Stanford history professor Norman Naimark cherishes memories of his time as a student at Stanford in Germany, in the summer and fall of 1964. He remembers talking with ordinary Beutelsbachers about their experiences during the war, and traveling to Berlin not long after the wall had gone up. He keeps a photograph of the hilltop campus on his office wall. At the same time, he completely understands why the program had to change. “The kids today are so much better-traveled than we were,” observes Naimark, '66, MA '68, PhD '72, now director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program.
Spurred by shrinking enrollments during the Vietnam era and a weakening dollar, Stanford began rethinking its expensive European enclaves during the mid-1970s. History professor and overseas studies director Mark Mancall set the course with a Berlin program that allowed some students to live in apartments and take classes at local universities. His successors—law professor Thomas Heller, German studies professor Russell Berman, and earth sciences professor Amos Nur—continued the trend, nudging the Western European programs toward urban centers while opening new study centers in Kyoto, Japan (1989, above), Santiago, Chile (1990), Moscow (1993), Australia (2003) and Beijing (2004).
Naimark would like to see the expansion continue. Buoyed by the program's $25 million endowment from Helen and Peter Bing, '55, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Naimark is working to open a center in Madrid, Spain. He hopes to develop more popular overseas studies seminars—intensive three-week summer programs that take students and faculty to extraordinary places like Mongolia and the Australian outback. Above all, he dearly wants to raise additional funds for a permanent outpost in Cape Town, South Africa. “We really need a place where students can mix it up with problems of the Third World,” he says.
These days, Naimark reports, around 43 percent of Stanford undergraduates participate in overseas study programs and seminars—not quite as many as in the heyday of the 1960s, but still a substantial and growing number. More important, they're clearly focused on intellectual work, not tourism. “Academically the program is much more rigorous than it used to be,” he says with satisfaction. “People work hard overseas—and I expect they play hard. But the four-day weekends are gone.”
Typical of the new overseas studies students is Pato Leung, '06. During her three-month stint at the Kyoto campus in spring 2005, the biological sciences major took courses on Japanese language, religions, economics and immigration issues. She hiked up Mount Koya and spent the night in a monastery, learned to meditate from a Zen monk, and observed a domestic abuse hotline for foreigners married to Japanese men. Then at the end of the quarter she left her Stanford classmates behind and spent three more months in an isolated Kyushu fishing town, doing lab research and working with mercury-poisoning victims at the National Institute for Minamata Disease.
“It was a little tiring, particularly in Kyoto,” she admits. “Intense would be the perfect word for it. I had a huge range of experiences in such a short amount of time.” Today, Leung is a second-year medical student at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx—one of 23,000 Stanford alumni who once called a Stanford overseas studies center home.
