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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.By Karin Fischer

Ryan Fazio freely admits: “I’m a perfect example of a guy who doesn’t go abroad.”

For starters, he dropped Spanish classes the first chance he got, after his initial semester at Northwestern University. He never picked up another language.

By the fall of his junior year, he was juggling a double major, in economics and political science, and was slated to take over as editor in chief of The Northwestern Chronicle, a weekly newspaper. His brothers in Sigma Phi Epsilon elected him president of the fraternity.

His life on campus was full, so why leave?

Some people chalk it up to the preponderance of women majoring in the fine arts, foreign languages, and other humanities heavily represented in overseas-studies programs. Others note that more women than men are enrolled in college in the first place.

But business students are now the second-largest group abroad (after those in the social sciences). Engineering, another male-dominated field, had record growth in study-abroad participation in 2009-10. The same year, the number of foreign-language majors overseas actually dipped. And even taking the overall gender-enrollment disparity into account, women still dominate study abroad.

Sending a broader cross-section of majors abroad hasn’t made a dent in the gender gap because, it turns out, women in those fields study overseas at rates disproportionate to their numbers. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, men make up 86 percent of computer-science students but only 71 percent of majors who go abroad. The engineering school even pitches study abroad as a way to attract more women to the discipline, says Amy Bass Henry, executive director of international education.

Nor have other efforts aimed at diversifying education abroad, such as offering shorter, cheaper trips and unusual destinations, had much of an impact. Whatever the cause, the trend worries many in the field, who believe that having an international experience is key to understanding and working with people from other cultures, a crucial skill set in an increasingly global and interconnected workplace.

“If half the population has less exposure to other cultures, it’s a disadvantage to them as individuals and to us as a society,” says Heather E. Barclay Hamir, director of study abroad at the University of Texas at Austin.

But Mr. Fazio’s story may encourage those wrestling with the problem. At the last minute, just days before the deadline, he decided to go overseas, to an English-language program in Prague. He spent the semester studying alongside four of his fraternity brothers.

“It was kind of a fluke I went abroad,” Mr. Fazio says, “but I couldn’t be happier that I did.”

Wired Differently

From its inception, more than a century ago, study abroad has had a reputation as a female pursuit, the lasting image one of Seven Sisters students steaming overseas for a grand European tour of art and culture, a refining gloss for a marriageable young woman. “Women were sent overseas to be culturally educated ladies who could entertain their husbands’ business partners,” says James M. Lucas, of Michigan State University, who has written extensively about men and study abroad. “The mantra became that study abroad is feminized and a dalliance.”

The gender imbalance is readily apparent to Kate Freyhof, a recent Gettysburg College graduate, who spent part of her junior year in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France. Perhaps one in 10 of her classmates, she says, was male.

Once back in Pennsylvania, Ms. Freyhof, who had so wanted to travel overseas that she saved her babysitting money throughout high school, teamed up with Samantha Brandauer, the college’s director of study abroad. Half of Gettysburg’s students spend at least a semester overseas, but just 30 percent of that group is male. Ms. Brandauer and Ms. Freyhof wanted to know why, so they assembled a series of focus groups, male and female: those who had studied abroad and those who had stayed on campus.

The pizza-fueled discussions revealed what the two women dubbed the “bro mentality.” Male students were far more reluctant to leave their campus social groups to go overseas. Many, like Mr. Fazio at Northwestern, were more likely to do so if their friends were also going abroad. “I thought it was girls who went everywhere together,” jokes Ms. Freyhof, who now works as a study-abroad adviser herself.

Recent research suggests that the two sexes respond to different messages, and different messengers, when deciding to study abroad.

A University of Iowa study of some 2,800 students at two- and four-year colleges found that the more men interacted with their peers, not only the more deeply influenced they were by them, but also the less likely they were to go abroad. Peer interaction did not have a similar effect on women.

Thomas Bogenschild, director of international programs at Vanderbilt University, sums it up: “We can talk ourselves blue in the face, but they’re really going to listen to their friends.”

Parents, meanwhile, hold far greater sway over female students, concludes Jill McKinney, of Butler University, who conducted extensive interviews with returning female study-abroad students as part of her master’s thesis. They were likelier to go overseas if their parents were supportive, and likelier to be encouraged to go as part of “safe” college-sponsored programs rather than independently, she says.

