Our students need the exposure to non-Western religions and politics. They need to see a different way of life and culture, he says. Holy Cross currently offers study abroad opportunities in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Russia, Peru, Japan, China, Sri Lanka and Cameroon. Vellaccio insisted on a more innovative, intellectually and socially challenging engagement with foreign cultures. In the typical Holy Cross program, students are fully integrated into the host institution, taking regular courses and eschewing American Studies Institutes.
Students live with host families, immersed in local language worlds.
According to Rodgers, in U.S. academia, funding for major Southeast Asian initiatives is rare. She explains that small institutions vie for support with major universities whose area studies centers are federally funded. Happily for Holy Cross, two years ago, dancer, actor and director Lynn Kremer, chair of the theatre department, composer Shirish Korde, chair of the music department, and Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., president emeritus and professor in the humanities, wrote a major grant proposal to the Henry R. Luce Foundation to support a new Holy Cross professorship in the Indonesian arts, targeted for Balinese dance-drama and gamelan instruction. The new Luce professorship was funded, making Holy Cross one of just 12 liberal arts colleges to receive these new Asian Studies positions. Receiving this grant is quite a feather in Holy Cross cap, says Rodgers, herself the recipient of a 2000-2001 National Endowment for the Humanities faculty fellowship for research on Sumatran chanted epics in political context.