New director of international programs lends her global expertise to the School of Arts and Sciences
New Jersey is third, behind New York and California, in the number of residents who are foreign born. Joanna Regulska drops that statistic into a discussion of her new job as director of international programs at the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS).
Then, she spins out some corollaries: Rutgers has one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. Foreign students from all over the world add to a significant cohort of first-generation Americans on campus, and their different backgrounds and experiences are a tremendous intellectual asset. Rutgers has faculty with expertise in every region of the world and working agreements with 150 universities around the globe. Finally, she observes that modern colleges and universities need not only to offer but to embed a global perspective into their curriculum and experience. “As an institution, we have a responsibility to create a generation that’s globally connected, globally aware,” she concludes.
Regulska, a longtime faculty member, is chair of the women’s and gender studies department and director of the Local Democracy Partnership at the Center for Comparative European Studies. Last summer, she was appointed to her new position at SAS – without relinquishing any other responsibilities – to analyze, expand, and coordinate the hundreds of global opportunities available to faculty and students at Rutgers–New Brunswick. Because so many of these programs have been developed and run by different groups within the university, unnecessary overlaps or missed opportunities for working together abound.
Regulska’s task is to change all that. A first step was to informally survey faculty members about their involvement in research and teaching abroad. With that information, Regulska is working to strengthen interdisciplinary “clusters” of faculty whose global work intersects in some way and to make international opportunities available to a broader range of faculty and students.
As part of the university’s transformation of undergraduate education, SAS has added a three-hour global awareness requirement to the general requirements, beginning in fall 2007. To fulfill the requirement, Rutgers students can choose from a wide variety of opportunities including research, service learning, internships, and studying at other universities, either in the United States or abroad.
Because of the diversity of the campus, students are exposed every day to cultures and civilizations different from their own, but Regulska believes, “they must be trained to look for and value those connections.”
Regulska, 56, grew up in Warsaw, in a family so immersed in politics, they discussed it over breakfast. Her experience as a young person in Soviet-controlled Poland sparked in her a drive to experience the world outside her intellectually repressed country, first earning a master’s degree in geography from the University of Warsaw and a then a doctorate in geography from the University of Colorado in Boulder. She joined the Rutgers geography faculty in 1982.
In 1989, when the Polish people revolted against Communism, Regulska returned to Poland to help build organizations that would foster local democracy, citizen participation and decentralization reform in her homeland. Regulska continues that work throughout the newly decentralized Eastern Europe and Central Asia through the Local Democracy Partnership. She has twice been knighted by the government of Poland.
Between several trips a year to Eastern Europe, Regulska oversees academic centers and programs focused on six geographic or interdisciplinary areas: Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Southern Asia, Latin America, and women’s global leadership. By combining existing expertise and “cluster hires” of new faculty in specific academic areas, Regulska hopes that SAS will promote interdisciplinary exploration of issues such as global warming, energy use, nutrition and health, and slave labor, and coordinate academic research on these topics here in New Brunswick and abroad.
The ultimate goal is to have a package of global opportunities that will meet the needs of Rutgers’ diverse student population and respond to the mandate of every college and university to educate future citizens of the world.
“It’s not that globalization is somewhere out there, beyond us,” Regulska said. “It is us. We are creating it. In many ways, we are the driving force.”