UMBC’s Participation in the ACE Internationalization

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 09:51:51 -0500

Dear UMBC Community,

Since the time of UMBC’s founding, our university community has recognized the benefits of international and global engagement, and the ways in which these activities support and enhance our mission as a research university. Many of our current students, faculty, and staff both facilitate and benefit from strong academic, personal, and professional connections around the world.

In 2018, UMBC was one of only eleven institutions in the nation selected to participate in the American Council on Education's (ACE) Internationalization Laboratory. This cohort-based program provides a guided process for higher education institutions to assess their current state of internationalization and also develop a plan for advancing the intercultural, international, and global dimensions of their mission, focusing in particular on the areas of education, research, and community engagement.

Since fall 2018, UMBC’s Internationalization Steering Committee and six subcommittees have led a campus-wide effort involving a rigorous self-study and wide-ranging conversations with the campus community focused on internationalization at UMBC. Today we are pleased to share with you UMBC’s Interim Report on Internationalization, a document that provides a snapshot of internationalization as it exists at UMBC today and proposes a number of recommendations as we consider the nature and scale of our international activities in the future.

We wish to thank the more than 400 students, faculty, and staff who helped guide the development of this report through active participation in subcommittee meetings, surveys, and/or focus groups. We also would like to thank the nearly 300 people who participated in the 2019 University Retreat and discussed and reviewed the initial findings and recommendations of the subcommittees. For your reference, background materials, including posters and session handouts that were provided to retreat participants, are available online.

As we develop a final report and recommendations in summer 2020, we hope that you will take this opportunity to read the interim report and provide feedback and further points of consideration using this short survey. We recognize that not every activity, partnership, and program of an international nature involving members of our community could be captured by the subcommittees because of the organic nature of many international initiatives. Therefore, we are also asking for your help in identifying in the survey any current missing international elements or activities.

This anonymous survey will be available until February 28, 2020.

President Freeman Hrabowski and Provost Philip Rous