Summer Institute for International Professors and Scholars in American Studies

This Institute presents human migration along waterways as a key to understanding the cultural, political, and social development of the USA and the problems and rewards of a diverse society. Four waterways, representative but by no means all encompassing, provide the Institute's structure: the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, and the Pacific. Each waterway carried people---Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians---at first into North America and then to various points on the land. Those migrants created settlements as diverse as the ancient Mississippi city Cahokia, the Atlantic seaboard's plantations and colonial cities, the great lakefront cities like Chicago, and the late-twentieth-century multicultural metropolises like Los Angeles and New York. In moving along waterways and establishing themselves in North America, migrants, pioneers, laborers, and citizens created sites that were in various ways responses to their access to a river, lake, or sea. But also on waterways developed some of the salient features of American culture: the encounters among peoples of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities; the conflict between colonials and Europeans over the nature of political institutions; the initial Americanization of political institutions; the reform movements of the antebellum era; the growth of an industrial nation requiring that labor, raw materials, and finished goods move efficiently to and from factories; and the development of a nation that is at once increasingly urban, committed to political equality across ethnic, gender, and race lines, and itself the postindustrial leader of the global economy. Water has long been symbolic in American life, too, whether through baptism, or the retention of West African water spirits, or the "green" sense that uncorrupted nature is essential to the human spirit. Intended to assist international faculty by being representative and suggestive, not comprehensive, this Institute will range from social history issues like migration, mortality, and settlement, to cultural and political developments in constitutionalism, reform, religion, and literature, to late-twentieth-century challenges in education and civic life. In general, the Institute's organizers see it as adding to standard themes in American history an emphasis on the fundamental qualities of water and human movement and on the religious and artistic dimensions of migration, settlement, and nation-building in the USA.

Participating Organization

Western Michigan University, a Carnegie classification Doctoral I institution with over 26,000 students, ranks among the 60 largest universities in the United States. Long a leader in teacher education, the University's College of Education is among the top two producers of professional educators in the nation. The six degree-granting colleges within the University offer 244 academic programs. More than 90 of these are at the graduate level, including 23 doctoral programs. A rapidly developing graduate-intensive, research-oriented public university, Western provides exceptional facilities for instruction and research. Within the past decade, more than $277 million has been spent on constructing new buildings and purchasing state-of-the-art equipment. Among these improvements are the new University Computing Center, remodeled and expanded library, a student recreation building, and cultural and performing arts facilities. The proposed summer institute will draw widely from the University's rich academic resources, especially the Programs in American Studies, Black Americana Studies, and Women's Studies; the Departments of English, History, Comparative Religion, Anthropology, Communication, Political Science, and Sociology; the College of Education; and the University Libraries.

The History of American Studies at Western Michigan University

The WMU Program in American Studies, founded in the 1970s, has long provided a major, enrolling a small number of students with exceptionally high grade point averages and plans for graduate professional education. Its director until 1999, Lewis H. Carlson, Professor of History, author of We Were Each Other's Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War (New York: Basic Books, 1997), offers the Institute expertise in popular culture and the twentieth century. In 1999, Katherine Joslin, Professor of English, was appointed director of American Studies at WMU. Newly affiliated faculty include specialists in early America, slavery, the nineteenth century, politics, material culture, environmental studies, religion, archaeology, women's studies, women's literature, African American literature, and sociology. These faculty members, several of whom hold doctorates in American Studies awarded in the 1980s and 1990s, are drawn from Anthropology, Comparative Religion, English, History, Political Science, Sociology, and Women's Studies. Moreover, the WMU Center for the Study of the Great Lakes offers an unparalleled forum for learning about migration into the Great Lakes region, the development of its waterways and economy, and contemporary problems of water use. Its director, Michael J. Chiarappa, Assistant Professor of History, experienced in public history and public education through museum exhibits and community organizations, offers the Institute expertise in the Great Lakes and in museums.

