Introduction

[00:00:07] Steve: Welcome to the Global Engagement Insights podcast. I'm Steve McDonald, your host. Today, we've got a very special guest, Jon Stauff. Jon, you are an SIO and a modern history professor.

[00:00:22] Steve: You have a higher education in your genes and lineage. Your father was a dean. You've traveled, and you've lived abroad. If you wouldn't mind, before we get into our subject matter today, which is the undervalued role of faculty in international education, maybe you could give us a little bit more of an expanded understanding of your background and what you're doing right now.

[00:00:46] Jon Stauff: I am delighted to share my journey with you, Steve. Thank you for having me on the podcast. My career in higher education began in 1993, but the seeds were sown long before that. As a curious kid on the Jersey Shore, I found joy in collecting stamps and pondering about the world beyond the ocean. This curiosity led me to explore languages, social sciences, history, and political science in high school and college.

[00:01:08] Jon Stauff: Where do these stamps take me, and what can I learn about different people? I took that curiosity throughout high school and college, and I had an interest in languages, but I also had an interest in social sciences, history, and political science. I went on to get a bachelor's degree in history and German from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and parlayed that into an assistant at a fellowship at the University at Buffalo in the State University of New York system to earn a PhD in modern European history. I have a very traditional background and certainly studied abroad as an undergraduate in Bavaria, Germany, and went on to focus on German history as a graduate student. I had language training at a go-to institute. I won a couple of German academic exchange student grants to pursue a graduate dissertation, research, and get into Germany. I ended up in a parliament internship at the Bundestag.

[00:02:03] Jon Stauff: Just as Germany was uniting, they were trying to decide where the capital should be, so it's a fascinating time to be there. During my graduate research, I watched the wall fall, and getting in certainly brought that perspective of watching the Cold War dissipate to some degree in 1989 and 1990. That guided my perspective on what I should be doing with my life.

[00:02:28] Jon Stauff: So, I became a college professor and started my career at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, where I taught for 15 years, but most importantly, faculty-led study abroad programs and got involved in international education from the administrative level caught the bug, if you will, just as the field of international education was in a very new phase of professionalization. People were getting involved in international education as their profession, not just a tag along to some other role they had at a college or university.

[00:03:02] Jon Stauff: Since then, I've been the senior international officer at Radford University in Virginia, the College of New Jersey, Monmouth University in New Jersey, and now at South Dakota State. While I occasionally kept my hands in the classroom, I've supported faculty and students in their international pursuits in various ways.

[00:03:22] Steve: You certainly are an authority, and I understand why we're talking about what we're talking about today. Maybe you can explain why you feel faculty are undervalued in their contributions to international education, and then we'll unpack how we address that.

[00:03:42] Jon Stauff: I'm firmly ensconced on the dark side. I've been in this role as an administrator for over 20 years without full-time teaching duties. But I do remember what it would be like to be an assistant professor, just at a graduate school with many hopes, dreams, and desires, as far as paying it forward goes. I provided students with the opportunities that I was provided thanks to a high school Spanish teacher who took us to Spain during the holy week and spring break.

[00:04:10] Jon Stauff: I got involved with a colleague to take students to Germany for three weeks and an intercession break in January. So, I started as a faculty member, planning a faculty-led program in an era before that professionalization that we're so accustomed to enjoying now, thanks to the form and education abroad and NAFSA.

[00:04:33] Jon Stauff: There were no policies, no way to collect money, and no assistance making reservations abroad. In the 90s, at least at my institution, the faculty member had to do that for himself or herself. This is partly due to my institution's lack of a strong international education office.

[00:04:51] Jon Stauff: I learned the ins and outs of how to get students from point A to point B, but in doing so, I felt it was taking away from the teaching activity. I was worried about tickets. I was worried about insurance policies and such. I appreciated what international educators in such offices were doing to promote global learning in the study abroad program.

[00:05:15] Jon Stauff: I felt like, Okay. I'm not the type that's going to write the best book about how Hitler came to power, but I could possibly contribute to higher education by figuring out how we can create a good relationship between faculty and administration and international education and the provost at the time where I was.

[00:05:36] Jon Stauff: With very supportive of that initiative and provided me with opportunities to get experience with release time from my teaching and eventually full-time duties as an assistant vice president at St. Ambrose International Education. So, I taught 24 hours a year, four classes a semester. I was leading students abroad.

