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Have vision, will travel

The "Globalization and the Natural Environment" program began with a vision long before it had a site. Six years ago, Samatar and Michael Monahan, director of the Macalester International Center, began discussing a semester abroad program that examined the environmental impact of globalization.

Monahan said administrators found examples of programs at other institutions that emphasized either fieldwork or classroom work but few effectively combined the two. "Environmental studies, in my view, is a quintessential liberal learning project," Monahan says. "You cannot understand the environment by only being a biologist or only being a political scientist. Even humanists have something important to say about the environment. That kind of interdisciplinary theme would fit very well with the mission of liberal learning institutions like this one."

Macalester enlisted partners with similar academic values and standards. Pomona and Swarthmore (which has a partnership with Haverford) joined the consortium. Such consortia allow small colleges to share the costs and faculty rotations and also offer benefits such as a richer pool of academic expertise and students. Administrators considered sites in Malaysia, Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Costa Rica and Europe. "We started looking all over the world," says Monahan. "There was no geography driving this. It was the theme that drove it."

They found an ideal site in South Africa. The University of Cape Town is arguably the premier institution in Africa and has a strong environmental studies program. Because English is widely spoken, there was no language barrier. The western cape of South Africa offered a setting that brought globalization into sharp relief. Two oceans meet at the southern tip of the continent. The cape has a varied geography of mountains, valleys and forests and both urban and rural areas. It is a biodiversity hot spot. In some respects, the country has felt the effects of globalization for three and a half centuries as a meeting ground of Africans, Europeans and Asians. South Africa remained economically isolated for many years because of sanctions, but since the end of apartheid in 1994 it has aggressively engaged with the international economy and the effects have played out very differently among social and racial groups.

"The ultimate value of this is to add value to the intellectual growth of these students and stimulate their potential to be good citizens and effective leaders of the world for their rest of their lives," says Samatar. "South Africa is a microcosm of the richness and complexity of globalization."

The first students went abroad in January 2004. Over the last three years, 29 students from the four colleges--11 from Mac--have gone through the program. "It's the opportunity of a lifetime," says Paula Paul-Wagner, assistant director of the Macalester International Center, "but it's also a challenge."

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