Students at UVM and in the Honors College seem to have a great interest in international learning opportunities. Students take courses in Global Studies, Community and International Development, and in a growing variety of languages, to mention just a few of their curricular choices. Many others study abroad, for a semester or a year, at some point in their last three years at the University. They might do so in the Belize and Oaxaca programs sponsored by UVM or in another university's program. Students participate in the World Debate Institute, which is housed at UVM. Within the Honors College, students take courses on French intellectuals, the history of Islam, and world music. Students show increasing interest in the many academic avenues that give them entry into regions and cultures beyond the ones with which they might be most familiar. Partly to build on this interest, the University has also stepped up its efforts to attract students from abroad to UVM.
There is also help for students who want to pursue international education. In concert with other efforts at the University, the Honors College Office of Fellowships offers students support. With its assistance, seven students won Gilman Scholarships in Spring 2010 to facilitate study abroad. Will Liew, a Gilman winner and an Honors College student, is studying Japanese language at Kansai Gaidai University and living with a host family. Another Honors College student, Whitney Roth, will be traveling to Morocco next semester as a winner of the Boren Scholarship. She will study Arabic and conduct research on the relations between Moroccan Jews and Arabs. Four UVM students won Fulbright Awards for postgraduate work last year as well. One of them, Honors College graduate Dzeneta Karabegovic, reports on her experience in this issue as well. She is studying social networks among diasporic Bosnians now living in Sweden. Another Fulbright winner, Emily Lubell, Class of '09, is leaving for northern Chile this winter to conduct research on the relation of water quality and public health.
These and other students seek out international educational opportunities for many reasons, too various to enumerate fully. They might want to hone their language skills, learn more about their own heritage, help those who are less fortunate, learn from others, benefit from a change in scene or, following graduation, seek job opportunities elsewhere. But there is another reason why international and cross-cultural study ought to be part of higher education. Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and Classics professor at the University of Chicago, writes in her book, Cultivating Humanity, that the comparative study of cultures allows us to understand the nature of practices with which we grew up more fully. Such study, by showing human variety, "removes the air of naturalness and inevitability that surrounds our practices." This realization, Nussbaum argues, leads us to conclude that what we do should not simply arise from habit; it should be that which it is possible to defend rationally as being good. Perhaps this realization underpins the fascination students have with cross-cultural endeavors: it helps them to see their own situations more clearly. By understanding others, they better understand themselves.
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