Higher education
Text by Rachel Pritchett Photos by Charles Bergman
C
harles Bergman and his students huddled for study in a corner of their vessel’s cabin in Drake
Passage, near Antarctica. Outside an albatross glided majestically among still iceberg mountains. The group read from Samuel Tay- lor Coleridge’s 1798 poem: “God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus! ‘Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.’ ” Just as in “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” the world contin- ues to slay the albatross as it fishes for Chilean sea bass with ensnaring longlines, Bergman explained to Pacific Lutheran University students during this J-term (January 2012) study-away class. The horrified stu- dents had no idea.
“Those are the transformative moments, especially when they are connected with carefully chosen readings,” he said. “It’s no real acci- dent; you’ve got to set them up.” When the longtime PLU Eng- lish instructor first took a group to the Antarctic in 2006, the ELCA- affiliated school in Tacoma, Wash., earned the distinction of being the only one with study-away students on seven continents simultaneously. PLU has ranked consistently among the nation’s top 10 master’s degree universities in the U.S. for including study-away opportunities. Forty percent of its students study away—about 500 in 2012-13—com- pared with 3 percent nationally. It is the recipient of the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Inter- nationalization, which honors out- standing efforts to engage the world and the international community,
Pritchett is the communicator for the Southwestern Washington Synod and a newspaper reporter in Bremerton, Wash.
36 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
‘Best hope
in not blowing up the world’ PLU prepares students to be competent world citizens
Students Alexis Ballinger (right) and Myles Getman from Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Wash., help biologist Andrea Raya Rey (left) measure Magellanic penguin chicks on Isla Martillo, Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina (the southernmost point in South America).
both on and off campus. PLU’s students and faculty, through its Wang Center for Global Education, have become global citizens, “humbled in the face of the much bigger world,” Bergman said. But PLU, if it is to stay at the top, must meet new challenges. Competing universities are ramping up their global-studies programs. Study-away continues to appeal more to female students than males. And then there are those who miss the immersion experience altogether because they can’t afford it. A global focus at this small uni- versity was always in its Lutheran
DNA. Wang Center founder Peter Wang came from Taiwan and graduated from PLU in 1960. “I was overwhelmed by the Lutheran church and how those young people behaved,” he said. “They were very nice to me.”
Roots of global education Early global efforts at PLU were modest, maybe a trip to nearby English-styled Victoria in British Columbia.
Lutheran churches helped support the university as it slowly expanded its global presence. In the 1980s, PLU was able to bring eight students
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