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The following are excerpts from the 2010 reaccreditation report: “The University of Michigan: An Institution of Global Learning, Knowledge and Engagement,” as prepared by Ben van der Pluijm, senior counselor to the provost for university accreditation and professor of geology. To read the full report, go to accreditation.umich.edu.
Mission and Integrity
The underlying cornerstones of the University’s scholarly reputation and its pluralist academic community are its people: the scholarly and creative contributions of the University’s accomplished faculty; the quality, vitality, and passion of its undergraduate, graduate, and professional students; and the contributions of staff members at all levels. Each of the schools and colleges, and each department in the larger units, has a distinct academic mission and culture born of a long and distinguished tradition of academic decentralization. Every academic program at the University shapes its own intellectual milieu for faculty and students. Faculty members form the core of each of these academic environments, supported by research faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, professional students, and undergraduate students, who collectively play key roles in the knowledge and creative enterprise.
Learning is enhanced when people from varying backgrounds and experiences can interact with each other in ways that are meaningful, dynamic, and mutually rewarding and enriching. The University’s educational mission requires an environment where students, faculty, and staff develop intercultural skills through interacting with many different types of people, both on and off campus. These opportunities start with recruitment and are provided through orientations, discussions, and other activities. Our successes are demonstrated, for example, by the numbers of doctorates awarded to American-Indians, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. The University strives to move beyond the facts of diversity to the actions of diversity, and, through this, to embrace diversity as a key component of excellence.
Preparing for the Future
Since being established in 1817, the U-M has worked to unearth, preserve, and interpret the past in ways that scholars and students at major research universities are well suited to do, while at the same time continuously looking ahead to the demands and many opportunities the future holds. The University accomplishes these connected goals through three major strategies:
• By making plans and decisions at all levels of the University about how to address issues and explore new opportunities
• By monitoring and committing a full range of University resources—its funding, its people, and its physical infrastructure—toward meeting its mission and looking ahead.
• By gathering and using a wealth of information about the University to assess, reflect upon, and improve what we do within the context of our mission.
To prepare for the future, the University engages in three types of activities that are closely interwoven. People make plans, gather and consider information related to our activities, evaluate or assess our efforts, and then, coming full circle, commit to a plan. Some of the basic questions that drive this process are these: What are we doing? How well are we doing it? What’s going on inside and outside the University that’s of interest? What more information do we need? Should we continue to do what we’re doing, or should we be doing something else or something more? Units across the University, the offices of executive officers, the schools and colleges, and the academic and non-academic units on campus carry out this planning and assessment cycle from the micro level to the macro.
Student Learning and Effective Teaching
Examining teaching and learning issues at today’s research universities is often challenging because it is the hidden centerpiece of our collective work. Whereas the outcomes of our research efforts are inherently public, the outcomes of our teaching activities typically are not. With an enrollment of over 40,000 students, the learning environment is expansive at the U-M, and the decentralized nature of the institution means that assessment reflects the range of our enterprise and is equally diverse.
The U-M is widely recognized for outstanding achievements and contributions in the domains of research and teaching/learning. However, we have not yet made a comprehensive, institutional commitment to understanding the interconnections between how faculty members teach and how students learn, so that these processes might be improved. By building on the kinds of activities identified in this chapter, providing additional infrastructure to support ongoing and new work, and creating a sustainable set of incentives for individuals and programs, the University is well-positioned to make important advances in this area.
Acquiition, Discovery and Application of Knowledge
Students are exhilarated and changed by joining the University’s community of inquiry. The University does not simply impart knowledge to them; rather, we create an environment that encourages and enables inquisitiveness and investigation. The conventional vocabulary of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge represents it as something that might be heaped up in an ivory tower, or passed from hand to hand without a transformative connection between human beings. Within the University, knowledge is perceived in much more active terms–not as a product, but as a process. The notion of inquiry is a touchstone for the University community, and among faculty members whose work is usually spoken of as creative rather than as research, a similar commitment to project- and process-based practices is easy to recognize. The strong demand for courses in the arts and music from students outside those schools marks the fact that these students, too, recognize the power of open-ended investigation into the arts.