Many of the women also reported that they wanted to have the experience of living and traveling abroad when they were in college because they believed they wouldn’t have that opportunity once they had work and a family to juggle, a view that left Ms. McKinney, associate director of Butler’s Center for Global Education, shaking her head: “They felt pressure to check it off the proverbial to-do list.”

By contrast, men are more inclined to question the value of an experience they perceive as “visiting museums with a professor,” says Mr. Lucas, who is assistant to the dean for international academic student life at Michigan State. They figure they can backpack through Europe with a friend or will have the opportunity to go overseas for work, he says. “They need to be told why culture is important, or they need to be given another message.”

Real-World Value

Mr. Lucas organizes short study-abroad programs for incoming freshmen at Michigan State. With his findings in mind, he writes different letters to male and female students to promote the trips. Women get the “traditional” message, which highlights the cultural and experiential benefits of going overseas, while the letter to men “makes it sound more like a privilege,” he says. “I tell them, ‘This is how you are going to distinguish yourself at a big university and, later on, in a global work force.’”

Emphasizing the practical, bottom-line benefits of an overseas experience is a strategy embraced by a growing number of institutions. That means offering programs not just in subjects tied to students’ majors but also in places they can see themselves working long-term. “No one is looking for a career in Florence,” says Daniel Riley, a campus-relations manager at CET Academic Programs, an independent study-abroad provider. By contrast, he notes that CET’s programs in China, which feature heavy doses of language instruction, are split evenly between male and female students. “Taking intensive Chinese for a semester is something men can see as valuable for a job,” he says.

Other institutions are expanding their offerings to allow students to work or hold internships overseas. There’s some evidence that such an option is more attractive to men, although not much more than study abroad. At Georgia Tech, 68 percent of the engineering students who study abroad are men, but they account for 71 percent of those who work abroad. And 87 percent of the computing majors who work overseas are male, slightly higher than their share of overall enrollment.

At Georgia Tech and elsewhere, study-abroad offices are forming partnerships with career services to help students better articulate the work relevance of education abroad. Such efforts are geared to those have already gone overseas, but Ms. McKinney, of Butler, says they also can send an important message to students who might consider doing so. At résumé workshops for students returning to Butler from overseas, she notes, students who have not gone abroad are increasingly in attendance. “I think they want to see what it means for their résumé, for their job prospects,” she says, adding that the sessions are “male-heavy.”

For another research study, Ms. McKinney analyzed the content of more than 100 study-abroad application essays submitted by male students. They saw going abroad as a résumé-builder, a networking opportunity, and even as a scouting trip for a possible career overseas.

Ads in ‘The Onion’

Still, there’s a question weighing on Ms. McKinney: Do male students who go abroad do so because they view it as more of a career credential than their male peers do? Or is study abroad simply not on the radar of most college men?

To make sure that men are getting the message, a number of colleges are expanding their study-abroad marketing with male students in mind. The University of Kentucky distributes brochures on gender and overseas study at key points around campus, like the academic-advising center. (Other pamphlets are aimed at students from underrepresented groups like racial and ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.) Brook Blahnik, director of study-abroad advising at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, advertises overseas programs in publications with a heavy male readership, like the sports section of the college newspaper and the satirical tabloid The Onion.

Mr. Blahnik and his colleagues are also careful to include more male faces and voices, whether on posters highlighting certain destinations, at study-abroad fairs and information sessions, or in student blogs and videos posted online. “It sounds really basic and simple,” he says. “But that subconscious message is important: ‘Here are people who look like me.’”

Kyle L. May Jr. hopes to spend six months beginning this summer in Australia studying sports management. Sydney is far from the North Carolina mountains, where Mr. May is a junior at Western Carolina University, but he has a friend to turn to for advice who went overseas earlier. He also has John Schweikart, a study-abroad adviser at the university, whom he met through his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha. “John just kept talking to me about where I wanted to go, what my options were,” Mr. May says. “He helped me figure out where would be a good fit.”

Bigger Than Study Abroad?

Men like Mr. Schweikart may be potent messengers to other men, but they are in the minority in the study-abroad profession. At American University, in Washington, one of the three male staffers, in an office of 10, has been reaching out to fraternities and athletics teams for the past three years.

Mark Hayes, associate director of education abroad, says the jury’s still out on the effectiveness of the staffer’s efforts. Women continue to outnumber men in all but three of the university’s study-abroad programs. “I try to take the long-term view,” Mr. Hayes says. “It may take a while.”