University Libraries

Library holdings, which include over 3.6 million bibliographic items and subscriptions to about eight thousand serial publications, are especially strong in American studies, American history, American literature, and the social sciences. Special collections of interest to Summer Institute participants include: The Randall Frazier Memorial Collection, honoring a notable alumnus, has a wealth of material on the history and culture of Black America; the Carol Haenicke Collection of American Women's Poetry includes more than 2,200 volumes from the 18th Century to the present; the Lincoln Collection includes books, photographs, and other items related to Abraham Lincoln; the C.C. Adams Ecological Collection consists of the personal collection of books and papers of the pioneer American ecologist, Charles C. Adams; and the Historical Children's Collection contains material related to the writing and illustration of children's books. Microform collections include the American Periodical Series, Early American Newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. National Archives, and ERIC documents (documents in educational research published by the Educational Resources Information Center). CD-ROM terminals provide access to a wide range of materials including NEWSBANK (articles from newspapers all over the U.S.) and Ethnic Newswatch (articles from 75 ethnic and minority newspapers and magazines in the U.S.). The Regional History Collection is a unique group of items on the thirteen counties of Southwest Michigan.

Research materials which are not in the University Libraries' collections can usually be obtained from another library through interlibrary loan services located in the Resource Sharing Center of Waldo Library. The University Libraries participate in online interloan systems regionally, state-wide, nationally and internationally, and are also a member of a variety of multi-type library networks. They also hold membership in the Center for Research Libraries, a multi-million item collection located in Chicago which operates as a cooperative library for less-used but important research materials. Extensive computer-based services also augment the holding of the University Libraries with access to numerous databases, journals, and reference materials.

Prior International Exchange Experience

Western Michigan University operates academic linkage contracts with 37 universities and colleges in 21 countries. WMU's oldest partners are the Free University of Berlin, Germany and Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, with which annual student exchanges and some faculty exchanges have been conducted since the early 1960's. Today, faculty exchanges are conducted annually with the Nihon University, Tokyo; Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea; and the University of Passau, Germany. Recent visiting scholars include the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya, Kandy, Sri Lanka, and faculty from the University of Cambridge; the University of Copenhagen; Osaka City University; the University of Riga, Latvia (on Fulbright); the University of Tubingen; and Keimyung, Pusan, and Suncheon universities in Korea. Reciprocal student exchanges have been expanded to include the Haarlem Business School, the Netherlands; Norwegian School of Management, Oslo; Vaxjo University, Sweden; and Daito Bunka, Josai International, Nagoya Gakuin, Nihon, Otaru, and Rikkyo universities in Japan. Foreign study programs began in 1947, and today WMU has its own study abroad sites at the Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro, Mexico; the Universite de Franche-Comte, Besancon, France; Saratov State University, Russia; and Sunway College, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. WMU is a member of the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP), based at Georgetown University and funded by USIA grants, and the Council for International Educational Exchange (CIEE).

WMU has attracted students from overseas since 1943. At present 2,028 international students from 97 countries are enrolled in WMU degree programs, and more than 100 are studying intensive English in the university's ESL unit. In Open Doors, published annually by IIE, WMU ranks second among Doctoral I institutions in international student enrollments, and among the 50 largest host universities in the United States. With nearly 700 Malaysians, Western Michigan University hosts the largest contingent from this Southeast Asian nation in the United States.

Western Michigan University is an experienced international contractor. Between 1960 and 1968, for example, WMU developed Ibadan Polytechnic College in Nigeria with a USAID contract. In 1987, WMU pioneered "twinning" programs in Malaysia with the foundation of Sunway College in Kuala Lumpur, and today has similar programs in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia. The university is an active provider of short-term training programs to USAID through Partners in International Education and Training (PIET); during the past year attendees in WMU training courses have come from the Cape Verde Islands, Croatia, Madagascar, Poland, and Romania. In mid-December 1996, senior officers of the Government of Pakistan Audit Department completed a one-month executive program in Human Resource Management in WMU's Haworth College of Business. Recently, WMU has received USIA grants for the President's 1000/1000 Exchange program; the Edmund Muskie MA and MBA Fellowship program; and the NAFSA Baltic/Eastern European Assistance Awards program.

Summer Institutes on aspects of American culture or business have been offered every year since 1983 by WMU's Office of International Affairs. A combination of intensive English instruction plus lectures and field trips is tailored to the interests of each group. Through 1996, over 900 students and nearly 70 faculty and staff have participated in these Institutes. The Office of International Affairs (OIA) manages Western Michigan University's international activities, including all institution-to-institution linkages abroad, faculty and student exchanges, foreign study, international student services, intensive English instruction, international grants and contracts, and summer institutes. OIA is headed by the Executive Director of International Affairs, who reports directly to the President.

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