From worldwide executive M.B.A. programs to food-security research abroad that protects the foods back home, the university gives new meaning to the phrase “study abroad.” It starts with language.

ILLUSTRATION BY BRYAN KESTELL

Michael Long, director of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, looks a bit exasperated when asked about language offerings at the university. It seems that demand far outweighs supply. Spanish, Arabic and Japanese all have waiting lists, and so do several other languages. He doesn’t have hard evidence, but Long knows that the students snapping up the more than 4,400 undergraduate seats offered are not just signing up to fulfill a major’s language requirement.“It’s usually for a minor and they’re coming from all sorts of majors. A lot of them are motivated to make themselves more marketable,” he says.

Maryland’s programs and curriculum prepare students to succeed globally, in keeping with our changing world. The university ranked 37 in the World’s Top 100 Universities Ranking, a highly regarded barometer of an institution’s worth compiled by the Institute of Higher Education at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai in 2005.

Beyond traditional study abroad programs and faculty fellowships, Maryland makes globalization real in several ways, and it all begins with language. Operating a successful business-focused campus in Tunisia requires Arabic proficiency. Life sciences professors should be able to discuss with Latin American agriculture experts the importance of preparing crops for broader distribution—in Spanish.

At the Robert H. Smith School of Business, being marketable describes people and programs. As Dean Howard Frank puts it, “Business is global, so therefore, the business school should be global.” The school boasts that during any month, between two and five faculty members are somewhere in the world either teaching or learning new business practices to bring back for students. A well-received business plan competition hosted by the Smith School in China brings faculty, professionals and students across the world. Initiatives—executive M.B.A. programs, exchange programs or management consortiums—are under way in South Korea; Tianjin, Shanghai and Beijing, China; India; Tunisia; and Switzerland.

“The feedback has been tremendously positive. Three years ago we tried to send a group of students to India, for example, and we couldn’t get enough to go,” says Frank. “Last year, we were oversubscribed for the 35 slots. Now it’s become well known as a hotbed of technology. You can’t assume that if [a place] didn’t work one time, it won’t work later. We can’t assume what it’s going to look like in five years.”

The school is strategic and practical about where it engages. Its first criterion for a potential international partner is a safe environment for students. Then it determines which location is willing and able, if the economic environment is sufficiently advanced so that the school doesn’t lose money, and if there is a market for its educational products. Once all of these pieces are in place, efforts such as its new Global Opportunities program can be executed.

Selected language and business students interested in the world of international business will be exposed to speaker series, field trips, study abroad opportunities and special summer offerings. “We want to give every Smith student the chance to benefit from firsthand global experiences,” says Frank.

Sharing What We Know

Since business means that not just people are traveling across borders, researchers in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture work to ensure safe food transactions. Nearly half of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Americans come from outside of this country, says

Michael Long, director of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of second language acquisition.

Chris Walsh, professor of horticulture and international training coordinator with the Joint Institute for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN). Seafood imports are even greater. He spends a lot of his time in other countries teaching trainers good agricultural practices in order to protect U.S. consumers from foodborne illnesses.

“People trained in plant protection or pest management can treat fruit and vegetable crops to kill insect pests, but there’s no way to remove human pathogens from fresh produce if it becomes contaminated,” he says. “We educate for the prevention of foodborne illnesses since it is impossible to use technology to remove microbial contamination.

“Foodborne illnesses are a major problem affecting people and markets all over the world. There are an increasing number of rules and buyer specifications. Supermarkets don’t want to go bankrupt handling other people’s problems.” He says farm-loss estimates for last year’s E. coli spinach recall in California hit $100 million.

“More than half of our food-borne illnesses can be traced back to fresh fruits and vegetables, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. We need more science to figure out why this happens, plus education and implantation to manage this risk. It’s a complicated world out there on the farm.”

With Mexico being America’s largest fresh vegetable supplier, Walsh has spent a lot of time in that country. He is functionally fluent in Spanish and always tries to bring trainers with some facility in the local language to whatever country he’s visiting.

Though students don’t travel with him on his trips, Walsh brings back extensive photographic presentations to share with his classes. It’s important to him that students know—no matter their area of interest in horticulture—how their food is produced, where it comes from and how global trade has changed our diet.

“There’s a lot to food safety that does not relate to national security, but has tremendous impact on our day-to-day lives.”

Healthy Research

In the Department of Public and Community Health in the College of Health and Human Performance, Assistant Professor Ed Hsu agrees that what goes on outside of U. S. borders requires increasing levels of expertise and awareness in several areas. His research, which involves students, focuses on advancing an evidence-based public health surveillance system that includes data-driven and scientifically sound health policy, as well as decisions for avian flu and other emerging, international diseases.

The Smith School's exchange program in India gives students real-world exposure.

Cautiously, Hsu says that the panic surrounding rumors of an imminent avian flu pandemic should be tempered with hard research. This is the kind of work he hopes to advance through a collaborative report with University of Texas and University of North Carolina, and a proposed joint project with the university’s A. James Clark School of Engineering and Peking University. Hsu says that while what he and his colleagues find may not sound “sensational,” it is based on fact after comparing relative risk with what has happened before. “We’re looking at numbers to try to inform the public … to do risk communication in a way that is culturally and linguistically appropriate.”

Which speaks to Maryland’s relevance to, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman would put it, the flattening of the world. His book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, talks about how the process happens, in part, by individuals connecting on a global scale. The book was selected for the university’s First Year Book Program, in which every new student receives a copy of a topical publication for reading and discussion.

"A first-class education in today’s world is global," says Scott Koerwer, associate dean of professional programs and services for the Smith School. "It’s not just global-minded or having a global perspective. It’s an education that affords an opportunity for global engagement." -TERP

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