Student and Faculty Exchanges

Woody Pelton

from 1992 to 2002. Others who have headed the office have been Stephen Kazar (2006 to 2008), Jim Dwyer (2008 to 2010) and Stephanie Sieegreen (2010 to 2014).3

When Pelton arrived, he felt that the best way to provide international experiences for students was to get them to study abroad. “Our students travel better in a pack, rather than individually, and with someone they know,” said Gilbertson. Beginning in winter 1993, several SVSU faculty took students to England for a full semester. But the realization was that most SVSU students could not come up with the financial resources or the time to devote a full semester abroad. The solution was to encourage faculty to create more opportunities that would take students abroad for a couple of weeks rather than two or three months.4

Student and Faculty Exchanges

Another attempt to promote a sense of global community stemmed from the international student and faculty exchange initiatives the university had forged. Many of these partnerships were with Asian institutions. SVSU was lucky to have people with connections there. Michigan Gov. James Blanchard had sent Yien to Japan in 1989 to help establish a Michigan center for study at Hikone, in Shiga Prefecture. Yien also was instrumental in developing SVSU’s oldest exchange relationship—with Shikoku University in Tokushima, Japan.5

SVSU’s oldest exchange relationship is with Shikoku University in Tokushima, Japan. Students from Shikoku first arrived on campus in 1979. This cohort made the trip in August 1990.

The exchange partnership with Shikoku developed from the sister-city arrangement between the city of Saginaw and Tokushima. The first group from Shikoku, which at the time was a university for women, arrived in 1979. In later years, dozens of Japanese students and faculty came to SVSU—more than 80 between 1986 and 1991 and 37 students in that final year alone. The university sent its first students in 1982.6

For the administration at Shikoku University, the exchange offered the same benefits for its students as SVSU hoped to provide for domestic students. Shikoku President Noboru Fukuoka noted that coming to SVSU benefitted Shikoku students by stimulating them to learn English through immersion in American culture. Fukuoka has said Shikoku students, much as those of many places around the world, can be inward looking in terms of their worldview; experiencing other cultures can shatter this provincialism.7

Despite the intention to have the partnership focus on students, the Shikoku-SVSU relationship became primarily a faculty exchange. The Japanese visitors remembered their trips to SVSU fondly. The campus community welcomed them and took them shopping, sightseeing and to parties. Some vividly recall their new friends taking them to see the Upper Peninsula, Mackinac Island, Toronto, Niagara Falls, even New York City. Kazuko Okada enjoyed golfing with her colleagues at SVSU, saying that all were nice and took care of her