A group of twelve university administrators, faculty members and education officials from around the world visited Tufts yesterday to learn about American college life as part of a
The group represented a diverse range of nations, including Angola, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as the West Bank. Its stop in Boston marks the last leg of a three-week, cross-country tour of American universities.
WorldBoston, a nonprofit organization that facilitates international professional exchange and cultural education, arranged the group's local itinerary. The organization offers several-week-long tours designed to expose young professionals to the American sector of their respective field of work.
At Tufts, the group addressed the theme "Best Practices and Challenges in Enhancing the Student Experience." It examined student resources, the quality of campus life and the role of student government.
The visitors began their day with a tour of Ginn Library led by Ginn's director of library services and information technology, Jeff Kosokoff.
"It's very different than how our libraries back home are," Hanan Bennoudi, a professor of English at Ibn Zohr University in Morocco, said after the tour. "It's very modern, very well-equipped."
Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate President Brandon Rattiner spoke to the group about the role and operations of student government at Tufts.
"The thing that they were certainly most surprised about was how independent we are financially," said Rattiner, a senior.
The student body's ability to organize autonomously and the Senate's financial independence impressed the visitors, Rattiner added.
Daily Editor-in-Chief Giovanni Russonello, a senior, met with the group in the afternoon to discuss the role of student media at Tufts. Topics of discussion included the Daily's approach to funding, distribution and circulation.
Russonello and the visitors also discussed administrative censorship at universities; the status of Tufts publications stood in stark contrast to those at their universities.
Tatyana Ivanovna Dzhakhanova, the chief of the section of international affairs at Kalmyk State University in Russia, said during the talk that her school's administration must pre-approve all publications.
"The president of our university or the vice president reads everything before it is published," she said. "If he doesn't like it, nobody will see it."
Ragnhild Skaalid, the senior adviser in the Department of Higher Education at the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, offered a different perspective, saying that Norwegian universities give their students a lot of freedom in publication.
"I don't think any institution would dare interfering with what the students will say in their newspapers," Skaalid said during the discussion. "We try to teach our students to have critical thinking, so of course they should have their own newspapers and not be influenced by an institution."
In the afternoon, the group spoke with Dean of Student Services Paul Stanton and Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser. These meetings addressed the general topics of student resources and campus life.
"The point is that they can take away some ideas to implement back home," Ilya Lozovsky (LA '06), WorldBoston's international visitors program coordinator, told the Daily.
"We just want the visitors to come and hear what resources Tufts has, to see what a typical American university looks like in terms of student life, and to ask whatever questions they have," Lozovsky said.
The State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) sponsored the trip. American embassies located in foreign countries select professionals to participate in IVLP programs; the State Department then organizes their overall schedule depending on their field of expertise.
Embassies choose individuals who are experts in their field and show signs of a promising career, Lozovsky said.
"What they're looking for is a person who's expected to have a successful career and who'll be a good person to introduce to the United States in this intimate way," he said.
The group first met in Washington on Oct. 2, after which members traveled to San Francisco, where they visited the University of California, Berkeley; the University of San Francisco; and Stanford University.
"In San Francisco, it was a multicultural environment," Bennoudi said. "We met people from different fields, and we had the chance to exchange views about culture and religion."
The group then split into three parts to travel to separate universities, namely Mississippi's Jackson State University, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Alabama State University.
The group will also study universities' approaches to community and government relations at Boston University and Harvard University today, according to Lozovsky.
Following the conclusion of the tour tomorrow, the visitors will return to their respective home countries.
Dzhakhanova said the amount of student involvement at American universities had impressed her.
"What I liked most in the United States is that people are so creative," she said. "In Russia, most people need to work most of the time, they don't have time to do some extra volunteer [work]."
WorldBoston hopes to provide the educators with an authentic view of American education, according to Lozovsky.
"Our point is not to push any kind of agenda or have any preconceived ideas of what they should take away, just that they have a true to life experience," he said.
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Ben Gittleson contributed reporting to this article.
