For the past several years I have taught various courses in the areas of marketing and management at IU. Having interacted with students, colleagues and staff for such an extended period of time should allow me to compare this university with institutions of higher learning that operate under the Austrian system of education.
IU differentiates itself from Austrian universities in the following ways:
• International student body The students currently enrolled at IU come from over 3O nations. While there are also many foreign students at some of the larger Austrian universities, in Austrian schools they account for only a small proportion of the total student body. At IU, however, no one nation is dominant. This international orientation is also reflected in the curriculum and it challenges our students (and instructors!) on a daily basis.
• Personalized instruction At IU, there are no more than 15 to 20 students in most classes. This holds true even for introductory courses like Principles of Marketing or Introduction to Business. In similar courses held at the Vienna University of Economics, a professor is flooded with up to 300 students. Personal contact between the student and the instructor, like an informal meeting during class break or a chat in the hallway, appears to be one of the most important factors for student motivation. A recent customer survey conducted by students in my Marketing Research class among our student population identified the friendly atmosphere at IU as one of the things our students like best about the school.
• Teaching and learning in English Apart from the foreign language courses, all classes at IU are held exclusively in English. Obviously, it is beneficial for our highly mobile and flexible students to be fluent in the lingua franca of the world economy. There is, however, a second benefit that is often overlooked. Most of the research in fields like marketing, management and information technology is conducted in the English-speaking world or appears in international journals published in English. Because of this, new research results are often found in English-language textbooks years before they find their way into German language textbooks geared toward the student market.
• Interactive learning Learning at IU not only consists of attending lectures. In all of my classes students are required to write term papers, work both individually and in groups and conduct research projects outside of the classroom. While this form of teaching is challenging for both the students and the instructor, I am convinced that it better prepares students for their careers than memorizing textbooks, a form of "instruction" that can still be found in many business courses at Austrian universities.
Dr. Richard F. Selcer about IU
Dr. Richard F. Selcer (History professor at IU)
There is no better subject of study for understanding how the world works than History -- and no better place to study History than Vienna. This is not just because of all the cultural monuments and exciting past, but because the city is a crossroads where the nations of the world come together. The students of IU reflect this cosmopolitanism. Where else can you have students in the same classroom at the same time from five different continents? The classroom thus becomes a living laboratory for discussing "International Relations," or the values of western civilization, or countless other "historical" subjects. History should teach empathy and understanding of other cultures, and this is a part of our daily curriculum in IU classes.
It can also be an eye-opening experience for the professor. I will never forget the time a student from the Ukraine challenged my comfortable concepts of so-called "Western Civilization" by asking why we only talked about Western Europe, hardly ever about Eastern Europe. Wasn't Eastern Europe also a part of "Western Civilization"? I suddenly realized, as everyone else did in the class, that there is built-in bias in the traditional teaching of Western Civilization toward the nations and events of Western Europe -- to the virtual exclusion of everything east of the Danube and the Elbe. Both students and teacher grew on that occasion, and it would never have happened anywhere else. Similarly, the broad-based curriculum at IU breaks down much of the provincialism of students from distant corners of the world who often grow up learning only an "official" version of history. At IU students from Arab countries can learn "Church History", students from Malaysia and Hong Kong can learn "British Empire"; students from the Balkan countries can learn about "Europe in the 20th Century." And they learn about these things all without any political agenda.
I have been at IU since 1985, and during that time I have seen both the numbers and quality of our students increase dramatically. There is a direct correlation between these two developments: As we have done a better and better job at teaching and placing our students on their chosen career paths, the word has gotten around, and other students have sought us out to get the same benefits for themselves. They consider their time and money wisely invested, and for us it is a case of supply and demand in the marketplace of ideas. Vienna is good for IU and IU in turn, is good for Vienna! IU fits in perfectly with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this great city -- a city where Arab oil chieftains feel free to send their children to a Christian University to be taught by American professors.
Most of our students come to learn math and business and other skills they see as essential to making it in the modern world, but in their History classes (among others) they expand and re-evaluate their comfortable views of the world so that when they leave, they can not just make money but make it a better world. As for the caliber of our students, the overwhelming majority are bright and hard-working. They would have to be. The unmotivated ones stay back home where they are not bombarded by new ideas and strange cultures. It takes a special kind of student -- the best kind -- to travel abroad for an education, seek out IU in a strange city, and study in a foreign language. This kind of students is tomorrow's best hope.
