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Florida colleges look to create 'global campus'

Early edition: The schools are branching out to open new opportunities overseas.

By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published December 26, 2006

The University of Florida is negotiating a partnership with a top Chinese research college. Florida International University recently opened a $28-million hospitality school in Tianjin, China, the country’s fourth-largest city.

Meanwhile, Florida’s public university and community college chancellors want to create a virtual institute that gives students better access to foreign languages, including Mandarin and Arabic.

Welcome to the global university.

With countries like China increasing their international influence, and with politics putting a spotlight on Latin America and the Middle East, Florida colleges are pushing harder than ever for education and research programs that prepare students to work abroad.

“If we’re talking about educating students, Floridians, for the world in which they’re going to live for the next 50 years, they need to be thinking about the world economy,” said UF president Bernie Machen.

Machen is particularly interested in China, the world’s most populous nation. It boasts the fourth-largest economy in the world, with an annual output of more than $2-trillion in 2005. In 2008, it will host the Summer Olympics.

Administrators in UF’s colleges of business and health and human performance are moving to establish joint degree programs with Tsinghua University, one of the premier institutions in China.

Machen and the president of Tsinghua (pronounced Shing-Wah) are negotiating a research partnership that would involve a third, unidentified university.

UF has long-standing education programs in Japan and South Korea, and Machen said UF would be remiss not to set up operations in China, given the research opportunities emerging as the Chinese government invests heavily in its colleges.

Fortune 500 companies have noticed and are setting up operations there. Tsinghua, for example, has a research park with dozens of American and international companies, including Google and Microsoft.

“We’re going to be able to do research with multinational companies, American companies, that we probably couldn’t do here in the United States,” Machen said. “It can really broaden our students’ experience. They need to get over there and experience that.”

Brianna Olson,  a senior at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, knows the value of studying in a foreign land. An international relations and Spanish language major, she left her native Tennessee and enrolled at the private liberal arts college because of its nationally lauded study-abroad programs.

Eckerd’s London Study Center, established in 1969, accommodates up to 57 students each year who learn from both Eckerd and British faculty. Eckerd also offers language immersion programs in Japan, China, Italy, Spain and France. At least 60 percent of Eckerd students study abroad, some more than once, during their time at the college.

During her freshman year, Olson spent half a semester in Asia, traveling throughout China and Japan. She spent two nights with a Japanese family that spoke no English.

“It was a complete eye-opener,” said Olson, 21. “Just seeing their house and the way they live. Everything was a surprise. It was so different.”

In February, she and 11 other Eckerd students will help longtime professor Ed Grasso pilot a study center in Xiamen, China. She already has studied Japanese at Eckerd, and will study Mandarin while in Xiamen.

Eckerd has fewer than 2,000 students, yet it offers more language opportunities than some of Florida’s larger state universities and community colleges.

Those institutions are a hodgepodge when it comes to language degree programs. Not one of the state’s 11 four-year universities offers a degree in Arabic, a valuable language post-9/11.

And only a handful of Florida’s four-year colleges offers a degree in Chinese.

Mark Rosenberg, the state university system chancellor, wants to establish a virtual language institute that gives students from Miami to the Panhandle access to the same language courses.

“The U.S. market was always a dominant market, but now we see the Chinese market, the Indian market, the European market, they’re all starting to compete with our market,” said Rosenberg, who is fluent in Spanish.

“It’s clear that in the 21st century, students are going to need more than one language to compete.”

As part of the expanded language education, Rosenberg also wants to create more opportunities for students to study abroad.

University of South Florida students could get more chances through projects at the Kiran C. Patel Center for Global Solutions.

Established in 2005, the center will pair USF faculty and other researchers with public and private entities to solve problems like the lack of potable water in areas of Latin America and Africa.

USF provost Renu Khator said the center will “add that edge to our entire curriculum” by exposing students to other cultures.

Grasso, the Eckerd College professor, is such an advocate of study abroad that faculty and students call him “International Ed.”

“You really don’t know your own country until you get outside and look back in,” he said. “You watch these students just grow and develop so much on these trips. You first get there, and it’s like I’m leading these little ducklings along. A few days into it, they’re leading me.”

He recently got an e-mail from a young woman who graduated from Eckerd last year.

She enjoyed Thailand so much during her study-abroad experience, she returned to teach English.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at (813) 226-3403 or svansickler@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 26, 2006, 21:05:45]