‘Study’ Abroad

Every year about this time, somebody’s blockmate sends a mass e-mail from Spain, so-and-so’s lab partner plans to leave for Africa next term, and about 4,000 undergraduates caught in Cambridge for the rest of the spring semester wish they had turned in those study-abroad papers last year.

And as gift-laden friends, barely back from some corner of the globe, re-immerse themselves in the mundane rhythm of response papers and tutorial reading, their stories of the halcyon life they had shuttling from host family to host family in Lesotho draw us further down the path of study-abroad envy. Of course, mostly we hear about alcohol. We hear stories about our friends getting smashed and hooking up with that girl in tight jeans and pointy, Euro-trash boots. Or about how wine is really cheap in Italy, beer in Germany, or Ouzo in Greece. A friend of mine who just got home from Africa sent along large bottle of Tanzanian liqueur. Notice a pattern?

Even though we hear more about discothèques than dissertations, the moribund Harvard College Curricular Review champions the value of “international experiences.” In a generally boring and predictable pedagogical shakeup, internationalization has become the one “visionary” plank in the Review’s shaky platform. Indeed, if some form of the current Review proposals pass, the College will continue at least to encourage its students to take a semester off and live in a foreign country.

But the question stands: is it worth sacrificing a semester at Harvard to learn to wear Euro-trash boots with the best of them? Until as recently as my freshman year, the answer the College gave us was a stern “no.” We only have eight semesters at Harvard, the logic goes, and France will always be there when we’re done.

Before I start really criticizing study abroad, though, the inevitable disclaimer: I do not doubt that a few undergraduates every year have significant and rigorous experiences working at universities in other countries. And making general claims about the value of study abroad is a dubious science at best without solid studies to back them up. (Lack of evidence, incidentally, goes both ways—hopefully Harvard will compile a few of these before it sets anything in Curricular Review stone.) I also think that spending a semester or a year in a foreign country, no matter how inebriated you get, is fun, relaxing and, sometimes, a broadening experience.

But after mountains of anecdotal evidence, I am convinced that those students who deserve course credit for their international experiences constitute the great minority of Harvard’s study-abroaders.

Here are a couple of examples. The friend of mine who just came back from Tanzania wrote in an e-mail that “…being stuck in a box with nothing but the BBC makes for a postmodern haven that is, at moments, unfulfilling. I fear I’ve also come to the realization that Cambridge, Mass. is a better place to study Africa than the continent itself, unless one really knows what s/he is doing. I’m afraid I feel guilty enough about receiving school credit for the classes I took this semester, which were comically poor. Exchanging another semester at Harvard for one at [the University of Dar es Salaam] would be a grave mistake indeed.” This from a guy who scratched at Harvard’s cage in Cambridge harder and longer than anyone else I know. Another friend’s European accomplishments were upping her already admirable tolerance to alcohol and getting addicted to cigarettes.

The bottom line is that international experiences without prior or concurrent heavy academic study often impart shallow insight, and few undergraduates have the training they need to make their international experiences anything more than half courses in translating pick-up lines into foreign languages.

And, if the Curricular Review passes in its current form, even fewer undergraduates will be prepared for study abroad. The Review’s general education proposals include eliminating the Foreign Cultures Core requirement in favor of a more general distributional requirement in the humanities and allowing undergraduates to complete two semesters of required of language study after their first year. This means that students could easily leave Cambridge with an even shabbier grasp of the language, history, and culture of the foreign country in which they choose to study, making it even more likely that they will take the path of least resistance and drink themselves through the semester.

I doubt that is the “vision” that the Review’s General Education Committee wants to articulate. But no curriculum reviewer should be naïve enough to believe that a semester studying at Niger’s University of Niamey—currently an approved destination for Harvard undergraduates—is in any way equivalent to taking Western African history and culture courses at Harvard, or that such a semester would be academically productive without the right kind of study beforehand.

At the least, the Gen Ed Committee must reexamine the notion that Harvard should encourage its students to leave for a semester or even a year. Requiring students to have some kind of international experience, a proposal currently on the table, is not necessarily a bad idea as long as the College is cautious—more cautious than it is now, certainly—about which courses of study at which universities abroad translate into Harvard credit. If the Curricular Review institutionalizes such a requirement, it should focus on getting students abroad during a possible J-term, over the summer, or on students’ own time they take off.

And more students should think about what they really want out of their Harvard education. As annoying as bad TFs and paper-packed reading periods are, the excellence of the instruction, the quality of the student body and the extracurricular opportunities are better here than you’re going to get than almost anywhere else in the world. France will always be there after you graduate.

Stephen W. Stromberg ’05 is a Russian studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.