Plans are underway to merge the Community Service Office (CSO), Internship Office, and the International Center into a new Center for Global Studies and Citizenship. The organizers of the plan say that the changes are designed to better integrate leadership and civic engagement into the student experience.

The plan is the result of work by Political Science Professor Andrew Latham and Dean of International Studies and Programming Ahmed Samatar. President Rosenberg enlisted both professors to create a program that would enhance civic engagement and internationalism among students, Latham said.

Rosenberg announced at the year’s first faculty meeting that he had appointed Latham to serve as Assistant to the President for Civic Engagement.

Earlier this month, Latham drafted a report outlining a conceptual vision of the new center, which Latham hopes will open in fall 2005. Besides proposing the merger of the CSO, Internship Office and International Center, Latham intentionally offered few details in his proposal, instead choosing to focus on the college’s need to create global citizen-leaders. “We are trying to get the concept right at this point,” Latham said. “Once we have the concept in place, we’ll talk about the architecture.”

According to the report, the general concept behind the center is greater integration of all aspects of Macalester life while emphasizing the theme of “global citizenship”.

CSO Director Karin Trail-Johnson said that she is excited about the concept. She said she envisions the center acting as the center of a hub-and-spoke network—connecting many different aspects of the Macalester experience. She also expressed enthusiasm about the potential for increased civic engagement in study abroad programs.

Latham said he hopes that professors will use the center to add a civic engagement component to their classes, pushing students to be more involved with the outside community.

Trail-Johnson said there is a need for unification of co-curricular and academic programs. She emphasized that being engaged outside of the classroom can contribute to a student’s learning process. “To be an effective change agent in the world, you need to understand social issues, you need to have practical skills,” she said. “You need the courage to take leadership.”

According to Latham, a broader, integrative approach to teaching the values of global citizenship will help to make Macalester unique among liberal arts colleges. He said that Macalester has lost some of its distinctiveness in areas such as internationalism, because other schools have begun to integrate such concepts into their programs. He said he sees the new center as something that would put Macalester on the “cutting edge” of liberal arts education.

“[Educating global citizen-leaders] has the potential to reinforce our existing hard-won reputation for innovation and leadership in the fields of both internationalism and community service/civic engagement,” Latham’s report said.

The report, which was sent as a draft to certain members of the faculty and administration, contains no specific mention of multiculturalism, an omission that has caused some controversy.

In last week’s issue of The Mac Weekly, Rebecca Hossain ’05 criticized the report for its lack of focus on multiculturalism. “We see three of Macalester’s pillars [in the report]: academic excellence, internationalism, and service to the community,” she wrote. “What would the creation of such a center say to students? It would say that multiculturalism is not important; it would say that to be a global citizen-leader one does not need to understand about the complexities of race or the intricacies of oppression.”

Hossain said that while she did not necessarily have a problem with the concept behind the proposal, she worries about a general trend of marginalization of multiculturalism on campus.

Latham argued that Hossain misinterpreted the report. “It was never the idea to excuse or minimize multiculturalism,” Latham said. “Multiculturalism is bound up in the heart of this center.”

He added that he thought the misunderstanding stems in part on his use of the word “global” in his report. “Global does not mean foreign,” he said. “It refers to local, national, transnational.”

Latham also attributes the misunderstanding to a lack of knowledge about the center,and said that he hopes students will learn more in the coming weeks. He emphasized that the concept is in a highly conceptual stage and continuing input from faculty, staff, and students is essential to the process of designing the center.