Hundreds of students, alumni and faculty at Missouri Southern State University gathered Friday in response to a decision last summer by administrators to cut spending in part by slashing 40 percent of the international studies budget.
Their message as summed up by alumni Adam Stratton, Jasper, who studied at Oxford University in England as a student at MSSU: "Please, please find a different way to cut spending so that every student can still have a chance to find themselves."
Missouri Southern President Bruce Speck said he got to the meeting in time to hear about half the speakers and he talked after the meeting about what he learned.
"Let me tell you what I didn't learn first," Speck said. "I didn't learn that international travel is transforming. I knew that, I've traveled internationally, my children have traveled internationally, so I was quite aware of that, it is not a new concept to me. It was reinforced, in terms of how that happens to people and how they are transformed, I think that's very important.
"I think one thing I learned, and it's something that we really have to consider, is that if our mission is to make sure that we have broad exposure of the students of this institution to international travel, then we may want to think about how many times a student goes overseas.
One of the things I heard here is that people have gone overseas multiple times and I think we really have to think about if that's a good investment of our money."
A big meeting
Cornell Auditorium in the Plaster Free Enterprise Center was filled and people lined some of the walls for the first few speakers. Hundreds of people filtered in and out during the more-than-90-minute meeting that saw 37 students and alumni and three faculty members speak about the impact the Missouri Southern's international mission and International Studies Program has had on their lives.
MSSU Professor Joy Dworkin, an organizer of the meeting, said the group gathered to tell why the international program was essential to Southern.
"We're here because as you know, Missouri Southern is facing some severe financial strain, and the international studies budget took a very significant cut of about 40 percent," Dworkin said. "There has been an across-the-board departmental cut of 10 percent, so international studies certainly has been affected for this year as far as its funding.
"So some people got together, faculty members and concerned students, and we came up with this idea to demonstrate why you, so many students, benefit from international studies."
Dr. Conrad Gubera, social sciences professor and one of the longest tenured professors at Southern at more than 35 years, spoke about the struggle to establish the international mission, starting in the mid-1980s.
"To me it was wonderful, to me this was what a new university is all about," Gubera said. "Now, mind you, I reflect as much as anyone, localism, parochialism. The only difference, which has always enhanced me, is that I'm the son of immigrants. And I knew a lot about old-world language, old-world folk ways, old world food ways, old-world folklore, old-world folk music and old-world folk stories.
"That has always enhanced me in my life, whether I be a marginal man, as a sociologist refers to an immigrant child, or not. It was a bonus in my life. Now we had a university that would allow you and help you to go to far away places and not just read about them. That's what made it so exciting and so passionate to be here, and I find that students respond to this."
Susan Davis, an alumnus from Joplin, said the international mission is a selling point she could use to encourage her friends to send their children to Missouri Southern.
"I know that as a student myself and as an alumni, I'm of the age where my friends have children that are going to college, and I always tell them that Southern is a great college and their kids have got to get involved in the international mission," Davis said. "So, of course I was disappointed to hear that the funding had been cut. I do think that there are some wonderful opportunities that come out of the international mission that are specific to traveling abroad, including educational opportunities to learn about other countries and cultures, that's my particular interest.
"The other thing is the academic aspects of learning about a foreign country and actually being able to experience and see them first hand. I think that's one of the best ways you can learn something is to actually experience it."
President responds
Speck said the international studies department was cut significantly because it had one of the largest operating budgets on campus. According to budget documents, the international studies department had the fourth largest operating budget among the 30 departments in fiscal year 2008 behind athletics, information systems, and physical plant.
After the cuts this summer, international studies fell behind the school of arts and sciences for the fifth largest operating budget.
He said Missouri Southern is in a budget crisis requiring significant cuts in a number of places.
"We were really in a mode of figuring out how are we going to keep afloat and what are we going to do about it," Speck said. "Clearly when you start looking at international travel, it's very expensive, so we had to make some decisions about that, and those were the decisions we made. I think this meeting was in response to that."
Speck said he has no plans to change Southern's international mission, but in the long-term, he thinks the international studies department needs to take a closer look at which students get to go on international trips and how often they go.
"Certainly a person can have multiple experiences and exponentially grow and those types of things, but it seems to me that in one sense that is not exactly what we're all about here," Speck said. "I think another message that was interesting to me was that there were people who had talked and got up and promoted the international mission who had already traveled internationally before they ever got here. So, if our goal is to help people learn about international travel and they've already done that, then I think we really have to ask, why are we doing it again for certain folks. If you've already been in the military and traveled, why send you out again."
