The Power of Money: Pushing For a Campus Revolution

    Coming to UC Santa Barbara, I had an expectation of a globalized campus. We have many international students – both graduate and undergraduate – from a wide variety of countries. However, at times it feels like there aren’t that many of us. We are almost invisible a lot of the time, and during classes, our experiences and knowledge from abroad don’t seem to be as valued. Few times in my classes at UCSB have I been confronted with a class that taught relevant content about countries outside of Europe and North America, and even fewer did I ever feel like instructors cared about my nationality and how this could benefit the classroom experience. “Research indicates that instructors are not necessarily prepared to help international students (Allen, 2018; Weigl, 2009). With help, however, instructors can “internationalize” their course content and their teaching by “exploring identities, questioning cultural constructs, freeing artistic expressions, and unifying voices” (Allen, 2018, p. 262). The outcome is a classroom that is accepting, diverse, and globally-minded.” (King & Bailey)

         It’s important that as a campus community we begin valuing more international perspectives - not just for the benefit of our international student community, but for the benefit of our domestic students and faculty as well. “The underlying assumption of the model is that as one’s experience of cultural difference becomes more complex and sophisticated, one’s competence in intercultural relations increases” (Bennett & Hammer, 1998). Every single person who is exposed to cultural differences both in class and with personal interactions stands to gain from this. By building a campus community that values internationalization, we are better preparing students to enter a job market where they will be expected to deal with co-workers of different nationalities, or where they might require certain experiences or knowledge about a different culture or country. If the goal of UC Santa Barbara is to form well-educated global citizens, then we need to make sure that we are exposing all our students to a variety of cultures, histories, languages, and experiences both in class and on campus.

To accomplish such a goal, we need efforts to bring our international students closer to campus and bring our campus closer to international students. The ISAB has produced research related to our international community and has promoted events and presentations to spread this knowledge to relevant stakeholders. However, our reach is still very small, and for the most part, it feels like we are preaching to the choir. Those who demonstrate an interest in our work are people that are already immersed in this cause and are already involved in these changes. We need other relevant parties to take interest and start acting as well, and as a group of students with no funds or much support outside of the labor we are able to produce, this is very hard to accomplish. The school should offer more training resources and opportunities for faculty and instructors to seek out information and resources related to creating a globalized campus, as well as invest time and financial resources in looking into what other UC campuses have accomplished towards this goal. It's also absurd how little money the school wants to put out into resources catered for international students - such as a more advanced and far-reaching career platform - something that would be incredible for both domestic and international students. International students bring in the brunt of the money to keep the UCSB campus afloat, it'd be more than fair for the school to reinvest some of this money into resources that are relevant to the international campus community.

Works Cited:

King, Carie S., and Kylar S. Bailey. “Intercultural Communication and US Higher Education: How US Students and Faculty Can Improve.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 82, 2021, pp. 278–287., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.04.007.