Everyone benefits from wide conversations about matters of shared interest and common concern at the University. For example, linguists’ views of the language politics of the classroom are perhaps surprising to many and deserve discussion. So, too, do such questions as these: What will students do with their English majors, or their sociology majors, or their art degrees? Interestingly, the disciplinary major itself first entered the undergraduate curriculum at Johns Hopkins, as part of the shift to today’s research university model. The separation of activities into many units, schools, colleges, and their departments, enables the University’s rich variety, but also calls for continued conversation. Our community already engages in more dialogue than at many institutions. For example, the University’s system of layered review recognizes that specialization and integration need to be balanced in the evaluation of faculty and academic programs. The University’s strength in interdisciplinary scholarship also reflects our culture of open dialogue. Interdisciplinarity is not an alternative to specialized disciplinary investigation, but fully complementary of it. The campus community has many contrasting opinions, but also a deeply shared commitment to academic values of rigorous inquiry and openness at the U-M.
Engagement and Service
Engagement and service contribute considerably to advancing University priorities. Our commitment to diversity leads to valuing engagement that emphasizes diverse communities and diverse forms of knowledge, intercultural and multicultural learning, and educational access. Depending on the kind of engagement, students and faculty members interact with people who often are not like themselves. They learn to address issues of privilege and cultural difference, social inequity, and racial discrimination. Engagement also advances the University’s commitment to encouraging young people to consider higher education who might not have done so otherwise. Many University students and faculty members work with youth in tutoring and mentoring programs. Engagement in international settings furthers student and faculty experience of and contribution to diverse cultures. Finally, engagement advances interdisciplinarity because the nature of partners’ concerns often cross disciplinary boundaries inside the University; in response, students and faculty members often recruit participants from other academic fields to help them address partners’ needs and issues. Despite students’ and faculty and staff members’ extensive engagement and service efforts, and despite the University’s many strengths in this area, we could do even more to enhance this work and address the barriers we face.
Global Engagement at the University of Michigan
Our students are entering a world in which international connections are the norm. Already they collect information, news, data, music, and video from the Internet without concern for national boundaries. The companies they will work for and lead, the scholarship they will pursue, the policies and positions they will vote on or enact, the associations they will form via the Internet, the cultures they will meld in their own experiences, and the voluntary work they will engage in, all have global dimensions and global drivers to a degree not true for their parents’ generation. It is imperative that the University help our students, whether they are resident or non-resident, domestic, or international, to prepare for lives of significant international engagement. We must give them tools to understand, to appreciate, to critique, and to engage. To live, lead, and thrive in tomorrow’s world, it is more vital than ever for our students to have ample and robust opportunities to expand their international horizons, and to experience an education commensurate with those horizons. We know that many of them are eager for such opportunities.
An increasingly interconnected world demands that our students and faculty members recognize and appreciate social and cultural diversity. Developing global awareness calls for campus discussion and, perhaps, enrichment and refinement of the teaching and research goals of the U-M. Operating in today’s global environment requires ever-greater attention to developing the international knowledge and skills both of faculty members and of students in our undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.
The U-M has a strong and successful tradition of decentralization. This practice has been important in fostering effective program development and administration, and has provided the latitude needed for innovation. However, it is essential that a university as large and complex as the U-M, and one with as many international programs, has well-functioning mechanisms in place to broadly communicate and share information about its internationally-themed activities. It is also important to have administrative arrangements that coordinate activities, thereby minimizing undesirable duplication; that provide access to common policies; and that facilitate collaborations to expand or enrich international activities and programs. The main recommendations for centralized action are:
• Create a Center for Global Engagement with a team of professionals to coordinate support systems and processes for education abroad, as well as to build, promote, and institutionalize campuswide international programs and activities.
• Create a centrally supported international Web portal that would include interactive software that provides comprehensive and up-to-date information for students interested in education abroad, as well as a web magazine format for publicizing individual experiences and highlights, documenting international research activities and listing relevant campus events. Global Michigan now is available at globalportal.umich.edu.
• Remove cost barriers to education abroad for both in-state and out-of-state students in a variety of ways (e.g., through alternate tuition models, grants, scholarships, and fellowships), and increase the number of short- and long-term international offerings through new university partnerships, both educationally and project-based.
• Leverage our international cohorts. Capitalize on the presence of international students and faculty members on campus and the commitment of our international alumni, and attract more international visitors to campus through University fellowships and hosting activities. Adding an international “backflow” to campus would complement our efforts toward our students’ off-campus experiences.
Our focus on internationalization should start with our applications process and emphasize “when” rather than “if” our students have international experiences. Early exposure to international people, issues, and cultures, both on and off campus, are key toward a more international U-M. Throughout the curriculum we should emphasize the international dimensions of our education. We are already uniquely positioned to leverage our international students and faculty members, as well as our international alumni and friends, for this purpose.
