Finding Harvard Rigor Overseas

As it continues pushing for more students to acquire experience abroad, the College is also redoubling its efforts to ensure that students can find Harvard rigor—even when their study or research is taking place in other parts of the world.

As more and more students do choose to go abroad, the College is expanding its own study abroad offerings, and providing incentives to faculty to design and lead various projects abroad for undergraduates—in hopes of using faculty connections with their colleagues in foreign institutions to their full potential.

And next year, the College will also review its guidelines for evaluating the quality of study abroad programs and granting credit for them.

TRANSPLANTING HARVARD

“I talked to a lot of people who don’t go abroad because they don’t want to miss a semester of Harvard,” says Anna G. Dolganov ’05, a classics concentrator who studied abroad last spring in Rome, through a Duke University-sponsored program. “And they’re not going because they’re afraid....They’ve heard the courses are b.s. and not very challenging.”

But the College is working hard to make sure that students do find their time abroad to be commensurate with the Harvard academic experience.

“We always want to make sure that the quality of the programs that students go to is commensurate with what we would normally give credit for at Harvard,” says John H. Coatsworth, chair of the Committee on Education Abroad (CEA).

While globe-trotting students have in the past relied heavily on other schools’ study abroad programs—Harvard only offered two choices in 2003—Harvard has increased the number of Summer School programs it is offering this summer to 10 programs, including ones in Beijing, the Czech Republic, Oxford, and Barcelona, up from seven last year.

And for next summer, Harvard—in collaboration with Ca’Foscari University—has designed summer programs in Venice on art conservation and lagoon biology, according to Director of the Office of International Programs (OIP) Jane Edwards.

In addition, the OIP is currently developing summer and term-time study abroad programs that are “still very much on the drawing board,” according to Edwards.

They include projects in South Asia in collaboration with the Harvard South Asia Initiative, and research-based programs in Africa, in collaboration with the School of Public Health and the Harvard Initiative for Public Health.

Rather than granting “permission to go abroad in a kind of passive way” and “wait[ing] for students to come to us and get approval,” says Coatsworth, who is also director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, “we’re very aggressive about both identifying and organizing opportunities abroad.”

“If Harvard set up more challenging, more interesting programs where the student can go with a clean conscience, and are guaranteed to learn something, I think that will provide an incentive for people to go who would otherwise not have gone,” Dolganov says.

“Yes, the push is to get you abroad at any place,” says Edwards, but “it’s about getting you abroad into the program that will best suit your needs.”

TAPPING THE FACULTY

As Harvard designs more of its own programs in the years ahead, it is also encouraging individual faculty members to design their own projects abroad.

“As we find an array of various kinds of study abroad opportunities, Harvard faculty will play a role in organizing them or leading them or teaching in them, certainly in designing them, and at the very least identifying them,” says Coatsworth.

Last month, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby approved a pilot fund of $100,000 to support faculty-led projects allowing for undergraduate experience abroad, which was recommended by the CEA in its April report, according to Coatsworth.

The CEA will administer the fund and give grants to faculty members planning their own projects.

“The number of students seeking and needing support for international study is growing very fast,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail. The fund will be geared “primarily” toward “faculty-led programs designed for students,” he added.

Professor of Anthropology Theodore C. Bestor, who teaches Foreign Cultures 84, “Tokyo,” says the fund may help support his interest in developing a trip to Tokyo based on the class.

Bestor says that he has envisioned “structuring a course around learning the geography of the city at the same time that you’re getting a sense of the historical development, hopefully, through quick immersion.”

“There would be an awful lot of background work getting something like this set up,” says Bestor. “One of the ways in which I think funding from the College would be really helpful would be enabling a department or an individual faculty member to hire some local coordinators” to manage the logistics of a trip.

Coatsworth calls the amount given to the fund a “small number but not insignificant,” and says that if the pilot goes well, investment in it might increase.

“As demand increases,” Kirby adds, “we will seek to mobilize opportunities—from Centers and elsewhere—to expand the international experiences open to our students.”

Harvard’s push to be more systematic in enlisting the Faculty in developing more programs is also motivated by an effort to ensure the quality of the study abroad programs in which its students participate.

Edwards says faculty members can use their contacts with colleagues in foreign institutions to better fit students with host institutions.

“The best experience for the undergraduate depends on the best relationship with the institution or faculty with which the student is studying,” says Edwards. “And the best relationship is if the faculty here know the faculty there.”

And some department head tutors agree.

“What works well is placing a student in a high quality laboratory under the direction of a well respected scientist, preferably someone known to a member of the department,” Biochemical Sciences head tutor Richard M. Losick wrote in an e-mail.

Losick says that he helps place some concentrators into research opportunities abroad through his personal contacts—in addition to the existing programs available to students.

QUALITY CONTROL

According to Coatsworth, the CEA will also focus next year on developing guidelines for the approval of credit for study done abroad and “for deciding what gets on the transcript.”

“What the Committee has been trying to do is raise the level of our monitoring of the quality of the programs that Harvard students go to,” says Coatsworth.

The guidelines will likely include consideration of and inquiry into the “relationship of the student’s activity to his or her educational goals at Harvard,” and the length and intensity of individual programs, says Coatsworth.

He adds that the guidelines are already in place but need to be “tweaked.”

“We don’t want to set standards so high that students are unable to fulfill them,” says Coatsworth, but “we don’t want to give credit for tourism.”

Edwards adds that the academic standards of the programs will not be “stricter,” but will be devised towards helping students make “better choices.”

“We regard our business as quality-control,” says Edwards.

—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.