Building back UVA’s global engagement will be one of the more exciting and urgent challenges we face as a University as we emerge from the COVID shadow in the coming months. Since evacuating hundreds of our students and faculty from locations around the world beginning last January, we’ve suffered a painful retrenchment of our education abroad programs that will continue through the coming spring semester and significantly curtailed our global research activity. At the same time, a combination of unprecedented barriers to travel, a growing international perception of threats in the United States, and increasingly complex immigration controls sent our international student enrollment levels into decline.
UVA’s global team mitigated the worst of these impacts with a resilient creativity that kept our global mission alive. The University’s China office worked with our International Studies Office and the University’s schools to find seats in partner institutions in China for more than 80 Chinese first year students who were unable to get visas or cross borders, from which they will be able to transfer credits when they are finally able to join us on Grounds.
Our International Students and Scholars Office convened at least five virtual town hall meetings for our international students to keep them informed and supported during the rapidly shifting immigration climate, and all of our Schools made substantial accommodations to ensure that all our international students could remain enrolled here. Student Affairs went to enormous lengths to support our international students who were unable to return home with housing and food service. And with our colleagues in the office of the Vice President for Research and the health system, we have developed a path for our University researchers to begin returning abroad to resume their research safely.
While we wait for the threat from COVID to diminish sufficiently so that we can safely and fully restore our more traditional global engagement, we are building on the lessons we’ve learned this year to grow our global mission in other ways. As you’ll see in this newsletter, next month we will launch a new pilot program to support “Global Mentors” to engage virtually with UVA students in the classroom; a program we hope to grow to include a residential component on Grounds when it is safe to travel again.
Our International Studies Office is exploring opportunities for students to enroll virtually in classroom opportunities in institutions overseas. And in the coming year, we hope to expand opportunities to support co-taught classes between our faculty and international partners in virtual “Global Classrooms”. In the meantime, the Global Affairs component of University Advancement continues extraordinary work with our community of very generous donors to find new opportunities to support more scholarship assistance for study abroad, faculty hiring for global studies, global programming support, and a range of other new global activities.
It is an ambitious agenda, but based on our strong success in overcoming challenges this year, I am confident it is a realistic one. Please join us on the road back to global engagement.
Stay Global!
