the VP for International Affairs position should be included as an objective in the current Capital Campaign