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By Ian Wilhelm

Washington

University officials from Iraq and the United States pledged Wednesday to deepen their academic ties, but they said there are significant challenges to increasing opportunities for Iraqi students to study in America and creating dynamic university partnerships.

During a conference here organized by the Iraq Embassy and supported by the U.S. State Department, government officials from both countries emphasized the need to rebuild the Iraqi higher-education system, which historically has been one of the strongest in the region.

After 30 years of war and economic sanctions, and with continued political instability, “the challenges facing Iraq are enormous,” said Ali Al-Adeeb, the Iraqi minister of higher education and scientific research. “Higher education is a basis on which we can start to develop” the country.

During the two-day meeting, Iraqi leaders from 11 universities and representatives from over 40 American institutions hashed out plans to work better together. The primary focus: improving Iraq’s scholarship programs. In the last few years, thousands of Iraqi students have traveled abroad to earn their master’s or doctoral degrees with financing by the Iraqi government agencies. Today, more than 500 Iraqis are studying on American campuses.

But this burgeoning academic relationship between the two countries has been rocky. Iraqi officials said student-visa requirements are overly burdensome and that Americans sometimes don’t appreciate the challenges facing students in Iraq, where paying the more than $100 to take a Toefl test can be too expensive for some.

American university officials countered that having three scholarship programs operated separately by the Iraqi higher-education ministry, the prime minister’s office, and the Kurdish regional government is troublesome. For example, the programs allow for different lengths of time for doctoral students to complete their degrees and for students to gain proficiency in English.

The various rules governing the scholarships “have caused some confusion, not only among U.S. universities but Iraqi students,” said Anne Schneller, who coordinates students on foreign scholarships for Michigan State University. Before the conference, Ms. Schneller did an informal survey of other institutions with Iraqi scholarship students to understand the variety of issues they face. In addition to program rules, she said, Iraqis seem to struggle with the admissions process, like what constitutes a proper letter of recommendation. “We often get letters that say, ‘Mr. Ali was in my math class three years ago and was very good.’”

She did note that the Iraqi students who enrolled at Michigan State—it now has 30 on campus—excel academically and mix well with other students on campus. And she was sympathetic to Iraqis who have to navigate the American higher-education system. “I can only imagine how difficult it is to learn each of our separate policies at U.S. universities.”

Abdul Hadi Al Khalili, the cultural attaché at the Iraq Embassy, said Iraqi officials are working to fix any problems. For example, the higher-education minister wants to make it easier for Iraqi Ph.D. students to extend their stay.

The State Department is also taking steps to smooth the path for Iraqis into American higher education. For example, it wants to help fix a longstanding problem—the lack of English proficiency among students—by building an English-language institute in Baghdad to train Iraqi scholarship students before they go abroad. It has awarded Ball State University $1-million to turn a former U.S. Army facility into the institute and to send language instructors to Iraq.

But during the conference, Abdul Sahib Najim, an adviser to the ministry of higher education, said the language center, which is to be located in the heavily fortified area formerly known as the Green Zone, is a bad idea because the security will prevent easy access by Iraqis. “We should establish this center outside the Green Zone,” he said to applause from participants.

Aside from the scholarship programs, Iraqi university leaders came to the conference seeking aid in modernizing their curricula, teaching methods, and research facilities.

Mosa Al Mosawi, president of the University of Baghdad, said the university is working with 14 American institutions and wants to find more partners. He would like assistance to incorporate the latest teaching technology into his university’s classrooms, set up sabbatical opportunities for professors in the United States, and update the medical curriculum.

For their part, American institutions were game, as long as the deals fit well into their educational strengthens.

Donald G. McCloud, dean of Diether H. Haenicke Institute for Global Education at Western Michigan University, said he was interested in finding an Iraqi institution at the conference that dovetailed with his university’s 30 Ph.D. offerings.

Said Mr. McCloud about the meeting: “It’s a matchmaking effort.”

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By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe

Look at what colleges state as their aims, and you’ll find a predictable list: Teach students how to think critically and analytically; teach them how to write and calculate; teach them the skills of their discipline. As important as such goals are, another fundamental goal is largely being neglected—developing the intellectual virtues they need to be good students, and good citizens.

