Vision and Mission

Our mission

To foster enlightened global engagement to advance the public good.

In plainer words: we prepare people to work across borders and to do it thoughtfully. We do that at a public university in Indiana, for anyone who can get here, and we think that matters as much as the work itself.

Our vision

By 2030, to be the leading hub for global and international studies in the Midwest and one of the top schools of its kind in the country.

We want to be the place scholars, students and practitioners come from anywhere to engage, learn and serve, and where everyone who walks through the door knows they are welcome, valued and respected.

Our strategy

Three distinctive strengths, and a plan to build on each of them. The strategy aligns with IU 2030, the university’s own, and it comes down to doing the things we already do better than most, and doing them better still.

Integrating international affairs and area studies

Almost everywhere else, policy expertise sits in one place and language and area studies in another. Our aim is to be the school that fuses them, and in doing so to show how a global issue actually lands on real people in real places.

That means hiring faculty who work a global theme inside a specific region, and building collaborative research across both. It means an annual Global and Area Perspectives conference and thematic event series each semester. And it means courses that connect the two, so that every student leaves with real depth in one country or region, usually including time spent in it.

Building academic and professional skills

A degree should come with the ability to use it. We want graduates who can analyze a complicated problem and then go and do something about it.

So we are adding short courses, micro-credentials and experiential courses, bringing practitioners in to teach alongside the faculty, and growing programs with real professional pull, such as the joint Master of International Affairs with the O’Neill School. We mean to lead the Midwest in simulations and debate, to keep building the Washington program and others like it, and to see every student who wants an internship get one, with our students among the country’s top recipients of Boren, Fulbright and FLAS awards.

Fostering civil discourse and public service

This is the part we take directly from Hamilton and Lugar: exchange across partisan lines and across national and cultural ones, with listening treated as seriously as being heard.

Inside the school that means events, community conversations and workshops on the subjects people usually avoid. In Indiana it means putting our language and policy expertise to work for the national guard, schools, businesses, local government and migrant communities. Beyond the state it means faculty in the press, policy briefs, expert testimony, and advice to the organizations that need it.

Paying for it

None of this is free. We pursue federal grants from the Departments of Education, State and Defense, which fund the language and area studies work and mark Indiana University as a national hub for it. We seek larger agency and foundation grants for faculty-led research across disciplines. Above all we ask individuals and institutions in Indiana, across the country and abroad to back our students and our programs.

If you would like to support this work, please write to us, at hlsdev@iu.edu.