Guest blogger, Stefanie DeLeo

I am delighted that Ms. Stefanie DeLeo has written today’s guest blog.  (Please be sure to read her bio below.) I am equally delighted to disclose that Stefanie is my cousin. She has an extensive travel background, supporting the theory that it must be something in our gene pool!  Please enjoy her commentary on the World Cup and South Africa.

When asked to write about opinions on the World Cup in South Africa, I didn’t know where to begin.  I am an American who lived and worked in South Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer for two and a half years.  My relationship with South Africa became a love-hate relationship that stretches my emotions from immense joy to blood boiling frustration.

I first learned about the World Cup being held in South Africa long before I was slated to move there.  I had always had a desire to go to South Africa, and my only real thoughts about the Cup being held there was, “wow, that’s so cool.”  Flash forward a few years, and I can remember being in South Africa and seeing huge countdown signs on every street and in every restaurant reading “739 days until kickoff…738 days until kickoff…”  Hard to believe we are now in the midst of it.  My thoughts after living there were no longer, “cool,” but rather, “how on earth will this country pull it off?”

In 1997 Nelson Mandela invited and welcomed the Peace Corps into South Africa with the purpose of educational reform and community development in rural black villages.  By the time my group arrived in 2007, the Peace Corps decided to expand its work into the Afrikaner community, and I was one of four volunteers selected to live in town working in a racially diverse school.  While there, I used my graduate training from New York University in Educational Theater to rewrite curriculum and use theater as a tool for socially conscious dialogue.

Though my experience was the most amazing of my life, it had its share of challenges.  The high violent crime rate, which was once just an abstract idea, was now part of daily life.  Like the local people, we lived in houses with burglar bars over the doors and windows, and going out after dark was unheard of.  All of my local friends had had brushes with crime.  The Peace Corps group before us joked that we wouldn’t officially be true South African volunteers until we got mugged – at least twice.  Another frustration included a slower pace of life and very different work ethic.  As a fast paced New Yorker, it was a daily struggle to acclimate to my new host culture.

The crime and slower pace of life, underscored with political and racial tensions, certainly left many of us wondering how a World Cup could be pulled off successfully, and yet, so far, the games have gone on without major incident.  The stadiums were completed, contrary to predictions made by the international sporting community.  In addition, the police force has mobilized and acted swiftly to keep the 350,000 plus visitors safe.

The harder thing to fathom, which has less impact on the World Cup and more impact on the country’s post-Cup life, is the racial and political tensions.  While rugby has often been considered the “white” sport, soccer has often been perceived as the “black” sport.  This is evident both in the color of the athletes, and by the majority of spectators in each sporting event.  Would the country be able to ban together to support such a huge soccer event in the same way they came together for the 1995 Rugby World Cup?

The film Invictus demonstrated how sport has served as both a political and racial unifier.  What I witnessed in the two and half years in South Africa was a shift from skepticism to pride.  Many of my South African friends shared their doubt that their country could pull this off.  By the end of my time in South Africa, many of those same people were wearing FIFA shirts and telling me how proud they were to be South African.  People of different races, cultures and languages waved the same flag as South Africa surprised everyone by tying Mexico, while the whole world watched.  This Cup has been a chance for people to be proud of where their country has been, where they are and where they certainly have the potential to be.

About the Author:

Stefanie DeLeo graduated from Eastern Nazarene College in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) in 2004, where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Arts with an emphasis in Theater.  After taking a year off to direct a show at a Boston middle school, she moved back to her native New York to earn her Masters Degree from New York University, in 2006, in Educational Theater.  Stefanie also recently returned from two and a half years in the Peace Corps, serving in South Africa, where she focused on theater for social change in rural schools. She has traveled extensively and has worked as director, playwright and English teacher, with two of her plays being produced in New York .  Stefanie writes for an online travel site – please see her travel video and photo that were entered into a contest. (You can feel free to vote for the video/photo if so moved). Feel free to contact Stefanie at NatalilyS@aol.com.

South Africa's school children

Johannesburg, one of the World Cup host cities

(Photos courtesy of Stefanie DeLeo.)

Readers, how is the economy impacting international education in your region?  Please comment with specific examples of what is not being covered in mainstream media.

December 28, 2009

University Branches in Dubai Are Struggling

By TAMAR LEWIN

The collapse of Dubai’s overheated economy has left the outposts of Michigan State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United Arab Emirates struggling to attract enough qualified students to survive.

In the last five years, many American universities have rushed to open branches in the Persian Gulf, attracted by the combination of oil wealth and the area’s strong desire for help in creating a higher-education infrastructure. Education City in Qatar has brought in Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth.

Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates that make up the U.A.E. and the one that controls most of its oil, is still flourishing. And it is still generous in its support for the most ambitious American educational effort in the area, New York University’s liberal-arts college, which is scheduled to open there next fall with a highly selective class of 100 young students from around the world.

In Dubai, however, the timing for Michigan State and the Rochester Institute of Technology could hardly have been worse. Both started classes in August 2008, just before Dubai’s economy began to crumble. By this month, Dubai’s debt problems were so serious that Dubai World, a government-owned investment company, avoided a bond default only with a $10 billion bailout from Abu Dhabi.

Because most Dubai residents are expatriates, thousands of them left when their jobs disappeared, and the prospective college-student pool in the area has shrunk substantially. “Nobody could have anticipated the global meltdown, which has certainly had a negative effect on our student marketing,” said Brendan Mullan, executive director of Michigan State Dubai.