Some academics may cringe at being charged with the task of developing virtue, believing that it’s a job for others—especially when there is so little agreement about what “virtue” even means in a pluralistic society like ours. They are mistaken. In fact, we often encourage such development—if a bit unreflectively. We would do much better to take the time to think through what the central intellectual virtues are, why they are so important, and how they should be integrated into our curricula:

The love of truth. Young people need to love the truth to be good students. Without it, they will only get things right because we punish them for getting them wrong. When a significant minority of Americans reject evolution and global warming out of hand, the desire to find the truth rather than “truthiness” cannot be taken for granted.

Honesty. Students need to be honest because it enables them to face the limits of what they themselves know, encourages them to confront their mistakes, and helps them acknowledge uncongenial truths about the world. Most colleges encourage a kind of honesty: Don’t plagiarize and don’t cheat. But it is uncommon to hear them tell students, “Face up to your ignorance and error” or, “Accept this unpleasant truth and see how you can mitigate its effects instead of denying it.”

Courage. Students need courage to stand up for what they believe is true, sometimes in the face of mass disagreement from others, including people in authority, like their professors.

Fairness. Students also need to be fair-minded in evaluating the arguments of others. They need the humility to face up to their own limitations and mistakes. They need perseverance, since little that is worth knowing comes easily. They need to be good listeners because students can’t learn from others, or from us, without it. And they need to be able to take the perspective of others, and empathize, especially in an age in which almost all serious published work is collaborative.

Wisdom. Most important, students need what Aristotle called practical wisdom. Wisdom is what enables us to find the balance between timidity and recklessness, between carelessness and obsessiveness, between flightiness and stubbornness, between speaking up and listening up, between trust and skepticism, between empathy and detachment. And wisdom is also what enables us to make difficult decisions among intellectual virtues that may conflict. Being fair and open-minded often rubs up against fidelity to the truth.

So how do we develop the intellectual virtues in our students? Few colleges think systematically about it. Aristotle rightly argued that character and wisdom are developed through practice and by watching those who have already mastered the relevant virtues. Some teachers have structured educational experiences to do exactly that.

Take the approach to education in the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools that teach thousands of elementary-school children in dozens of poor, inner-city neighborhoods. KIPP has found that developing academic skills demands developing character. With virtues like perseverance and honesty and some of the other intellectual virtues we’ve described as essential parts of the curriculum, it’s been possible for KIPP students to achieve high levels of proficiency in mathematics, English, and science. And these intellectual virtues aren’t simply values that are preached. The teachers work hard, and consciously, at figuring out how to incorporate them in what they model in their everyday behavior. For example, in teaching first graders the importance of good listening, and how to listen well, KIPP teachers look intently at a student who is talking, and nod vigorously at what is being said.

At the other end of the academic continuum, the Harvard Medical School doctors Barbara Ogur and David Hirsch redesigned their third-year program at a community hospital in Cambridge, Mass., in order to better develop character. Combating the common erosion of empathy among medical students was one concern; teaching judgment another. Instead of changing course material, they changed the way students, teachers, and patients interacted. Instead of relying on rushed, impersonal encounters in frenetic hospital wards, each student was assigned to work in clinics every morning in close relationships with their doctor-mentors, and each student was assigned 15 patients to work with for the whole year. The aim was to structure learning experiences that simultaneously taught technical skills and encouraged the development of empathy, humility, courage, perseverance, perceptiveness, and reflectiveness.

The Cambridge and KIPP teachers programs do by design what some college professors also do, if often by accident. What questions we ask in class teach students how to ask questions. How we pursue the dialogue with them models reflectiveness. They watch whom we call on, or don’t, and learn about fairness. We teach them when and how to interrupt—by when and how we interrupt. We teach them how to listen by how carefully we listen. If they see us admitting that we don’t know something, we encourage intellectual honesty as well as humility. We are always modeling. And the students are always watching. We need to do it better.

The mass-production approach to higher education that dominates at most institutions these days is much more focused on the “efficient” transmission of knowledge than it is on the nurturing of intellectual virtue. And when students notice the neglect of intellectual virtue in their own educational experience, they are likely to neglect it themselves when they are leading their adult lives as teachers and professionals. Lecturing college students about intellectual virtues promises to be about as effective as lecturing M.B.A. students about business ethics.

Intellectual virtues are no substitute for disciplinary skills. We have to fill the empty vessel. No one will choose a cardiologist who is brimming with love of truth, honesty, and perseverance but empty of anatomy and physiology. But it takes intellectual virtues to fill that vessel.

