New brown-bag series links campus
international scholars and  researchers

Haenicke Institute Dean Dr. Donald McCloud successfully launched an international-topics "brown bag" series over the 2008-2009 academic year that attracted 300 WMU faculty engaged in scholarly and research work in various regions around the world, staff and visiting faculty and scholars.

McCloud recently announced the fall 2009 schedule, which begins September 11 with a meeting of the South Asia group. Click here to view the fall schedule.

The goal of forming the brown-bag groups is to bring together faculty, graduate and selected undergraduate students to enrich and invigorate the academic environment at WMU by offering a place where international scholarly topics are discussed and perspectives from a wide range of academic disciplines are presented. Group members share research interests, exchange information and discuss contemporary issues in the field, discuss, organize and support information for the global studies undergraduate majors and minors, present papers, and plan joint projects/initiatives. Lunch is provided by the institute and University staff are also encouraged to attend.

"One definition of a university is "a community of scholars," and yet we find few places where the campus community can meet and interact as scholars," said McCloud, who came to WMU to serve as the institute’s dean in fall 2007. "Our contemporary universities are subdivided into academic disciplines and the disciplines are further divided by sub-specialties, which narrow thinking and areas of expertise. The brown-bag format offers an opportunity to counter this hyper-specialization by bringing us together as a community with few, if any, limitations, restrictions or borders."

Seven groups formed this academic year by faculty doing scholarly work or conducting research in Japan, Russia and Central Asia, South Asia, Latin America, China and Africa. An eighth group has coalesced under the Globalization heading. Faculty engaged in Europe and the Middle East have not yet met, but groups have formed and will begin meeting in fall. Definition and control of the brown-bag program belongs with each group; the Haenicke Institute is responsible for the logistics only.

"Brown bag" lunch programs focused on particular academic disciplines or geographic areas are common on many university campuses across the United States," McCloud said. "Faculty members who have experienced these at other universities have been especially positive and vocal in their support for the new program here. I began this series because I recognize the value of these seminars from my own experience with a brown-bag program at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies during my years in Madison. It is curious that there is no tradition of luncheon seminars here, and I have found no good explanation as to why not—they simply never happened."

The initiative is one of many the dean is implementing to advance the internationalization of the curriculum at WMU, which expands the Haenicke Institute’s ability to lend its support to academic development and scholarly interchange across the campus.

"The meetings have already proven invaluable for stimulating the area studies programs across the campus and re-integrating those programs with the global studies undergraduate majors and minors, a connection which somehow had been lost (or weakened) over recent years to the detriment of both," McCloud said. "While it is true that area studies programs are no longer "in fashion" with federal funding agencies, they remain the heart of much of our academic work and are essential to the global studies programs. With the development of Web sites for each of our brown-bag groups, we will begin providing an important support service for students interested in every aspect of international studies."

Response to the brown bag seminars has been uniformly positive across the Western campus, with attendance exceeding 300 in the first full year of the series. Several luncheons offered opportunities for graduate students to present draft papers aimed for subsequent presentation at academic conferences and opportunities for visiting Fulbright scholars to present their research work. Some luncheon groups read and discussed selected articles from the field, and, in one ambitious case, the group tackled an entire book. Almost all luncheon groups have discussed some aspect of current events or issues in their areas, and all have involved comment and discussion from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

"We at the Haenicke Institute are very encouraged," McCloud said. "At the same time, we recognize that it will take several years for the groups to mature and become part of Western's academic culture."

He said the globalization group reflects Western's longstanding and significant commitment to thinking in global terms, particularly bringing together those faculty members who are thinking in terms broader than specific geographic regions. This group will also be particularly important in its support of WMU's global and international studies undergraduate curriculum.

"At the end of the day, however, we needn't take an either-or perspective on the global versus the regional," said McCloud, director of WMU's global and international studies major. "Both are parts of a puzzle that few of us fully understand, and hence each contributes to understandings for the other. One would find it very difficult to study a single region of the world without addressing areas beyond the region in question, and, conversely, one cannot comprehend the global without some understanding of what happens at the regional level."

Over the next academic year, McCloud said the main goal for the groups is to continue to mature as communities. He has pledged at least three years of institute support to sustain brown-bag programs for each group until they evolve into self-managing entities.

"We will be building that culture over the coming several years," he said. "Initially in this first year there has been some hesitation to discuss topics that might be considered sensitive, however defined. Yet as time goes on, the depth and value of the discussion will become more broadly appreciated—and participants will learn that they can disagree, even disagree vigorously, but leave the room as friends looking forward to the next meeting. A very positive first step was the presentation of a graduate student paper at a recent brown-bag meeting, where the presenter was a graduate student from foreign languages, but faculty members from anthropology, political science and fine arts offered suggestions for strengthening the paper."

McCloud said the institute will declare "final victory" in the culture-building, brown-bag effort when each group has decided on its own that its meetings are so important to their work and life at Western that they should meet every month of the semester.

"At that point we will assume that the culture of brown-bag seminars has taken hold at Western," he said. "The Haenicke Institute will then be justifiably proud of having created and led an improvement in the academic life of Western Michigan University."

Faculty and graduate students interested in joining a brown-bag group may contact Rena Lynema at (269) 387-3984 or via e-mail: rena.lynema@wmich.edu.

WMU's Global and International Studies Web site