[00:05:56] Jon Stauff: They caught the bug. I got to do it more often, and then I could see how my university could take advantage of that interest and build new opportunities for students. They afforded me that opportunity in the year 2000.

[00:06:09] Steve: To have a successful study abroad program, you must have some real beliefs about the need for collaboration between the international office and the faculty.

[00:06:21] Steve: Can you explain how that relationship and that collaboration work?

[00:06:26] Jon Stauff: From my perspective as a modern German historian, I was trying to express to my supervisors and all the fancy folks above me that Germany was my laboratory and that you can have a biology laboratory in a building on campus, but my laboratory was out in the field.

[00:06:39] Jon Stauff: I needed to devote a lot of energy to figuring out how that site could help me achieve the learning objectives in the course I was teaching. How do I maximize the impact of that site? Why am I asking to pay this amount of money to experience that?

[00:06:57] Jon Stauff: I needed them to experience that because there's no way I could create a concentration camp in Davenport, Iowa. I focused a lot of energy on that activity. It takes a lot of planning, back in the day, letter writing, faxing, and phone calls before the Internet was accessible around the world to do that payment system, liability labor, and all the things that go to keep students safe and secure to protect the institution from harm and to bring those students back alive. Certainly, the university had a vested interest in that. The ability of the university to provide those services to the faculty member, allowing that faculty member to focus on the learning taking place and structuring that learning in a beneficial way for the student, to me, was the marriage of the best of administration and the best of faculties. That's always been my guiding philosophy when working on such programs with faculty members.

[00:07:52] Jon Stauff: I can't possibly tell you how an animal science professor can best take advantage of a site in Turkey to deliver a global learning experience to a colleague in animal science, which is excellent and even better. He's working with the political scientists on our campus to achieve that goal because she's a native of Turkey. That's great; the students are going to benefit from that.

[00:08:11] Jon Stauff: How can I support that? How can I make sure that they're compensated appropriately and that the students have what they need to focus on the learning activities? In my case, it's having a great director of education abroad and a team of people processing invoices and ensuring that the money goes where it's supposed to go so the students can enjoy it.

[00:08:27] Jon Stauff: I think not having to deal with that part of it as a faculty member is a dream, and that's one of the benefits of what we've done in international education over the past several decades.

[00:08:46] Jon Stauff: We've made that dream possible for many faculty members. Do they challenge us? Sure. They challenge us in our offices and ask for things that are often impossible. They sometimes shoot for the moon, but without their collaboration, we don't have a reason to exist, and I remind myself of that on more difficult days than others.

[00:09:07] Steve: One of the big things I took away from what you said is that many international education departments don't have a background as faculty. You could put together and work with others in program after program after program, but it's really the faculty.

[00:09:24] Steve: That has their finger on the curriculum and what they want the students to be learning, the best way for them to learn, and the best way for international education in that location. The experience is there to tie in. How can you really have the best study abroad programs without direct collaboration with the faculty? That was one of the biggest things I learned from what you said there.

[00:09:49] Jon Stauff: Sure. Sometimes, opposites like mine face the challenge of changing that. We're glorified travel agencies, providing vacations for students and faculty, distracting them from where they should be on campus. I always go back to the idea that Germany is my lab and Europe is my lab. Just as you have a great research facility for swine on this campus, we're a land grant university, so we have pigs and cattle and all that stuff. Take a student to a museum or two, such as the museum in Leipzig, Germany, devoted to the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany during the Cold War. How did the citizens take over this facility and make what they found a museum? It's all the evidence of state surveillance and record keeping of who was doing what, when, and where. I can't possibly download a YouTube video and make that real, especially when you have people targeted by the Stasi presenting the information on the tour.

[00:10:50] Jon Stauff: I'm trying to get people to appreciate the why. Why do we do this? What is the student going to leave with? How might it help the university gain a bit more of an international reputation or put us on a pedestal that can't be done without the faculty's contribution?

[00:11:11] Jon Stauff: The faculty members may have absolutely no clue about that university reputation piece and all that bureaucratic stuff we're dealing with, but they want their students to have this experience. So, the learning opportunity for all of us is to learn from the faculty members as we're putting things together, and the faculty members gain a deeper appreciation of what's going on behind the scenes to support them on campus and off.

[00:11:36] Jon Stauff: It's an important voice in the office, and we value their input.