Barry Schwartz is a professor of social theory and social action and Kenneth Sharpe is a professor of political science, both at Swarthmore College. They are the authors of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (Riverhead Press, 2010).

In the 1950s and early 60s, as many African nations shook off their colonial mantles, African-Americans rallied behind their own civil-rights and black-nationalist movements. Jazz came to serve as a bridge between the two continents and their emancipationist moods.

An influential minority of black American jazz musicians harked to Africa, while in various African countries, jazz riffs accompanied the cry for freedom.

From the hundreds of musicians involved in the exchange, Robin D.G. Kelley has chosen four emblematic figures for his compact, continually surprising Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press). All are figures who “identified with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, the demands for independence and self-determination,” writes the author, a professor of American history at the University of California at Los Angeles. They sought new forms of expression at “a crucial moment when freedom was perhaps the most important word circulating throughout the African diaspora.”

From Brooklyn, the pianist Randy Weston ventured to Africa in quest of ancestral roots and new musical ideas. His friend, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a bassist and player of the lutelike oud, from childhood nurtured a “dream to make sacred Arab music swing.”

Conversely, the vitality of jazz appealed to many African musicians. In South Africa, the vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin chose jazz over emerging local popular-music hybrids. For her, as for so many fellow African musicians, jazz appealed as “a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity,” writes Kelley. She “struggled to give beauty and human dignity a voice against a backdrop of apartheid and racial subjugation.” Kelley’s choice of Benjamin is timely, as her reputation is rising. Also recently out from Duke University Press is Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz, based on 20 years of Benjamin’s exchanges with the South African musicologist Carol Ann Muller, a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania.

For some black African devotees, jazz did not fulfill its promise. From Ghana, the percussionist Guy Warren, also known as Kofi Ghanaba, came to Chicago in 1954 with a personal agenda: He was intent on infusing jazz with West African percussion traditions, convinced that jazz could use the help. An idiosyncratic figure, he befriended titans of American jazz­—Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk—but soon returned embittered to Ghana. At a time when American jazz drummers were incorporating African rhythms alongside the Afro-Cuban ones that then predominated in jazz, Warren composed music that collapsed the “boundaries of genre, style, culture, and nation.” Warren was an experimentalist—he developed a kit of African and Western drums that was hardly standard in any musical culture—but he was not happy to see jazz percussionists pick and choose among the expressive possibilities offered by African elements.

Whether or not he would have hired on Ghanaba, Randy Weston was sure he would find fresh inspiration and musical elements in Africa, so pursued a “musical, political, and spiritual journey” to a continent that few American jazz musicians, black or white, then considered visiting. He wished to know African America’s roots more broadly—”to study,” as Kelley puts it, “the accomplishments of his ancestors in order to counter the prevailing racist, colonialist stereotypes” of Africa that held sway in the United States.

Ironically, it was the U.S. State Department’s hiring of jazz musicians like Weston—along with much better-known figures like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie—to undertake “good-will ambassador” tours of developing nations in Africa and other continents that alerted many African-American jazz musicians to black African political aspirations. They came home voicing black-nationalist sentiments about what might be done about inequities at home, much to the consternation of political and cultural observers.

Jazz-related ironies were many in the era Kelley describes. For example, some African musicians, Guy Warren among them, believed that many American jazz musicians were simply jumping on an “African bandwagon” while unequivocally not playing African music. Kelley says that Warren measured American jazz drummers by Ghanaian percussion standards because he was unable to appreciate that jazz had inherited a muddle of African and other musical forms, and was well within its tradition in continuing to borrow just what it liked.

Similarly, Abdul-Malik came under fire from some North African purists for a lack of virtuosity on the oud, or at least for not playing it “properly.” The irony there was that, at the same time, many African-American jazzers were embracing what they thought was a fundamental aspect of traditional African music. As Kelley puts it by phone from his Los Angeles home, they had come to believe that virtuosity must not have been paramount in “a precolonial Africa in which music was not commodified; rather it was something owned by all people.” Weston, for example, rejected the club scene in favor of schools, churches, and other locations that could accommodate a sense of jazz as community.

