March 8, 2007
Fenner on a mission to boost international learning experiences
Editor’s note: Uniquely Washington is a biweekly column featuring one of the University’s most important resources — our people.
When David Fenner started work at what was then the Foreign Study Office in 1983, about 250 students a year studied abroad in six places — five in Western Europe. Last year, International Programs and Exchanges facilitated study abroad for 1,747 students going to 79 countries all over the world.
If Fenner has his way, that number will go up.
“We figure about 15 percent of our undergraduates are getting international experiences,” he says, “so we’ve gone from a miniscule number to an okay number, but it means that 85 percent still aren’t getting those experiences. My goal every morning is to get up and figure out how to grow that number.”
If Fenner sounds like a man on a mission, that’s because he is. He came to work at the UW after having international experiences of his own — in Yugoslavia as an undergraduate, in the Soviet Union as a graduate student and in the Sultanate of Oman as a Peace Corps volunteer. Maybe that’s why, despite his degrees, he was willing to take a position as a temporary office assistant — because it was in the Foreign Study Office.
He soon moved up from his humble beginnings, becoming a counselor in the Foreign Study Office, then assistant director, associate director, acting director and finally director. Along the way the office expanded its role to include incoming as well as outgoing students and scholars and changed its name to International Programs and Exchanges (IPE). In addition to being its director, Fenner is assistant vice provost for international education.
He’s happy that, unlike in some universities, his unit is sited in the Office of Global Affairs within the Provost’s Office. It’s central enough, he says, that there are no barriers to working with any unit at the University. Fenner calls IPE a “facilitator of mobility.” For example, a group of students were taking an Honors Program seminar on Paris, Moscow and Berlin, but were doing it in Seattle. They came to IPE and said they wanted to travel to the three cities. IPE helped them find a faculty member who could speak all three languages, get departmental blessing for academic credit and make all the logistical arrangements for their stay overseas.
That’s the enabler role, Fenner says. But IPE staff don’t just wait around for suggestions. Fenner considers it part of their job to make sure UW students have options in a wide range of places. “So if a group of students doesn’t come to us and ask for a program in, say, Cambodia, then we’ll go out and try to find an academically rigorous, safe program in that area and work with faculty and departments here to gain credit approval,” he says.
Why study abroad? That’s the question Fenner loves to answer. He pulls out two transparencies that he uses in his talks on the subject — one of a caterpillar and one of a butterfly. They represent his idea of the before and after of students who spend an extended time in another country.
“It’s just an amazing thing to see students come back from having spent a quarter overseas and watch how different they are — how much more engaged they are, how much more politically aware they are, how much more geographically savvy they are,” he says. “In a relatively short time we get tremendous bang for our buck.”
He told of a student from Puyallup who had spent a quarter studying at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, after which his father called Fenner to thank him, saying his son was “magically and finally interesting at the dinner table.”
That’s the feedback he loves to hear. When it comes to study abroad, he says, “It’s almost more important that students go than where they go.”