[00:11:40] Steve: You mentioned there that there's a role in international education for taking the perceptions, the brand of the university, putting up on a pedestal, helping it to expand its exposure, its impact on an international basis.

[00:11:55] Steve: SIO does all of that regularly. Are you advocating internally because of the importance of everything you just mentioned? What is the role of the faculty in those advocacy efforts? How do they help you advocate for international education and its importance to the university?

[00:12:15] Jon Stauff: Obviously, we showcase faculty achievements everywhere we can on campus, including their achievements in their research, laboratories, publications, and creative activity, which are important to us. We write press releases, and we're a public university, so we're responsible to a state board and trying to put the best and the brightest in front of those making important decisions on behalf of the university system.

[00:12:43] Jon Stauff: But we're also lobbying our congressional representatives in Washington. We're also trying to make the case that universities need resources to get the job done. We're applying for grants, and we need the faculty voice to help ground all of this activity and show that we're not a glorified travel agency.

[00:13:07] Jon Stauff: We must ground their work in learning in credits and promoting students ability to make changes within global systems in the 21st century. These are the students who are going to be the folks who are innovating for the next 25 to 30 years. They're going to be the leaders of their industries.

[00:13:26] Jon Stauff: They need to be creative. They need to take in multiple inputs from around the world and the corner, and it will benefit South Dakota. If our students are exposed to various perspectives and different ways of thinking about the world, the faculty member can translate all the gobbledygook.

[00:13:46] Jon Stauff: I just talked about the practical components of their educator tasks: What is that student in animal science and trying to understand how important it is to the economy of South Dakota? Our senator just returned from Washington to discuss the importance of international trade in this state, connecting that faculty voice to that initiative, which we can do with the state. It wasn't an SD state person there, but someone from the university system joined the senator in that conversation. How do we get that core activity of the university to be included in our international work? How can we get the international into the conversation at the local level?

[00:14:29] Jon Stauff: We need the faculty to act as a bridge for those things. They bring credibility to our enterprise. It s not that we're not credible, but the folks on the street may not think about the study abroad office. They might think about the English department, and so it's something that helps us as we advocate. As good Nafsons on NAFSA advocacy day with our congressional representatives, having that faculty component reminds people that NAFSA also has a knowledge community for faculty achievement and teaching and learning the scholarship.

[00:15:01] Jon Stauff: That component is such a crucial voice in our advocacy and driving the point home, depending on the audience we're trying to address.

[00:15:08] Steve: So, they lend authenticity and validation. They're the front line with the students. It's all about the student experience.

[00:15:17] Jon Stauff: I'm in the role because I was tired of teaching world civilization twice a semester every semester and grading the same papers over and over again. I joke about front-line work, which was so important in making me a good international educator; it could give me an appreciation of why I need to lead these programs. Why do we need to get students some global perspectives in the Iowa classroom with the New Jersey classroom?

[00:15:43] Jon Stauff: That front-line piece often is not experienced by the international educator of the 21st century. We might not have been TAs. We might not have taught countless sections of the freshman survey. As we move toward people getting more PhDs, International education, and higher education, the hutching that tangible first-year experience that students have on campus.

[00:16:11] Jon Stauff: It may not be as palpable for that study abroad advisor that faculty member needs to help us sometimes, and my colleague, Jill Blondin, and I co-edited a book on global learning in the first year at home and abroad. It's got a really unwieldy title, but the idea is that faculty and international offices need to connect with one another to devise game-changing learning experiences that get students thinking internationally and globally, which will not help them. We need the faculty member in that.

[00:16:47] Steve: You eloquently talked about how faculty helps you. Think of a story that brings that to life where a faculty member has stepped up to advocate for the international education office and what that looks like because it sounds fantastic.

[00:17:03] Steve: But we retain things actually 22 times more when it's told in a story, and advocacy and advocating is all about telling stories. Is there a story that comes to mind that you wouldn't mind sharing with us?