Disagreements on the relative merits of virtuosity and community-friendly playing “remind us that when it comes to the quest for standards, a certain level of regimentation, precision, and virtuosity—the things we think of as Western standards of music—things are not so simple,” says Kelley.

That should not surprise, he adds, if considered in context. Weston and others were individualists who aspired, consciously or not, to shape new American and African modernities from a jumble of African and American traditional and improvised elements. (Another new study of that phenomenon is Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana, from Duke University Press, by Steven Feld, a professor of anthropology and music at the University of New Mexico.)

Africa Speaks, America Answers is Kelley’s second book focused on cultural resonances of music. His highly regarded 2009 book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press), came after his earlier works had addressed issues in American political, race, and labor cultures. He wrote about how worthwhile studies of such subjects were in Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997). Kelley’s return to Africa in his new book, like his 2002 study of the African intellectual diaspora, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon), serves as a reminder that he began his career as a historian of Africa.

No one continent seems likely to contain him.

With two colleagues, Kelley is completing a general narrative of African-American history in a global context, for W.W. Norton. With Africa Speaks, America Answers, he writes, he wished to offer a model for writing transnational histories of modern music that sheds light on the “vexing relationship between art, politics, and spirituality,” while at the same time putting jazz in an appropriately global light.

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The U. of New York Tirana (in Albania, offers degrees from the State U. of New York Empire State College.

By Karin Fischer

Headlines in recent weeks have highlighted the stumbles, and sometimes outright spills, by American colleges seeking to set up degree programs with foreign partners.

State University of New York Empire State College has allowed a university in Albania to deliver diplomas in its name. But the public college, the subject of a New York Times investigation, has had seemingly little say-so in the curriculum or hiring at the University of New York Tirana.

In North Dakota, state auditors issued a scathing review of dual-degree programs at Dickinson State University, reporting that they had admitted hundreds of unqualified students, mainly from China, and awarded them degrees even when they failed to meet graduation requirements. Ignoring its own standards, the public university had acted as a diploma mill, the audit concluded.

Then there’s Houston Community College, which has been in the midst of its own desert storm. Students at the Community College of Qatar, in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, protested after learning that they would not earn degrees from the Texas college, as they had expected to. Those degrees would allow them to transfer to four-year universities. Houston officials maintain that they were working with Qatar’s first community college only in an advisory role, but that students could earn Houston diplomas by submitting their transcripts for review.

Taken together, these incidents have renewed concerns about whether, in embarking on ambitious international ventures, American colleges are putting themselves at risk, legally, financially, and reputationally. In their quest for global prestige and, often, dollars, are they rushing abroad without doing their homework? After all, experts note, even internationally savvy institutions, like George Mason University and Michigan State University, have occasionally misstepped in their efforts overseas.

“There are lots of good reasons to go and serve students where the education is weak,” says Alan Ruby, a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. “But that doesn’t mean going unwittingly and unthinkingly.”

Looking Before Leaping

The North Dakota University System audit is damning. Dickinson State, it charges, enrolled international students with subpar grades, shaky English, and fraudulent transcripts, awarding them bachelor’s degrees for spending just one of their four college years on that campus. A number of the students transferred in from a remedial-education institute associated with Taiyuan University of Technology, in China, and not from a college-level program.

What’s more, Dickinson State disregarded its own rules regarding course and degree changes, allowing students to switch to majors for which they had no preparation. Department chairs apparently felt pressure to do so because recruiting agents in China, purporting to work for Dickinson, had promised students they would be able to swap majors once in the United States. Just 10 of the 410 students enrolled in these dual-degree programs since 2003 actually completed the necessary requirements, the audit report concludes.

It’s not entirely clear what led Dickinson State to begin the controversial programs, and the president in charge when the worst offenses occurred has been fired for other enrollment irregularities. But the news has many international educators scratching their heads: Why, they ask, did a small, little-known state university in North Dakota have dual-degree agreements with dozens of institutions abroad?

Too often, these experts say, colleges’ international relationships are partnerships of convenience. Kevin Kinser studies branch campuses at the State University of New York at Albany—he doesn’t start them. (He’s also a Chronicle blogger.) Yet he has been approached countless times after speaking at conferences by foreign institutions that want to work with Albany.

Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, says colleges need to scrutinize their motivations and those of their potential partners before entering into any agreement. Sometimes he wonders why foreign universities or governments approach certain American institutions: “I don’t know if they just go through the phone book.”