Increasing male participation may be the goal, yet another piece of research suggests that even if men go overseas, they may not benefit as much as women do. A study of nearly 1,300 students at various colleges who studied abroad found that women made greater gains than men in language proficiency and in their understanding of and comfort with other cultures.

Michael Vande Berg, one of the report’s authors, says there are ways to improve language and cultural learning for both men and women studying abroad that can largely erase the gender gap. “Men are trainable,” Mr. Vande Berg, vice president for academic affairs at the Council on International Education Exchange, says with a laugh.

Still, he acknowledges, it is important to ask what’s happening to men on campus—before they ever study abroad—that would lead to the gender disparity.

Mark H. Salisbury may have an answer. Now director of institutional research at Augustana College, in Illinois, he is an author of the Iowa report, the one that said men are less likely to go overseas the more they became involved with their peers.

Conversely, Mr. Salisbury and his co-authors also found that male interest in study abroad grew if they had more diverse experiences outside the classroom, such as interacting with people from different backgrounds on clubs or teams or in their dorms.

“Study abroad,” says Mr. Salisbury, “doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

It certainly didn’t for Keaton E. Becher, who is studying now in Fribourg, Switzerland. He got the bug to go abroad after he met a foreign-exchange student, a woman from Sweden. Sitting down to write his application essay and map out his required study plan made him think more purposefully about how a semester overseas could further his goals of graduate school or a career in international development.

His feelings only deepened as he heard other students and alumni swap travel stories at reunions and football games. “If you study abroad, you’re connected with everyone else,” Mr. Becher, a junior. “It’s like you’re in a little club.”

That club? It’s at Wabash College, an all-male liberal-arts institution.

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Key words:  Andragogy, Cross-cultural conflict, Etic, Emic, Ethics power

Meeting in the Middle: An Essay on Fred L. Casmir’s Contributions to the Field of Intercultural Communication

Mark C. Hobson, George Mason University, Tabitha Hart, University of Washington; and Gina Castle Bell, George Mason University

Abstract

Fred Casmir’s third-culture building (TCB) framework made a major theoretical contribution to communication studies. Casmir conceptualized the framework as an active process whereby different cultural groups come together to form a third-culture between them. The third-culture then becomes a common ground for all participants; a cognitive space that incorporates elements of both cultures and yet remains separate and distinct. Third-culture building is a departure from adoption (the process of taking on the cultural mores of another) or adaptation (modifying one’s cultural mores to better fit those of another), and achieved through deliberate development in an extended process, during which all participants gain an understanding of, and appreciation for, one another. In this essay, the authors review the life and work of Fred Casmir—a leading figure in establishing intercultural communication as a specific area of study. Next the authors discuss the ideological foundations, intended use, key applications and heuristic value of Casmir’s third-culture building framework.

Key words: Fred L. Casmir, oral speech, communication scholarship, third-culture building, international communication, intercultural communication, communication and speech organization

A Different Way of Knowing: With Respect to John C. (Jack) Condon

Richard Harris, Faculty of Management, Chukyo University, Nagoya, Japan

Abstract

John C. (Jack) Condon is one of the most respected figures in intercultural communication today. His 1975 introductory textbook was a significant factor in defining the field and giving it its initial direction and terminology, and the two international conferences he helped organize in Japan in the 1970s were influential in bringing together many of the figures responsible for its subsequent development. His teaching, especially at the University of New Mexico and the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, has introduced thousands of students to the field, and many of today’s leading practitioners were directly and personally influenced by Condon’s approach. His career spans almost half a century, and yet the details of his extraordinary life and achievements are not widely known. This retrospective summary attempts to suggest some of the more important biographical and intellectual stages in Condon’s ongoing development as a major intercultural leader.

Key Words: Cultural values; Focused observation; General semantics; Intercultural communication; Personal engagement; Japan; Mexico; Epistemic structures

Mocha Java Café: Reminiscing about Paul Pedersen’s Continuing Contributions to Our Intercultural Fields

Gary Fontaine, School of Communications, University of Hawaii

Abstract      

Paul Pedersen has been one of the most energetic, prolific and eclectic thinkers, writers and doers in our collage of intercultural fields.  His general interests have spanned intercultural counseling, intercultural training, international education and–increasingly over his career–conflict management at the micro, regional and global levels.  He has taught and conducted research at an array of universities, consulted for a broad range of organizations, and provided services to a long list of professional organizations.  This paper provides a glimpse of his professional journey and what he has—and is—contributing to us all along the way.  Particular attention is paid to his contributions to multicultural counseling and psychotherapy, Microcounseling, his Triad Training Model, and his currently emerging work on Inclusive Cultural Empathy and its relevance to a broad range of intercultural contexts including counseling, advising, teaching, consoling, consulting, coaching, managing, leading, and international diplomacy.

