Hendrix Alumni Blogazine

At the end of February when Chinese equities dropped nearly nine percent in one day and sparked a sell-off that gave Wall Street its seventh-worse single-day loss ever, it brought home the point that economics is a global game.

Tomorrow’s business leaders must be equipped to operate effectively in a global society. Competing in a global marketplace requires language skills and cultural dexterity.

To prepare our graduates to compete globally, Hendrix is enhancing offerings in International Business, International Relations, and Global Studies. We are also providing opportunities for students to experience other cultures and other ways of thinking.

International education makes you good at conceptually reading cross-cultural maps and solving puzzles. These are important skills in a global environment.

The eight students who travel to China this summer with economics and business professors Dr. Keith Berry ’73 and Stephen Kerr ’76 will be developing such skills as they study the impact of Chinese culture on business and entrepreneurship practices. Guided by Shane Nunn ’87, a successful businessman in China, they will visit corporations, factories and markets in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere. During the trip, they will evaluate the feasibility of China-related business plans they are developing now, comparing their business assumptions with the reality they encounter in China.

International travel and service projects, study abroad and cross-cultural experiences all fit neatly under the umbrella of Your Hendrix Odyssey: Engaging in Active Learning, the component of the Hendrix curriculum that gives students transcript recognition for completing experiential learning projects. With the Odyssey Program as catalyst, interest in international education is expanding on the Hendrix campus.

Experiencing cultures different from our own is important beyond its impact on business success.

Cross-cultural experiences jar you out of complacency; forcing you to think in different patterns and to be more aware of things that you take for granted – everything from the way you shop to what is polite or impolite. These experiences make you think about your values. If you are never immersed in that “sea of otherness” you experience in another culture then you begin to believe that the world that we create culturally is the way the world is absolutely. By giving students chances to be immersed in other cultures, we help them to create full lives for themselves and to fulfill their own personal odysseys.

International study is also important because our world needs leaders who can reach across cultural divides to solve problems that affect all of us.

Right now, our greatest humanitarian and security challenges are in Africa, where 25 million AIDS orphans are living today. African nations don’t have the resources to deal with this pandemic. We can’t allow conditions to deteriorate and create more failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan, where the government can’t provide security and violence spirals.

Addressing this global problem begins with understanding the cultural and economic forces that brought us to this point.

Three groups of Hendrix students and faculty will be traveling and learning on the African continent this summer. With funding from the Hendrix-Lilly Vocations Initiative, Dr. Anne Goldberg is leading a group of students who will volunteer at an orphanage for AIDS babies in Tanzania. Dr. Carol West and Dr. Allison Shutt are leading another group of students to South Africa, to visit sites they’ve learned about in African history, literature and film classes, and to develop an understanding of the culture and people.

At the end of June, 11 students will travel to Rwanda with me, Provost Robert Entzminger and Dr. Daniel Whelan. We are being lead by David Knight ’73, a member of the Board of Trustees. We will learn how a nation recovering from genocide that claimed more than 1 million lives is rebuilding itself through a process of reconciliation and forgiveness. The students are reading The Bishop of Rwanda by Bishop John Rucyahana in preparation for the trip, which will include a visit to his Sonrise Academy, where Hutu and Tutsi orphans live together. Bishop John will visit Hendrix on April 11 to lead a chapel service on reconciliation and forgiveness; giving students who can’t travel to Africa a chance to expand their worldview.

Every opportunity to connect with other cultures is a chance to build trust and create understanding, which are vital to our success as human beings and to our survival as a species.

Odyssey grants help make international travel and study possible for our students and faculty. Call the Office of Advancement (501-450-1223) to learn more about how your gift to fund the Odyssey Program can help build bridges between cultures. 

Editor’s Note: Ashby Bland Crowder, M.E. and Ima Graves Peace Professor of English, American Literature, and the Humanities and a member of the Hendrix faculty since 1974, spent the 2005-2006 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar teaching American Literature at the University of Lodz in Poland. 

By Ashby Bland Crowder

When my wife Lynn and I arrived in Poland in early September of 2005, it was almost as warm as Arkansas—and the days much longer. But how things changed in the next few months. Poland’s latitude substantially dispenses with daylight by mid-December; at 3:30 in the afternoon (so-called) it was as dark as the inside of a cow. It is hard to say when full-daylight emerged in the winter morning because the ubiquitous coal-burning stoves set a haze that made the whole day crepuscular. Once June came round, there was almost no darkness. It did not get quite all the way dark at night, and by 4 a.m. the sun, blazing in one’s curtainless bedroom window, urged one’s face to the ruelle in the hope of just one more hour’s sleep. Winter was very much better for sleeping. Time in Poland is as out of joint as Hamlet says it was in Denmark.

For about fifty percent of my year in Poland I was, in effect, deaf, dumb, and illiterate. The Polish language to me was a cacophany of meaningless noises, I was unable to say words that people could understand, and everywhere I saw signs, newspapers, schedules, and menus that I could not read. I did not advance much beyond “dzien dobry” (hello) and “do widzenia” (good bye) in the extremely difficult Polish language.