Michigan State, with only 85 undergraduates, is seeking to raise that figure with a scholarship offering half-price tuition to the first 100 qualified transfer applicants for the semester that starts next month.

“We’ve had close to 200 transfer applications, some from other universities in the U.A.E., but others from India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Oman,” Dr. Mullan said. “We are not compromising on quality, even if that means it takes us longer to gain traction here. We actually turned down 30 percent of our applicants last fall.”

Dr. Mullan said that while the break-even point for the campus was now expected to be five years, up from the original goal of three years, Michigan State was determined to remain in the Gulf.

“We still believe this is viable and valuable,” he said. “We’re not just going to be a teaching storefront here; we’re going to have significant research capacity, and our commitment to Dubai is unyielding.”

Rochester, which began only with graduate programs, accepted almost 100 students for this academic year. But Mustafa Abushagur, president of the Dubai campus, said it ended up with only about 50, spread among electrical engineering, computer networking, finance, and service and leadership studies. Rochester plans to start an undergraduate program next year, Dr. Abushagur said.

“Our plan for next year is 100 to 120 students,” he said, “which we think we can get, because we’ve studied the market very closely and we believe that as an institution, we can distinguish ourselves in certain programs that are in demand here.”

George Mason, one of the first American universities to open a branch in the United Arab Emirates, closed its Ras al Khaymah temporary campus in May, having never graduated a single student.

While the higher-education projects in Dubai face serious challenges, New York University’s plans in Abu Dhabi are moving ahead smoothly, with Abu Dhabi even going so far as to fly in top high school seniors from around the world for two days of meetings with those at the university.

“We’ve had a worldwide recruiting effort, identifying top candidates at high schools around the world,” said Linda Mills, the N.Y.U. senior vice provost overseeing the Abu Dhabi admissions process.

The cost of attending for a year, with tuition and travel and living expenses, is about $63,000, but Ms. Mills said students would get enough financial aid that no student would have to graduate with debt.

“We looked at the leading universities around the world,” Ms. Mills said, “and what we’re offering is on a par with Swarthmore, which I think offers the most generous financial aid.”

In fact, the head of the new Abu Dhabi campus is Alfred H. Bloom, the former president of Swarthmore, which has need-blind admissions, meets full financial need and, as of last year, replaced the loans in financial-aid packages with larger scholarships.

The admissions timetable has been somewhat different for the Abu Dhabi campus than the Greenwich Village one, with early-decision candidates having until Jan. 15 to accept a spot in the Gulf, and not expected to commit to Abu Dhabi without a visit.

Already, N.Y.U. has had more than 500 early-decision applicants for next year’s inaugural class, and has admitted students from Australia, Brazil, Britain, China, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Russia and Taiwan. About 100 have already been flown to Abu Dhabi for a visit.

“Everyone introduced themselves, in English and whatever language they wanted,” Ms. Mills said. “From French to Russian to Arabic to Hungarian, they’d say things like ‘I traveled 30 hours to get here,’ or ‘I’ve never been on a plane before.’ It was kind of a goose-bump moment.”

Nancy began the session by having audience participants read quotes about reading – this set the tone for the importance and value of words and their meaning, or perceived meaning. My quote, by Thomas Carlyle, was one that I would have hand picked if given the choice: “What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.”

Nancy described how her passion for reading became an opportunity for not only personal development, but professional development. Each book we read tells us a story, but it also provides us with many hints about culture. Why do the characters behave a certain way? Why do they respond (or not respond) in a particular manner? How would we, based on our own cultural upbringing, react to the characters and circumstances? What influences these behaviors and decisions? How can we better understand ourselves and the characters through works of fiction?

Nancy offered guidelines to consider when reading intercultural fiction. Areas such as gender, daily habits, individualism vs collectivism (Hofstede), time, and the author were outlined as a starting point. A series of questions about each of her guidelines were provided and then we were asked to listen to a snippet of a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, read quite gracefully by James. We drifted into story land, absorbing all of the cultural cues provided in Lahiri’s work. I closed my eyes to imagine the scene that James was describing, began to feel the characters near me, smelling the food that was described, hearing their voices develop as the plot did.

James and Nancy then had us break into small groups to discuss Lahiri’s words against the 12 “frameworks” provided. My group quickly addressed gender and time/time period while others focused on cultural issues that were less visible to the reader, such as communication style. It became quickly apparent that this type of exercise would facilitate dialogue about cultures with our students, faculty, administrators, staff – even friends and family – in a non-threatening manner. After all, we were not talking about ourselves, but characters from a story. This model adds tremendous value to our ability as educators to create opportunities to dialogue about cultural differences and to surface similarities that may not have been immediately visible.

As international educators, we have a responsibility to develop and maintain our own tool kits to refer back to when working across cultures. I am very appreciative of the value of the tools that Nancy has made available at www.thinkingoutsidethebook.org. This beauty of this tool is that it can easily be used with a variety of populations on our campuses: ESL classes, international students’ orientation, study abroad students pre-departure and re-entry orientations, across diverse teams and via campus wide/community reading programs. I would encourage you to visit this site and explore some of the readings suggested by Nancy and James. And as soon as I finish my latest read: “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (from Nigeria), I will incorporate one of her short stories into an upcoming training or orientation.

I’m curious to know what works of fiction you will be using in future intercultural training. Add a comment with the name of the author and book title for others to consider.