On campus, the United World College Davis Scholars Program is turning
dynamic internationalism from theory into practice.

BY | DANNY LACHANCE

When it comes to international students, Jack Weatherford is picky. In a world of jet-setters, the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology says, it’s easy to foster a kind of bland internationalism on college campuses, to enroll international students so worldly they’re boring. Luckily, Weatherford can afford to be picky. Macalester’s international student body isn’t composed, as some are, of mostly affluent foreign students from a handful of countries. Representing 12 percent of the student body, Macalester’s international students come from nearly 90 nations—the largest number of countries represented on any liberal arts college campus in the United States.

The college’s success in cultivating an authentically international student body is partly the result of its ability to attract students from the United World College system (UWC), a set of 12 international high schools that operate on five continents. Selection committees in 124 countries send their brightest high school students to the highly selective schools, where students spend their last two years of high school following the challenging International Baccalaureate curriculum. By all accounts, the perspectives brought by UWC students to their undergraduate institutions are anything but bland. Having spent two years interacting with others from widely different backgrounds, they arrive at Macalester with a strong sense of themselves and the world. “In a way, the students who come from these schools are models for Macalester,” says Jimm Crowder, director of international admissions. They’re also socio-economically diverse. “Most of these students are from modest backgrounds, and they receive their scholarships to go to UWC based on need. We follow that.”

Macalester’s financial support of UWC students has been buttressed by the generosity of philanthropist Shelby M. C. Davis. Impressed with the quality of the UWC schools and the interactions they foster, he launched the Davis United World College Scholars Program in 2000, contributing need-based grants of up to $10,000 per student to colleges that enroll UWC graduates. Macalester’s first class of UWC Davis Scholars is graduating this spring: Thirty-three students from 28 countries. Pleased with the success of the program, Davis has announced an expansion of his support: Beginning next fall, schools like Mac that enroll five or more UWC students will receive a grant of up to $20,000 per student per year. The goal, says Philip Geier, executive director of the Davis Scholars program, is to foster a critical mass of UWC students at every college campus. Schools already enrolling five or more scholars, the foundation found, have reported the best outcomes. “What appears to be happening is the formation of new networks of future decisionmakers, creating greater potential for all students to be more engaged in and appreciative of the world’s opportunities and challenges,” he says. The expansion of support from the Davis Foundation will have a snowball effect for Macalester, Crowder predicts: The increased contribution will free up money in Macalester’s financial aid budget to fund international students who did not attend a UWC, making the network of future international decision-makers even larger.

And that, in turn, will maintain Mac’s reputation as a destination liberal arts college for international students who want to go to college where international relations is a daily reality rather than just an academic department or a viewbook platitude. Indeed, it was precisely that impression that brought Victor Llanque-Zonta and Nagi Otgonshar, two of this year’s graduating Davis scholars, to St. Paul nearly four years ago.

An Unlikely Transformation
Victor Llanque-Zonta’s parents didn’t ha ve to worry, as some parents of college-bound students do, that their child would become a hippie in college. He already was one.

RIGHT: Llanque-Zonta believes that microfinance could help transform the developing world.

It was no surprise, really. He’d grown up in the Bolivian Amazon, the son of academics who specialized in teaching indigenous people how to manage the environment. It’s hard to shock your father with your new radical politics when he’s a Communist himself.

So when he arrived at Macalester three years ago from the Norway UWC, Llanque-Zonta found himself ahead of the hippie curve: he sported long hair, dressed in tattered pants, and wore wooden earrings. He regularly attended leftist protests in the Twin Cities and, when immigration returned as a hot-button topic, organized several protests himself.

But while it fostered his idealism, his Mac experience was also forcing him to think more deeply about the nuts and bolts of power and social change. All the protesting served a purpose, he says, but he wasn’t sure if it was the right purpose for him. “Once you start thinking of outcomes, you realize that the problem is way more challenging,” he says. The immigration debate, for instance, ultimately will be settled by legislators, he notes. “I wanted to be inside, making those decisions myself.” He turned to his majors of economics and anthropology to ponder how to change the system from within. During Llanque-Zonta’s junior year, a visiting speaker on microfinance provided one answer: Small loans to startup entrepreneurs in developing countries were dramatically improving the lives of the poor.

“When he described it, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I want,’—a very practical solution, serving the neediest in Latin America.” After he graduates this spring, Llanque-Zonta hopes to find a job working for a nonprofit dedicated to development in poor nations. With that experience in hand, he’ll be positioned to do that kind of work back home in Bolivia. Llanque-Zonta admits that he’s less of a hippie these days. The wooden earrings are gone, and he wears nicer pants. He even cut his curly hair. But his parents can rest easy. He may not organize marches anymore, but he still attends them. Microfinance may have taken him off the soapbox, but it hasn’t distanced him from his vision of a more just world. “The means more than the ends have changed,” he says.

Macalester’s international students come from almost 90 nations—the largest number of countries represented on any liberal arts campus in the United States.

Making Connections
Nagi Otgonshar can’t stand humidity. So initially he was excited when he looked at a map of the United States and saw that his new college was about as far away as possible from an ocean. Perfect, he thought. No humidity. But when he arrived at the end of a sweltering summer three years ago, he got a quick lesson in Minnesota geography: “How was I supposed to know that there were 10,000 lakes around?” he says, laughing.

If the Minnesota weather wasn’t as ideal as he thought it would be, his other expectations about life at Macalester were met—and then some. Before he’d even decided to come to Macalester, he says, e-mails he exchanged with anthropology professor Jack Weatherford were already giving him a feel for the kind of relationships students have with their professors at Mac.

“Are you a real Mongolian who knows how to ride a horse, sing a song, and drink horse milk?” the e-mail asked. “Or are you a city boy who plays hip-hop?” Weatherford says he was testing Otgonshar—trying to make sure he had both the authenticity and the sense of humor that would make Macalester’s first Mongolian student an asset to the college. Otgonshar proved he was the real deal by detailing with mock indignation his diet and horseriding experience to Weatherford. Indeed, before he attended the UWC in Norway, he had lived in western Mongolia, in a tribe of about 10,000 people.

Since arriving at Macalester, Otgonshar has worked closely with Weatherford, whose book about Mongolia, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Crown, 2004), was a New York Times bestseller. These days Otgonshar is combing through Mongolian history books, picking out tidbits that Weatherford might find useful as he works on a book about Mongolian queens.

And he spearheaded, along with other Macalester students, the creation of the book Doorways to the World, Doorways to Ourselves: Cross-Cultural Multilingual Folktales for Children, a compilation of stories from the United States, Mongolia, Lesotho, and Jamaica. He translated each story into Mongolian so the book could be distributed to children there who have limited access to texts written in both English and Mongolian.

It wasn’t until he brought copies of the book to a center for homeless youth in Mongolia last summer that he realized the significance of Weatherford’s mantra— “It doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is what you do.” Says Otgonshar, “At Macalester it was, ‘We created a book—great.’ But there I was able to see what I could do, what the result was.”

Economics courses, meanwhile, have helped him to think about investing in Mongolia’s future—about how he can successfully bring monetary as well as intellectual capital to his country. He hopes to work on Wall Street as an investment banker because it can “bring together people who have ideas and great projects with those who have capital and are looking for a return on it. It’s like being a matchmaker.”

After getting work experience in the United States, Otgonshar hopes to return to Mongolia and put his matchmaking skills to work there. Those skills, he predicts, will be crucial for the continued growth of the booming Mongolian economy, which doesn’t have much of an investment banking infrastructure.

Yet.

DANNY LACHANCE is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.