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Vol. 4, No. 5 - May 17, 2005
| New DOE Grant to Support International Affairs Major Skidmore has received a grant of $173,000 from the U.S. Department of Education's Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program. The funds, to be provided over two years, will be used by the College to strengthen its International Affairs Program and the new international affairs major. "This grant provides significant support for one of our top priorities at Skidmore College – increasing our students' intercultural and global understanding," said President Glotzbach. "If we want our students to emerge as leaders and not just as observers, they must understand this world and their role in it. Our job is to immerse them in that world. It is their future." With the help of the grant, Skidmore will revise and develop its three core courses in international affairs and introduce 12 new courses. The new courses with a regional focus will include Arabic Language and Culture, Islamic Religious Sciences, Maghreb in International Affairs, Franco-Québécois Identity in History and Literature, Dynamics of the Caribbean Political Economy, and Confucian Values and the Rise of East Asia. The international courses will be Human Rights and International Affairs, HIV/AIDS: A Global Perspective, Global Feminisms, International Law, International Migration, and Comparative Constitutional Systems. To strengthen students' foreign language skills, the College will use a portion of the grant to introduce new "language across the curriculum" courses at the advanced level in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. These courses enable Skidmore students to build a foreign language component into a wide range of courses taught in English. In addition, the funds will support the creation of summer internships in China, Germany, Italy, and Japan that will immerse students in a foreign-language setting. The grant will also help provide advanced foreign-language training for faculty. The new funds will also be used for faculty workshops related to teaching, assessment, and methodology, as well as a travel program that introduces faculty members to foreign cultures of vital interest to the United States. Skidmore is planning a faculty educational program in Tunisia and Morocco in 2007. Said Mary-Beth O'Brien, professor of German and director of the College's International Affairs Program, "Our goal is to enhance students' global awareness, cross-cultural understanding, and international education. As a community, we believe that all students should learn to acknowledge and respect that their worldview is not universal and that other people may have profoundly different perspectives and values." Skidmore
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