You might think this a terrible fix to find myself in, but not so. I rather entered into a fresh relationship with my surroundings: I became hyper-visually orientated. I became an inveterate gawker at everything--the carved fox coming round the tree on the facade of Leopold Kindermann’s art nouveau villa; the carved statues of mill-workers standing right there with the Greek gods atop Palac Poznanski (which was the residence of the owner of the next-door and now closed weaving and spinning factory, one of the largest in nineteenth-century Lodz); the evening silhouette of the Julian Tuwim park-bench statue and the long shadow it cast down ulica Piotrkowska; and the peeling stucco of the secondary streets, the brick exposed like raw flesh, the city and the people too poor to heal these sick buildings.

Observation of people and other creatures is another aspect of my experience as an illiterate. In Park Staroczieiski one morning in early spring I saw two young women greet each other with the traditional Polish cheek-kisses; then they put their bags down on the park bench and ran off on their morning jog around the park together. In what American city of 850,000, I wondered, would two women leave their belongings unattended on a park bench? As I walked on I cast my eyes back on a gathering of casual teen-agers near the bench, but they seemed no threat to the girls’ belongings.

Read the full account of Dr. Crowder's time in Poland:

Snow transforms the landscape
Except for a few pigeons, communists long gone
The small wounds of poverty
Progress also brings loss
No time to stop for death
Holocaust horrors penetrate language barrier
English creeps into Polish vernacular

Plus, check out Dr. Crowder's Poland Fun Facts.

Dr. Deb Skok, Dr. Ian King and Dr. Alex Vernon traveled through Vietnam for two weeks learning more about student and faculty exchange programs and opportunities for individual study.  Miss Ngoc Nho, second from left in the adjacent photo, was their guide for part of the trip. 

By ROB O’CONNOR ’95

In January, Dr. Ian King, professor of politics, Dr. Deb Skok, assistant professor of history, and Dr. Alex Vernon, assistant professor of English, traveled to Vietnam, where they spent two weeks investigating opportunities for future collaboration between Hendrix students and faculty and their peers in Vietnam, as well as possibilities for engaged learning experiences in Vietnam for Hendrix students.

During their stay in Vietnam, the Hendrix professors visited with faculty and administrators from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities and the Institute for Educational Research in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), as well as Can Tho University and the Hoa An Biodiversity Application Research Center in Can Tho City.  In the capital city of Hanoi, the group met with representatives of Hanoi University of Education, the Vietnamese Women’s Union, and the College of Social Sciences and the Humanities at Hanoi National University. 

For each of the three Hendrix faculty members, the trip was an opportunity to experience firsthand a country that has been a subject in their courses, including Dr. King’s Asian Politics course, Dr. Skok’s Vietnam and the 60s social history course, and Dr. Vernon’s Vietnam in the Literary Imagination course.

“For a long time, I think we tended to treat Vietnam as a war, not a country, and I am interested in the country,” said Dr. Skok. “For me, that’s what drew me to the country initially.”

“I study war literature, particularly American war literature of the 20th century. And the American war in Vietnam is the war, and the war generation, that most immediately influenced our generation,” said Dr. Vernon. 

Dr. Vernon is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy.  He is the coauthor of The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War and editor of Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing.  Last Spring, Dr. Vernon published most succinctly bred, a memoir of his childhood, his education at West Point, his service as a tank commander during the first Persian Gulf War, and his perspective as an academic viewing the coming of the second Gulf War. 

“It’s only natural that, the old soldier that I am, I would want to walk the same ground and breathe the same air,” he said.

It is an ideal moment for students and faculty from the West to study in Vietnam, said Dr. Skok.  In 1986, the country instituted a policy called doi moi, or economic restructuring.

Educators are particularly interested in revitalizing the centrally-controlled education system to encourage more creative teaching methods, such as hands-on learning.

“That goes along with their economic restructuring,” Skok explained.  “You need creative thinkers in the economy, and that requires a different pedagogy.”

Most universities in Vietnam are eager to establish relations with foreign universities, and many schools already have established exchange programs for foreign students, Skok said.

Vietnam should appeal to students and faculty with a wide variety of interests, from language and cultural history to service projects and biodiversity issues, Skok said.

“There are tons of opportunities in Vietnam,” she said. 

Dr. Vernon agreed.

“The opportunities for individuals are plentiful … doing service work in orphanages, studying mangrove ecosystems as they recover from the war, exploring one of the Vietnam’s 54 ethnic groups, witnessing the economic transformation currently underway, or immersing oneself in a native art form or craft,” he explained.

Hendrix students can connect their engaged learning projects in Vietnam with coursework at Hendrix.  In addition to those Vietnam-related courses taught by Dr. King, Dr. Skok, and Dr. Vernon, the College added Dr. William Gorvine, who specializes in Asian religion, to the religion faculty in the fall, and recently hired Han Zhau, who will specialize in Asian history.