Advancing International Studies: Strategic Plan

III. Strategies & Plans: Student, Education, & Research Excellence

One of the great challenges facing international studies, no less than any other area of unit of the University in this strategic plan, is whether to build on strength or broaden our reach in order to ameliorate existing weaknesses. Our strategy addresses this recurring dilemma at different levels. With respect to the undergraduate curriculum, we come down on the side of investing moderate resources in order to correct for our deficiencies. We simply cannot claim to be a great international university and fail to teach our students about vast tracts of the globe. With respect to research excellence, we have a different answer. Here, we feel that a strategy of redressing weaknesses would stretch our resources too thinly, and make no significant impact on our scholarly reputation. Therefore, when forced to choose, we would simply respond that we need to build on research strength.

But a more complete answer would elaborate a strategy that does not merely privilege reproducing that which we already have, but uses our existing strengths as a magnet for fresh talent, and as a platform for strategic investments in faculty, departments, and our research institutes that will extend and consolidate our areas of excellence. One way to think about our research excellence is in terms of geographic strengths - Latin America, Europe, Ireland. The logic of investing in our areas of strength would be to further invest in these areas. But another, intriguing possibility, is to think about building from these strengths along the lines of our greatest thematic strengths - democracy, development, religion, social justice, and peace. Such a strategy would establish and consolidate Notre Dame's reputation as the essential crossroads for the study of these issues of paramount importance for a Catholic university. Equally importantly for this strategic plan, it would permit the investment of resources into departments that have a true chance to achieve excellence. In this way, internationalization as an overarching framework of the University's strategic plan can become an asset to faculty recruitment and vaulting our best departments into the top quartile of their disciplines, not a competing priority.

In this strategy, the role of the international institutes is vital. It is important to take advantage of the ability of institutes to help recruit distinguished faculty and support their research. Institutes have recruited members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, who in turn have helped to recruit superb faculty in other areas in their departments. But this will only be possible if the institutes are in a position to work creatively and harmoniously with departments as they have in recent years, when those institutes with larger endowments have seeded many major appointments to the faculty, with positive consequences for the departments and for international studies at Notre Dame.¹ Our institutes, in short, are not in competition with our departments. Rather, institutes have helped to build the academic reputation of departments, and they should continue to do so.