Key words:  Paul Pedersen, Multicultural counseling psychotherapy, intercultural training, Microcounseling, Triad model, Inclusive cultural empathy, Global leadership.

K.S. Sitaram: An Early Interculturalist

Michael H. Prosser, University of Virginia Emeritus; Shanghai International Studies University Emeritus

Abstract:

A retrospective of the leadership and academic contributions of K.S. Sitaram (1935-2009) with an emphasis on his early work career in India and his 1969 doctoral dissertation on Indian radio; his early influence in the development of the study of intercultural communication and his coauthored 1976 text, Foundations of Intercultural Communication with its stress on Asian communication; his further development of an understanding of Asian communication, particularly through Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in his 1995 text, Communication and Culture: A World View; his  co-chairmanship of the 1995-2001 Rochester Intercultural Conferences and co-editorship of the 1998 Civic Discourse: Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity, and Global Communication and 1999 Civic Discourse: Intercultural, International, and Global Media; and a summary of his professional contributions.

Key Words: Asian religions, India, Intercultural and multicultural communication, Information technology, K.S. Sitaram, Radio, World peace

Edward C. Stewart:  Cultural Dynamics Pioneer

Jacqueline Howell Wasilewski,, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan (retired); Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), Albuquerque, New Mexico

and Holly Siebert Kawakami,, Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba, Japan (retired); Go Global Coaching, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Abstract

Professor Edward C. Stewart’s work has been much affected by his own experiences and the historical spaces he and his families of origin have occupied.  He remains one of the most complex members of the intercultural field.  Although he played a key role in the initial organization of the field in the 1970s, he has also been the quintessential “outsider.”  As a French-Swiss-Southern American-Brazilian, his multicultural perspective is novel.  His initial academic formation was in experimental psychology with a focus on perception.

During his whole career he has been creating comprehensive conceptual frameworks for the complex intercultural communication field of inquiry.  One of Stewart’s earliest pioneering efforts was at the 1974 conference held in Chicago to establish the intercultural field sponsored by the Speech Communication Association (SCA, now the National Communication Association, NCA), the International Communication Association (ICA) and the newly developing Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR).  At this conference Stewart’s 40-page 1973 “Outline of Intercultural Communication” provided the “text” that the 200 participants, divided into small groups, discussed.

Stewart began his work with a focus on cultural differences, using a contrast culture approach.  This approach produced his two most famous works, the Contrast American or Contrast Culture Method (CCM) of Intercultural Training and his book, American Cultural Patterns:  A Cross-Cultural Perspective.   Although this approach moves beyond simple contrasts to embrace similarities and the realization that differences are a matter of degree (Paige, 1993), later in his career Stewart focused more on adaptation, on dialectical and contrasting forces.

This all goes back to his original intellectual formation as a student of Harry Helson, the neurophysiologist, and Helson’s idea that perception itself is an act of creation.  This is the platform upon which Stewart constructed a cognitive/emotional/aesthetic dialectical geometry in which all “liveliness” includes seeming opposites AND the space between, the interface where relationships are formed.

Stewart’s most recent synthesis-in-process is a proposal to create a graduate level university course, “Culture as the Central Social Science” and an accompanying text, Forces of Identity (FORID) for Culture-Building.  The idea is that this course would be a required course for any of the social sciences.   Stewart’s latest ideas (see part 6 Epilogue below) move way beyond a simple dialectical orientation to become a five-part (Seenko) framework for analyzing culture.

Key words: American cultural patterns, Contrast American method, Culture as the central social science, Contrast Culture Method (CCM), Culture heroes in training, Cultural identity for the third millennium, Cultural trilogy, Edward C. Stewart,  Primordial sentiments of being, Seenko

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New students arrive at the U. of Wollongong in Dubai for orientation. The Australian university recruits students from across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa.