Nor are many colleges sophisticated in their methods of assessing possible global ventures. Colleges should have centralized committees that vet any agreements, and those panels should draw on a range of expertise, including faculty members, human-resources administrators, and university lawyers, says Bob Lammey, a senior director at High Street Partners, a company that advises colleges on overseas risk management. Institutions need to ask the right questions, from what’s the rule of law in a potential destination country to who in the partnership will do the hiring and firing to how much such an arrangement will cost in staff time and money.

Few colleges have formal proc­esses to assess international ac­tivities, Mr. Lammey says, and that’s a problem. Mr. Kinser agrees: “Approving a program in another country is not the same as approving a new program in sociology.”

Keeping Control

In Qatar, much of the disagreement seems to center around academic control. In internal e-mail messages obtained by the Houston Chronicle, officials of Houston Community College expressed concern about decisions made by the top administrator at the new Community College of Qatar, who was hired by the Qatari government, not the Texas college. They were also apparently surprised by a Qatari decision to educate male and female students separately. And although initial announcements by both partners said students at the Qatari institution would have “dual enrollment” in Houston Community College, Houston officials recently said that only those who go through an in­dividual review process would be eligible for American credit for classes taken in Qatar.

Houston Community College is not the first institution to run into disputes over decision-making. George Mason shuttered its campus in Ras al Khaymah, another Gulf emirate, after its partner sought to make midstream changes in their agreement, demanded to hire a chief academic dean, and reduced its financial commitment. Peter N. Stearns, George Mason’s provost, says the university hasn’t given up on overseas work but will focus on creating dual-degree programs, not overseas campuses. Degree programs, he says, give the university a greater amount of control.

Daniel Kratochvil, of the University of Wollongong, in Dubai studies the Emirati education market. There’s no such thing as a “free ticket” when it comes to international joint ventures, he says. “You’re overseas as a guest, and that’s a risk. Misunderstandings can arise, partnerships can change, governments can make unilateral changes to the terms of a contract.”

Webster University, based in St. Louis, has campuses throughout Europe and Asia, but it operates under a “one-university” policy, says Grant Chapman, associate vice president for academic affairs and director of international programs. All course changes are reviewed by a centralized curriculum committee. Every diploma says “Webster University.” While staff and fac­ulty members may be hired locally, there’s always an administrator answerable to the home campus. And any variation from admissions standards must be approved back in St. Louis. “We’re not in the business of franchising our name,” Mr. Chapman says.

Relationship Maintenance

Some observers question if that’s what Empire State College did in striking a deal in Albania. Although an initial agreement between the SUNY college and University of New York Tirana sets out high academic standards, Empire State’s director of international programs told the Times that instructors in Albania were not subject to its review and approval. Teams of faculty members from New York are able to make the trip to Eastern Europe only a couple of times a year because of budget constraints. (College officials have since said they have a more substantial review system in place.)

By contrast, officials from the Rochester Institute of Technology regularly visit its branches in Croatia, the Dominican Republic, and Dubai. Rochester faculty routinely take temporary teaching appointments abroad, and the university uses its overseas sites as destinations for its students to study abroad. All those people going back and forth help act as a quality-control mechanism—one of many, says James H. Watters, senior vice president for finance and administration. “It’s easy to say, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’” he notes.

Mr. Lammey, of High Street Partners, says many colleges assume that their foreign partners are taking care of everything on the ground. That’s not always the case, he warns, mentioning one client whose longstanding partner failed to pay employees of the joint venture according to local regulations. The American college could face a hefty settlement with the foreign government.

International agreements, Mr. Lammey says, “always start out on good footing.” But when problems arise, colleges need to have an “easy-out clause” to end floundering relationships.

Still, he cautions that educators should not assume the worst of all international ventures just because a few problems have grabbed headlines. Many are well-run, he says.

Jason Lane, who is co-director, with Mr. Kinser, of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at Albany, worries that failures of institutional management could lead to “overly aggressive external oversight” by outside groups, like accreditors or state legislatures. They could put severe limits, or even prohibitions, on overseas partnerships.

But John K. Hudzik, a former vice president for global and strategic projects at Michigan State, finds that good can come from scrutiny. “It’s hard, but we can learn from failures,” he says. “It’s a good thing if people can learn to be more systematic about this work.”

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