Taking roll and scanning the faces in my class at the beginning of a semester is like standing in front of a mini-United Nations. In a class of 10 or 15, 1 see 8 or 9 countries represented, all brought together by their knowledge of the English language and by their desire to learn. There are precious few places in the world where one can get this kind of experience. IU has come a long way in the last 15 or 20 years. With the blessings of God and the indulgence of the Austrian Government, it can continue the work of "preparing students from around the world to serve in the world" for many years to come.
Dr. Peter Havlicek about IU
Dr. Peter Havlicek (International Studies professor at IU)
Our program of International Studies started in its present form in 1995 and has since developed very successfully, currently offering almost 20 different courses. Political Science, Government, International Studies -- all of these stand for one thing: the study of politics. Politics is generally perceived as being devoid of morality or ethics and the study of politics is pursued in a very pragmatic manner. Why then study such disciplines at a Christian university?
What can an institution such as IU do differently from others or what can it offer to an international body of students that many other schools cannot?
The truth is that political science (just like all social sciences) is not a precise science, not in the sense of natural sciences. Take five experts in Russian politics and you will probably get at least two different predictions as to the future of Russia. Social sciences are very susceptible to personal opinion or philosophy, and issues can often be interpreted in several ways--as long as this "slant" is arrived at or rationalized along acceptable lines of scientific inquiry.
This characteristic of social sciences, which is generally perceived as their weakness, gives the IU program the opportunity to imbue its International Studies program with a characteristic of its own-one which allows us to approach the subject with perhaps a bit less cynicism, and a view which is a bit more opposed to giving "equal hearing" or "equal value" to all political systems, as many schools seem to do nowadays.
The "valueless" approach is not acceptable to us. We, too, demand of our students objective political analysis, but we maintain that there is good and evil in this world. Political systems are equally as good or bad. Democratic regimes do commit their share of mistakes, but they are better in enabling humans to live in freedom and dignity. As God has offered the human race the grandiose framework (life, earth) and freedom to shape our lives, making the rest dependent on our own actions and what we make of this generous offer, so does democracy provide only a generous framework. It is our task to prepare the next generation for this "political world," to make sure that they can recognize the "evil" as well as the "good" in politics. They must learn that politics does not always have a "dirty game for men to get rich" as one of my students characterized politics at the beginning of one of my recent courses. Our students are reminded daily through their ongoing intimate contact with religious ideas and their Bible studies--and thereby moral and ethical training--that these are very important aspects of our personal lives, as well as in the world at large, including that "cynical" world of politics. This gives us an edge which is hard to beat.
In short, IU's international studies program is different -- and this difference is something we can be proud of.
Dr. Guy Woodall about IU
Dr. Guy Woodall (English Literature professor at IU)
The disciple of literature at IU is at the core of a learning program designed to educate the Whole person. A University is a community of teachers and students engaged in the study of ideas. Philosophically speaking ideas can fairly well be classified as those dealing with aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. Aesthetics treats ideas related to the question of what is beautiful; ethics deals with the questions of morality, a study of what is night and what is wrong; and metaphysics concerns itself with what is real and what is unreal. Literature then, as it is studied at international University, is taught with a view of helping students to see, understand, and appreciate the main currents of aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics in the masterpieces of Western literature. All branches of philosophy are important, none is esteemed as unimportant, but ethics is the one that is most emphasized in literature classes (as well as others) at International University. In the present troubled world, answers to the philosophical questions of what is beautiful and what is real are of very great importance, but the paramount question to be asked and answered is what is ethical. It more than any other governs the relationship of human beings and the Higher Being that they serve.
Literature can generally be classified as either "belletristic" or "general." Belletristic literature is that which was primarily written to please or entertain: "general" is that created to convey useful facts or information. Speaking on the types of literature, Thomas De Quincy; the British essayist, once said: There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
At International University the literature of knowledge is often, for example, anthologized in the forms of homilies, moral debates, travel literature, journals, diaries, and historical essays. Such genres are taught in literature courses, as well as some others; however, the preponderance of literature taught at International University is the literature of Power or belletristic literature in the genres of poetry, drama, novels, short-stories, and familiar essays. The literature of Knowledge and the literature of Power are not always mutually exclusive. Entertaining and pleasing pieces of literature are often didactic. One has but to consider, for example, the masterpieces of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne or Wait Whitman to know that the genius of great literature is that 'it entertains and Instructs morally and socially. A great desire at International University is that students read and enjoy the masterpieces of literature, and while doing so assimilate truths about beauty, ethics, and reality in life. A further desideratum is that they will want to perpetuate and share these truths. A.W. Schlegel made no small case for the importance of the study of literature when he asserted that "Literature is immortality in speech." Indeed ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic ideas cannot survive without literature.