By Sara Lipka

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

When the global financial crisis hit Dubai, many of the Indian expatriate families whose children went to university here sent them back home. But while sons were leaving, daughters were staying, noticed Raymi van der Spek, executive director for administration and strategic development at the University of Wollongong in Dubai.

How better to attract the attention of female prospective students, he thought, than with a young Bollywood actor? Ranbir Kapoor visited Wollongong in November to promote his new film, Rockstar, and hundreds of Indian women—and men—flocked to the university. The event landed on Page 3 of one of the country’s big English-language newspapers, Mr. Van der Spek gloats. “It’s all about promotion, hype, promotion, recognition,” he says. “Everything to get your name out there.”

The down economy looms large for international branch campuses, which now number 200 around the world, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. A handful of optimistic ventures have ended in high-profile closures, and many outposts, both established and fledgling, struggle to succeed. To be solvent requires the steady revenue of tuition, but building a brand and recruiting students are formidable tasks.

Still, college administrators often go in with a “Field of Dreams mentality: If we build it, they’ll come,” says Kevin Kinser, an associate professor of education and co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York at Albany.

Wollongong, a branch of the Australian university in New South Wales, takes nothing for granted. Striving to maintain a strong reputation in the region, the university draws ever more students to its three buildings here in the education theme park of Knowledge Village. Its population of 3,100, evenly split between undergraduate and graduate programs, plus 500 English-language students, comes from 95 countries, and new enrollments in 2011 were up more than a third over the previous year.

Coming to Dubai in 1993 gave Wollongong an early foothold, but it can’t rely on that in a crowded higher-education market, where studies now show that supply exceeds demand.

One of more than 80 universities in this shiny desert metropolis, Wollongong has been agile and aggressive in international recruitment, among other pursuits. Mr. Van der Spek manages marketing meticulously and tracks recruiters’ numbers, rewarding top performers; the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, directed by a sociologist, conducts continuous market research.

Wollongong also invites local high schools to bus over their students, and it takes them to the activities area, usually clacking with Ping-Pong and billiards matches. Franky Barreto, manager of student services and a former player on the Indian national soccer team, knows his role: “We need to make sure that they get entertained.”

Television ads also direct students here, as they watch, for instance, American Idol on India’s Star TV. Glossy color fliers come inside Dubai’s Chinese circulars; Mr. Van der Spek won’t reveal which. Any advantage, he says, must be closely guarded.

Selling a Brand

Wollongong didn’t start life in Dubai with a beach named after it. In 1993 the branch began teaching English in a rented office building, to eight students. It grew slowly, without large grants or loans, investing extra tuition revenue. In 2001, with about 500 degree-seeking and 100 English-language students, the operation moved to a shopping complex on Jumeirah Road, where the strip of sand across the street is still known by old taxi drivers as Wollongong Beach.

Now in Knowledge Village, a special economic zone for international higher education, the University of Wollongong in Dubai offers English-language instruction, 13 bachelor’s degrees, 11 master’s degrees, and two doctorates. It has exemplified what Jason E. Lane, the other director of Albany’s Cross-Border Education Research Team, says is the right approach to branch campuses: “Start small, build your brand, and then expand.”

Local connections help, of course; here such influence is called wasta. Wollongong has endured the shifting, bureaucratic process of seeking and maintaining accreditation in both Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, even when that came to involve both institutional licensure and independent evaluation of each degree program. Through accreditation and other channels, including Emirati alumni, Wollongong has formed strong relationships with several government agencies. When a group of public employees earned master’s degrees in forensic accounting, in 2010, the crown prince of Dubai presented their diplomas.

The university’s branding campaign was in full force by then. Headhunted in Australia for his background in finance, Mr. Van der Spek had come here in 2007 and, invigorated by Dubai, quickly shifted his focus. “This is probably one of the most competitive markets on the planet,” he says.

Mr. Van der Spek, 53, is a fast, intent talker with spiked hair. In perpetual motion one afternoon—checking this number, finding that flier—he finally takes out his lunch, a foil-wrapped sandwich, at 4:30. He proudly endorses a commercial approach to higher education.

“Selling is not a dirty word,” he says. “We have to sell to be able to educate.”

Wollongong’s early opening helped it build name recognition in the UAE, but its brand had become static, and that was a liability, Mr. Van der Spek says. “We kept holding on to the same thing.”

The University of Wollongong in Dubai was too much of a mouthful, he says, so he pushed UOWD. The institution secured the local telephone number 800-UOWD, and across the top of its main building, it mounted 10-foot-high blue letters, visible from the city’s Metro.