[00:17:14] Jon Stauff: My problem is that I always have 10 at one time in my head. I can think about it; I'll return to my experience. But I was a faculty member. I was a resident director of a semester program in Ireland, and my employer was St. Ambrose University, a Catholic institution. We played a bit with semester study abroad, but we had never done that traditionally. Let's send a group of students with faculty members to a partner institution and have them mix it up with the local students and faculty. There were ten of us, and I was an associate professor. I was tenured by then and slightly relaxed, but we had ten students. Five of them were from the Southside of Chicago. For the most part, five were Iowans, so I had some rural and urban to work with. But when I think about one young man, he wasn't academically curious. Let's say he was a business major. He wasn't traditionally looking at the liberal arts as something interesting to him, but he was searching for something. He wasn't quite happy where he was. He wasn't sure where he was going. But he was a blonde, blue-eyed Iowa kid from a traditional farming community. We sized him up and said, Wouldn't it be interesting for you to get a related work experience? It could be an internship. It could be a job shadow or something that gives you a taste of what you might find as a business major back home.

[00:18:40] Jon Stauff: We ended up connecting this young guy to a product that was made in Carlow, Ireland, where we were situated, called The Hot Irishman. The Hot Irishman was a concentrated Irish coffee starter that was bottled. You bought the bottle, poured out the concentrate, added a few things, heated it up, and it was an Irish coffee.

[00:19:05] Jon Stauff: You wouldn't have to go through all the measuring and all the skills that a bartender needs. So, this guy took water, like fish to water, and he was going to trade shows, and he just gained a deeper appreciation for the Irish experience through that internship.

[00:19:23] Jon Stauff: He understood what he was learning about Irish culture and history in the classroom. He gained confidence in talking to Irish people, not just about what he was observing but sharing what he brought from Eastern Iowa to the table, and he went off. He transferred from St. Ambrose to Iowa State.

[00:19:40] Jon Stauff: We never saw him again. Twenty years later, on the anniversary of our descent upon Ireland, he sent me a Facebook message. He said, Dr. Stauff, it's twenty years since you took us to Carlow, and I can't tell you that was the most impactful experience I've ever had. It really set the course for my life.

[00:19:58] Jon Stauff: And that shouldn't be tear-jerking. That shouldn't make people gooey inside. But it was a very black-and-white type of student. He began to see the potential for himself and the potential that others brought to the table that he could take advantage of, and he went out and grabbed it. Now, he's an entrepreneur from where he grew up. But it took him around the world and back again to arrive at that.

[00:20:23] Jon Stauff: That international experience may not have made him a PhD in Irish history. However, one of those 10 students eventually got an Irish history PhD and stayed in Ireland to teach. But that's what we're in it for. We're in it to change lives. We're in it to help students realize their full potential, and they take that learning, mold it, shape it, process it, figure out the meaning, and move forward with their lives.

[00:20:52] Jon Stauff: It was exciting to get that note, and we have maintained some context since then. It's nice to be a part of his life again. That's why we do it, I think, and we certainly have experiences in South Dakota of similar taking that small-town kid and exposing them to something completely different and then watching what they do with the rest of their lives.

[00:21:12] Jon Stauff: It's hard to quantify and put into a box, but those stories do make a difference.

[00:21:20] Steve: Oh, they make a huge difference. I'm just thinking you gave me goosebumps when you talked about 20 years later, he writes back. Facebook. Wow.

[00:21:29] Jon Stauff: Facebook memories popped up. But yes, indeed.

[00:21:32] Steve: We ve talked about it so much here, and the goal was to discuss the undervalued role of faculty and international education, and that story accentuates the impact that you can have. The U.S. faculty put that program together, and now you can do that in conjunction, collaboration with your international education office.

[00:21:49] Steve: What do you want other international education and SIOs to take away from our conversation today?

[00:22:06] Jon Stauff: We often talk to faculty members who want to lead programs abroad and say, Once you're over there, you're the infirmary, you're the treasurer, you're the student affairs office. You are bringing the university's bureaucracy. You're representing it; you bring it to bear in your program, either conduct issues or things.

[00:22:17] Jon Stauff: So, the faculty members, even those supported by the international office in leading the program, bear much responsibility.

[00:22:37] Jon Stauff: They may not appreciate it until it's happening before them: students getting sick, students complaining about each other, and they have to mediate. At the same time, in the international office, the faculty members saw that the faculty member was challenging because they were asking for this, and that is the next thing my staff needs to appreciate: the burden we're placing upon that faculty member when they're leading this group. We need to lighten the load where possible, but that faculty member can't get away from the student when she's hurt.

[00:23:12] Jon Stauff: It is important to understand the challenges of the faculty member, even though the international educator may not have been a classroom instructor themselves and not have had that full-time faculty experience. They need to respect what that faculty member brings to the table. Their PhD may be in the blank. They may have been a Peace Core volunteer, bringing many practical skills to the table, whatever that combination may be. We need to honor that.

