Colby's Worldwide Campus b y Jonathan Weiss
Each September, as some 1 ,600 students come north to the Colby campus in Wa terville, more than 1 50 students board airplanes tha t take them in other directions to Colby' s "campuses" in foreign lands. A large group arrives in Paris, some to participate in a year-long program at the Universite de Caen, others in a semester program in Dijon. Thirty students land in Madrid and take a bus to Salamanca, site of Colby's year-long program in Spain. Colby students arrive in London, England, and in Shannon, Ireland, and a large group makes i ts way to Cuernavaca, Mexico. In February, new groups depart to London and to Lubeck, West Germany. The growth in Colby's foreign programs during the last decade is no accident. In a variety of ways, Colby has turned outward, has encouraged diversity both in its student body and in its academic programs, and has become increasingly aware of its relationship with the rest of the world . With this awareness has come a new commitment to provide our students with the opportunity to expe rience foreign cultures not as tourists but as participants. Integration into student life in foreign countries is the ideal that has guided the conception of Colby's programs abroad from the outset. In 1 979, when Professor Arthur Greenspan, a new addition to the Modern Languages Department, went to France, it was with the idea of putting Colby students directly into a French university and having them take courses side by side with French students. For years Colby had been sending students to programs run by other universities; with few exceptions, these were American "ghettos," special courses set up for American students or within the context of centers for foreign students. Inevitably, the American students stuck together, spoke English together, traveled together, and, with a few exceptions, viewed the foreign country from the outside in. The challenge facing Greenspan was to give our students the chance to see the country from the inside out.
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Caen: Where it all began Colby in Ca en was our flagship program, and it would establish standards and structures for the others. Colby had been in Caen for some years before Greenspan arrived but at a center for foreign students, not at the university itself. What Greenspan asked of the administration of the Universite de Caen was an entirely new idea for them: Colby and the university would sign an exchange agree ment whereby Colby students would have the same rights and privileges as their French counterparts, attend classes with them, and live in the dormitories on campus; in return, four French students would attend Colby each year and earn credit toward their degrees at Caen. To Greenspan's surprise, the French administration-not noted for their openness to new ideas coming from abroad-responded "why not?" and in the fall of 1 980 Greenspan took the first group of Colby students (along with students from Washington University in St. Louis, which had affiliated with the program) to the Universite de Ca en. But Greenspan's ideas d id not stop there. To achieve a more balanced academic program and to maintain Colby standards, he required students to attend each semester at least two "core courses" ( regu lar university courses in which the professor teaches an extra hour with Colby students). French professors typically love this COLBY 20
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