In its marketing materials, Wollongong plays up Australia, which is well respected in the region for education, and emphasizes its longevity, a powerful message in a city where universities have closed suddenly, leaving students scrambling. More recently, the campus has started portraying itself as multicultural, to dispel a stereotype that its students are all Indian (actually, about a fifth of them are).

While Wollongong puts up billboards and wraps intercity buses in ads, many branch campuses hardly advertise, says Albany’s Mr. Lane. Top administrators seem to think an international brand will instantly translate locally, he says, but often it doesn’t. Wollongong hasn’t made that assumption: “UOWD has done a great job of branding,” he says. “That’s something American institutions have not been able to do at the same level.”

Strategic marketing is just starting to catch on at international branch campuses, he says. In Dubai, Mr. Van der Spek sees some from Heriot-Watt University, a Scottish outpost, as well as Manipal University and BITS Pilani, both Indian.

Mr. Van der Spek recently consulted with the Knowledge Partnership, an Australian higher-education marketing firm, and he is always scheming to stay ahead. Right now he is trying to shift from promoting the university to selling its individual programs. “Targeted segmented product advertising,” he says, like a quarter-page ad in a conference program on a master’s of engineering management. And scannable QR codes, he says, waving his smartphone, on everything.

No Risks

Many decisions at Wollongong, including new degree programs, have months of research behind them. The relatively few branch campuses that do such analysis, says Mr. Lane, tend to rely on their home institutions or hire outside consultants. Employing a full-time director of institutional effectiveness in Dubai, he says, gives Wollongong better data.

The director, Daniel Kratochvil, a sociologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, has been here for three years, in the region for nine. A student of local mores, he just finished a sweeping analysis of demographics and trends in the Emirati education market.

Mr. Kratochvil surveys high-school students on Facebook and job seekers on Bayt.com, a Middle Eastern professional site, collecting information on their backgrounds and considerations for various decisions. What field of study? Which institution? Why? He polls new students, asking which Web banner ads they have seen (Yahoo? Google?) and which radio spots they have heard (104.8 FM?). One of Wollongong’s key selling points, he knows, is that graduates can exchange their Emirati diplomas for Australian ones.

In evaluating possible new programs, he conducts focus groups with students, alumni, and employers. Good decisions let Wollongong snag students like Ahmad Popal, an Afghan expat. Mr. Popal is in his third year of an undergraduate program in digital security. “This is the only university offering this major in the UAE,” he says.

Wollongong’s research recently identified another need: a part-time, evening bachelor’s program. Many prospective students, whether expatriates or Emiratis, don’t want to stop working, the university found. They may have gone from high school to a government job but need a degree to advance. So the university started a part-time bachelor’s of business administration. As with its other programs, tuition isn’t low, but it’s competitive: about $47,200 in total.

Growth can be shaky: The part-time program started in the fall of 2010 with only 28 students and serious scheduling glitches. After a break last spring and summer, it resumed, and last semester 40 students were enrolled in the evening classes.

Wollongong offers no online courses. “We’re in that camp that says you need to have face-to-face instruction,” says Mr. Van der Spek. “There are very strongly held traditional views here,” he says of the UAE. “Traditional ways of doing things are typically viewed as of a higher quality.”

The university’s selection of degrees is also conservative, says Mr. Kratochvil. “Once you’ve gotten away from engineering and business, you have to be careful.” Some branch campuses want to boost enrollment by offering the latest thing, but Wollongong won’t, he says. “If you’re desperate for students, you’re going to take a risk.”

And if enrollment lags, the university may have to close a program. That causes significant reputational damage, Mr. Kratochvil says, because it hurts alumni. It’s better to be deliberate—and patient, he says. “We had a dip, but we rode it out. We didn’t panic, didn’t add anything.”

Wollongong began offering a master’s of engineering management in 2007 and a doctorate of business administration in 2010. It was persuaded by local demand, which is less susceptible to economic fluctuations. A quarter of graduate students at Wollongong are Emirati, compared with 12 percent of the general population.

The university recently conducted “feasibility surveys” to gauge interest in, for example, psychology and culture. It’s not moving on those yet, but as a result of those studies, it found interest in two new master’s degrees, international studies and media and communications, and added them this year. “We won’t start a degree program,” says Mr. Kratochvil, “unless we know there’s room for growth and stability.”