[00:23:36] Jon Stauff: Sometimes, we get a little bit too big for our riches, if you will, and we're so focused on providing standards of good practice and getting training to deal with immigration, counseling, and such. We are so busy trying to do a good job in our offices that we lose track of that learning experience.

[00:23:57] Jon Stauff: I'm not saying anyone does that consciously, but subconsciously, we might sometimes get a little bit fussy about the training that we want to do in NAFSA and forget that faculty member is leading a group of 25 students and Lord knows what can happen nowadays in the world. How do we balance that need for safety and security and that bureaucratic stuff we're dealing with in our offices with that learning experience?

[00:24:19] Jon Stauff: I'm all about that learning experience. I want to help that faculty member as much as I can. Still, they also have the answer to the general counsel, the student affairs, the vice president, the provost, and various university police or emergency management, wherever it happens to be on your campus.

[00:24:43] Jon Stauff: I think we sometimes give faculty a bad reputation and study abroad. We do not appreciate the gift they're giving us of their time and energy. Frankly, without that gift, we don't have that much reason to exist in study abroad offices or international education offices. So, how do we strike the right balance?

[00:25:04] Jon Stauff: There will be tough conversations and difficult moments, but at the end of that program, we're usually breathing a sigh of relief and then feeling a little bit of joy about what's happening. That student comes back, and they can't stop talking about the experience. The faculty member made that possible, and so did my team, but it was a supporting role and understanding that learning should take predominance.

[00:25:21] Jon Stauff: . The student outcome should be the reason we're doing this without that faculty member's leadership. We're not in the right place. We could be in corporate travel, some form of education technology, or something else. Maybe we need to find another place to work. I think that's why I consider this a faculty-centered enterprise and how I can support the faculty member in that quest.

[00:25:52] Steve: I love the overall takeaway that without the faculty, there wouldn't be an international education program.

[00:25:59] Steve: Jon, if people had additional questions, how would we best connect them to you?

[00:26:06] Jon Stauff: Certainly, and it has not changed in the 30 years that I've been in higher education 31 years, I should say, beginning to add up but the reward system in higher education does not favor the faculty member who devotes a lot of time and energy to studying abroad.

[00:26:23] Jon Stauff: Of course, the measurement of tenure is good teaching evaluations, and study abroad can contribute to that in some way through those types of assessments, but leading a faculty-led program abroad is not the same as writing a book, publishing an article, or creating a sculpture or a piece of art.

[00:26:39] Jon Stauff: Most universities will not credit the faculty member with that special thing that they need to advance their career, advance their rank, or gain tenure in and of itself. It needs to connect to something that they're doing. They might use that program to get data to write an article, etc.

[00:26:59] Jon Stauff: We must encourage faculty to translate that activity into some recognized forms of achievement to allow them to gain the credit they deserve. Certainly, we give them awards and such. Still, the other thing is helping them understand that some of those publications and professional presentations can be focused on international education and global mobility.

[00:27:25] Jon Stauff: How am I promoting global mobility amongst my students as an animal science professor? How am I building an international partnership that benefits both sides and translating that into more acceptable ways?

[00:27:34] Jon Stauff: Another thing we should be thinking about, at least from the international education perspective, is bringing our colleagues into our world a little bit, bringing them to our conferences, enlightening them about the teaching, learning, and scholarship track to NAFSA and that knowledge community the international education leadership track as well, because some of them may be in some form of leadership that have a global connection.

[00:28:00] Jon Stauff: Introducing them, providing them with financial support to go to conferences and share their stories in some ways, taking advantage of professional development opportunities that exist in our organizations, mentorship, both in AIEA and NAFSA, through the NAFSA Academy and AIEA's programs. So, there are a variety of ways for faculty to gain some connection to the world and join their voices with ours as we tell the world about how great international education is.

[00:28:25] Steve: Well, Jon, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all these insights. I think this is an important message that needs to be in the mix about how important international education is, how the advocacy effort works, how it impacts higher education, and the important role, not undervaluing, that faculty play in all of that.

[00:28:48] Steve: So, thank you for coming on and sharing today. We really appreciate it.

[00:28:52] Jon Stauff: I enjoyed the conversation, Steve. Thank you so much.