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Mission Statement:

The President’s Council on Boston University and the Global Future: www.bu.edu/globalfuture

Boston University aspires to become one of the great international universities of the century. By developing and harnessing our academic, scientific, spiritual, and humanistic resources, we will enable the university community to meet the challenges of the 21st century and contribute to the realization of a just and peaceful world. To reach this goal we will champion bold new approaches to teaching our students, while seeking and applying new knowledge, and building sustainable partnerships around the globe that will benefit humanity.

University Identity:

The fourth largest private university in the United States, Boston University is located in a major city at the crossroads of many cultures. The early nineteenth century origins of Boston University as a radically egalitarian Methodist institution propelled the university to be the first to accept women in all of its degree programs, including medicine, theology, the humanities, and law. African-Americans and recent immigrants received higher degrees early in the University’s history. In continuity with its early tradition of inclusion and diversity, today Boston University sustains one of the highest numbers of international students among American colleges and universities. Over 30,000 students from every state and 143 countries are enrolled in 17 schools and colleges and more than 250 degree programs. The faculty and students of Boston University address the challenges of global citizenship from many disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, which span the health and life sciences, the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. Our firm commitment to excellence in teaching and in research, and to diversity, social outreach, and activism, makes Boston University a unique environment in which to work toward a better world.

We understand the principal responsibility of a great university is to educate its students to think critically, to understand not only the career opportunities their education provides but also the challenges facing society, and then to act wisely and with integrity and the intent to make a positive contribution to the world. As alumnus Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1968, “This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” Dr. King’s words are even more relevant today. At Boston University, building a “world house” means teaching our students to be “global citizens” literate in complex global issues, doing research and applying it to solve problems, and serving humanity in ways that further the vision of a just and peaceful global community.

Boston University and the World:

Boston University has already grown into a global university with a diverse student population and faculty, an extensive study abroad program, and a network of international connections and partnerships. BU is also engaged in the greater Boston community, taking on civic and social responsibilities beyond its own educational mission. For example, the University’s longstanding partnership with the Chelsea public schools has resulted in the recognition of the Chelsea Public School District as one of just three in Massachusetts in 2004 to meet “No Child Left Behind” standards. The merger between BU’s University Hospital and the Boston City Hospital has created Boston Medical Center, a major academic training center that provides “exceptional care without exception” to its patients, regardless of their ability to pay. Building and expanding on this rich legacy, the University looks forward to the future and its important role in educating the next generation of leaders at home and around the globe.

Our world is now faced with enormous stresses due to globalization, which—together with increasing economic disparities and poverty, political turmoil and abuses of basic human rights, genocides and neglect of the poor and marginalized, social disruption, religious strife, isolation from the creative arts and the humanities, widening gaps in health and access to health care, and ecological degradation—threaten the stability of societies everywhere. To meet these challenges Boston University will teach, conduct innovative research, and serve with a global perspective to ensure that our graduates have the knowledge, skills, and values to contribute to solutions, while our faculty generates the knowledge necessary to advance (universal? Or more equitable?) quality of life and eliminate disparities around the world.

Boston University will foster opportunities for scholars from the U.S. and abroad to come together to teach, learn, study, and serve society. By collaborating across disciplinary boundaries for a greater understanding of the integrated nature of the world, we will seek to solve old as well as new problems in our multicultural world. By building bridges, and thoughtfully moving its global mission into a new phase, Boston University will address the common bonds among people, whether local or far from our shores, and thereby become a force for public good in the 21st century.

Boston’s International University:

Boston University boasts an extensive history of creating and supporting international education programs around the world. To offer a few examples, during the last three decades, the University has offered credit bearing certificate and degree programs in the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Israel, Japan, and China. The University has forged partnerships with foreign universities to offer education locally, and in other cases the University has created independent programs. One such facility, located in Brussels, has been in place for 33 years offering degrees in business administration and international relations. The University’s ability to work independently, but also collaboratively with partner universities and industry, demonstrates the flexibility necessary to establish global education programs serving the local and world communities.

Boston University has further developed its expertise internationally by offering 48 undergraduate academic programs in 20 countries around the world. Eighty percent of these programs also offer internships for students. The global reach of these programs extends to every continent except Antarctica, and is one of the largest international programs offered by any US university.

Internships and Boston University International Programs:

For over 20 years Boston University International Programs has been in no small part defined by its international internship programs. Annually, more than 1,200 students participate in Boston University internship programs around the world. And Boston University, in turn, has defined these in a very specific way:

An international internship program combines coursework in a particular academic area with a professional work experience. These two strategies—classroom, or theoretical, training and professional, or practical, experience—complement each other. Together, they ground students in the reality of daily life in the host culture, and at the same time enable an increased understanding of international professional culture. The internship placement is therefore a component of a larger, integrated academic experience, typically a four-credit course in a sixteen-credit semester.

The internship itself exhibits these characteristics:

It is academically-directed. The internship is a discrete course, supervised by faculty members, and carrying significant academic requirements.
Its grades and academic credit are based on explicit requirements detailed in a course syllabus.
It is imbedded in other coursework completed by the student overseas, either implicitly through its thematic relationship to subjects studied during the semester abroad, or explicitly by means of a seminar or proseminar co-extensive with the internship and whose explicit subject matter is the internship experience.
It is unpaid and for-credit. The internship placement itself cannot otherwise be conceived as part of an academic program.
Whenever possible, its language (both in the work place and in the classroom) is the language of the host culture.

Ultimately, and by its nature, the international internship program seeks to provide students with a certain level of cultural immersion and what is sometimes referred to as intercultural competence. By giving students an opportunity to explore the host culture from the inside out, as it were, we hope to offer them an all too rare opportunity to realistically project their classroom experience into the hard context of their surroundings. In that way our effort to lead them toward greater interaction with the world around them can work from specific, personal, and thoughtful experience.

On the Boston Campus:

With a total of 4,488 international students on campus, Boston University’s international student body ranks among the 10 largest in the United States, and is by far the largest international student presence among New England colleges and universities. These students currently come from 153 countries. The top 10 represented countries are respectively China, Korea, India, Taiwan, Canada, Japan, Turkey, Thailand, Mexico, and Italy. Boston University also proudly hosts more than 1,000 foreign nationals from 91 countries to conduct research, teach, and work in a variety of capacities throughout the institution. Our international scholar population varies from short-term visitors who conduct research on unpaid appointments to permanent, tenure-track professors.

The University’s global reach resides in the quality and number of faculty who work and travel internationally, or whose interests include research on international issues. The large number of academic departments and institutes with international components help illustrate this point. In such a large institution as Boston University, these lists are not comprehensive, but are intended to provide an idea of the almost endless array of programs, resources, and potential that already exists within the Boston University community.

Area Studies Programs:

African Studies Center

East Asia Studies

Latin American Studies

Russian and Eastern European Studies

Academic Departments, Programs, Centers and Institutes:

African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC)

Asia-Pacific Executive MBA (APEMBA)

Bilingual Education

BU Brussels

BU Global

Center for Archeological Studies