Multilingual Recruitment

For its carefully chosen programs, Wollongong chases students. From 2010 to 2011, it drove up its new enrollments by 39 percent, to 1,360.

Officials here scrutinize their numbers and know whom to keep looking for: expats in Dubai, undergraduates from Pakistan, graduate students from India. Five years ago, international students composed 5 percent of the total population; now they make up 25 percent, a more significant share of a larger number.

UOWD’s recruiters visit fairs and schools across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa; lately they see a lot of potential in Oman, Kazakhstan, and Morocco. In another growing market, Nigeria, they understand the importance of subtle, focused advertising. In the southern, Christian part of the country, they represent Dubai as a safe, Westernized destination, and in the northern, Muslim region, they play up the city’s Muslim character.

Experiments with technology have sometimes been clumsy, like a live-chat feature on the university’s Web site that didn’t initially filter requests, including lewd ones. Representatives spend more time on Facebook and LinkedIn; the first responders are two full-time staff members and three student employees known as the “call center.”

Many prospective students show up in person, about 50 a day at peak times. When they enter the main building, they step into a busy lobby hung with giant UOWD banners: a South Asian man, an African woman, an Emirati man with an iPad. To the left, a sign tells them—in English, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Chinese—to take a ticket and wait to be served. The tickets’ numbers appear on a flat screen, referring bearers to particular windows.

Mohamed Salman, a third-year computer-science major from an Indian family in Abu Dhabi, recalls liking the university’s customer-service approach when he was a bewildered high-school student. “The staff really helped me out a lot and answered all my questions,” he says. “I had lots.”

Wollongong’s recruiters—Mr. Van der Spek calls them the A-Team—are almost all alumni. There’s Abubakar from Nigeria, Ahmad from Pakistan, Ahmed from Sudan, Ekaterina from Russia, Mohammed from the UAE, Shahab from Iran, and Toufik from Algeria. Together they speak 10 languages. As a young man at a window is hesitating in English, Toufik appears, and they begin chatting easily in Arabic.

The recruitment team for Michigan State University’s now defunct campus here consisted of two American women, one of whom spoke a little Arabic. Mr. Van der Spek is now trying to figure out if the Kazakhs are politically comfortable with the Russian woman. He keeps an eye out for university employees of other nationalities. He tapped a Chinese instructor in the English-language program, Cherry Lei, to start recruiting Chinese expats on the side; she would hang around the city’s Dragon Mart. Now he’s after a Turkish-speaking Ukrainian woman who assisted the former vice president for academic affairs.

Ahmed Elsir M.A. Abdelnour, one of the recruitment team’s leaders, describes his work as “results oriented.” Each recruiter has targets and competes for weekly prizes—dinner at a local hotel—in students served, applications collected, and offers made. Objective criteria—high-school or college grade-point averages and English test scores—keep the process honest, says Mr. Abdelnour. At certain levels, students get in; slightly lower, they are admitted conditionally. The university tries to give answers in 48 hours, referring unsuccessful applicants to the English-language program.

Wollongong also offers incentives for current students to recruit. For four years it has run a refer-a-friend program for 10 percent off tuition. Large banners adorn the hallways: “Looking to lower your tuition?” one says. “The more friends you refer, the more discount you get!” says another, describing silver, gold, and platinum levels.

The banners surprised the university’s interim president, David Rome, but he has supported the program. “We have to be innovative,” he says. “We’ve got to move with the times.”

According to Mr. Van der Spek, his commercial attitude hasn’t always gone over well with top administrators. “We’re coming to terms with that slowly,” he says. Last year he fought to separate admissions from the registrar and merge it with the marketing division, to form the recruitment department. “If I had been allowed,” he says, “I would have called it ‘sales.’”

Many branch campuses operate like for-profit companies, say Mr. Kinser and Mr. Lane, the American researchers. Without the benefit of an endowment (or a subsidy from a host country), a branch campus has to stay in the black for its parent institution, which, especially if it’s public, has politics to worry about.

At Wollongong in Dubai, 90 percent of revenue comes from tuition, and the profits go back to Australia. A few years ago, the New South Wales premier called UOWD one of the state’s most successful exports. Success for an international branch campus means quality, sure, but it needs to be financially viable. Otherwise, says Mr. Van der Spek, “there would be questions asked about why we’re here.”

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