In August, UM-Dearborn’s Director of Global Engagement Scott Riggs was named one of three recipients of the U-M President’s Award for Leadership in International Education, which recognizes the extraordinary leadership and efforts of U-M faculty and staff from all three campuses who advance international education for students. Riggs has a list of accomplishments that made him plenty worthy of the honor, the most visible of which is building up the Study Abroad infrastructure at UM-Dearborn. Given his success, it was a bit surprising then that Riggs’ own assessment of his work over the past seven years includes at least as many mentions of things he wishes he’d accomplished as achievements. It doesn’t come across as grumbling, nor false humility. It just seems reflective of a guy who makes plans and aims high. At one point in our conversation, he even declares that study abroad — an area where he’s arguably had the most success — was never intended to be the main dish, almost like an indie musician expressing ambivalence over an unexpected mainstream hit that overshadows the rest of the band’s canon. Which is not to say that Riggs doesn’t love and value study abroad, because he does. It’s just that he wants people to see that global and intercultural education could be so much more than the obvious.
Riggs, who worked for nearly two decades in English language programs at UM-Dearborn and elsewhere before moving to his current role, is the only person to have ever held the position of director of global engagement at UM-Dearborn. He says the title was created in 2018 when the campus was attempting to add some formal support for global education, which had been more ad hoc and depended on the passions and sweat equity of individual faculty. To some extent, Riggs, whose office consists of him and just one other employee who spends half their time supporting Global Engagement, thinks that’s still an apt description of how things work. But when he took the job, he saw an opening to build out “this vague, ambiguous thing we were calling global learning” into something that was threaded through the university experience in all kinds of creative and meaningful ways. His preference for an expansive view of global education, one with “breadth and depth” that resisted being reduced to study abroad, was rooted in accessibility. “From the get go, our Global Learning Advisory Council was very clear that ‘global’ for our campus should never be synonymous with ‘international,’ because that was going to make the experience inaccessible to most of our community,” Riggs explains. “Many of our students have a lot of hesitancy and nervousness about traveling. And with so many having work or family commitments outside of their studies, they just don’t have the time or resources to do something like study abroad.”
Instead, Riggs envisioned making global education accessible by rooting it in various parts of the university’s curriculum and everyday classroom experiences that students were already having. For example, the big unrealized part of his original vision, which he still hasn’t given up on, revolved around creating degree paths, consisting largely of curated collections of existing courses, that were tied to global challenges instead of disciplines. “Imagine, for example, a degree in community impact toward climate change or fighting poverty,” he says. “I just thought that would resonate with some students more than degrees that were strictly discipline focused — especially with undergraduates, where one of the goals is to build their critical thinking skills. Disciplines are very important. But they may not always speak directly to what students want to do in life.”
Riggs is still working on that larger vision, and notes that others have taken up the cause and worked this ethos into other aspects of the university experience. (More on this below.) By far, though, the loudest success of Riggs' tenure has been the development of study abroad, which, pre-pandemic, had grown to reach about a hundred undergraduate students a year. Riggs says the program now supports three main kinds of experiences. One is a traditional offering where a student has a semester-long stay at another university with whom UM-Dearborn has an agreement. A second option allows students to leverage their federal financial aid packages to pay for study abroad trips organized by private companies. The third model is a shorter study abroad trip that is led by UM-Dearborn faculty, often during the summer. The overwhelming majority of students choose the third option. Riggs says when much of your audience is young people who have likely never traveled internationally — or maybe have never been on an airplane or outside of Michigan — a two-week trip led by an English-speaking faculty member from your own university sounds a lot less intimidating. For most, the other options are “a bit of a stretch.”
These faculty-led experiences don’t follow a recipe. College of Business Lecturer Diana Smrt annually leads a multi-week summer program at the University of Padua, where she teaches a class, and UM-Dearborn students get to take courses alongside Italian students with Smrt and her Italian faculty counterpart. Geology Professor Jacob Napieralski’s Geology Field Methods course has been a vehicle for hundreds of students to do hands-on field work in countries across Europe and the Caribbean, including a 2022 trip to Iceland where students studied volcanic craters. Interim Chancellor and French Studies Professor Gabriella Scarlatta, one of campus’ biggest champions of study abroad, has led multiple trips to France, where Riggs says “the bus is basically the classroom,” and students learn from a whirlwind experience of important cultural sites. In 2026, Associate Professor of Sociology Carmel Price and Professor of Public Health Natalie Samspon will be teaching a summer Bicycling Urbanism course, organized around experiences of contrasting approaches to bicycling infrastructure in Detroit and Scandinavian countries.
Riggs notes that the strength of this model is also its shortcoming: As in the old days, the driving force is the enthusiasm and hard work of individual faculty, who basically are the bottom liners for planning a trip. “Doing it this way makes it easy on students, which is why we lean pretty heavily in that direction,” Riggs says. “'I'd like to see faculty get greater recognition for this work. The amount of effort that goes into it is pretty staggering.” (Riggs would know. He organized an 11-credit experience in Poland, while also serving as director.) Sometimes, he says faculty will plan entire trips, only to have them canceled due to lack of enrollment. This has been a particular challenge post-COVID, where participation in study abroad is now half of its pre-pandemic peak, something Riggs is still trying to figure out but attributes, in part, to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza reinforcing students’ jitters about international travel. Moreover, programs that live or die on the effort of individuals aren’t really sustainable. Riggs can name more than one amazing study abroad experience that no longer exists because a faculty member moved on to other endeavors.
Riggs is always looking for ways to improve the process and credits the helpfulness of others across campus as being vital to the enterprise. Beyond the effort of individual faculty, he notes Scarlatta’s support as provost (and now interim chancellor), and fundraising support that’s created a robust need-based study abroad scholarship program for students, as two important difference makers. “I’ll call up staff in financial aid and be, like, ‘Can you help me with this?’ And everyone is always a ‘yes.’ That’s how you get things done as an office of 1.5,” Riggs says. “I think that’s one of the really amazing things about Dearborn that we take for granted is the amount of access to upper-level administration. I mean, I’ll be talking to my colleagues at other universities about something, and I’ll say, ‘Sure, let me just talk to our chancellor or provost about that.’ And they’re, like, ‘What do you mean?’ That’s just not the way it works in other places.”
As much as study abroad has sort of become the main dish, Riggs is still pushing for pieces of that original “breadth and depth” vision. One of the ideas he's enthusiastic about, and which is already happening, is virtual exchange. This is where UM-Dearborn students and students at a university in another country collaborate on a class project usually lasting a couple weeks. For example, in one of Professor of Earth and Environment Ulrich Camp’s courses, UM-Dearborn students and students at a university in Guadalajara, Mexico collected trash and compared notes about what that waste revealed about their respective cultures and economies. Spanish Professor Sofia Calzada-Orihuela threw her students the challenge of creating Latin American folk tales with their partners in El Salvador. Riggs says building out virtual exchange across the university could have some obvious payoffs: Even in a great year, study abroad reaches less than 2% of undergraduates at UM-Dearborn. By embedding virtual exchange projects into more classes that students are already taking, thousands more could have an intercultural experience that pushes them out of their comfort zones.
In fact, Riggs says you don’t have to cross even virtual international borders for students to have rich intercultural experiences. He points to the work of faculty like Education Professor Chris Burke, who has a long history of community-based course projects that take students into Latino-majority schools in Southwest Detroit, and Price and Sampson, whose community-based activities have footprints in Southwest Detroit and Dearborn’s Arab and Arab American communities, as examples where students are getting valuable intercultural experiences without ever leaving the area. Riggs says he’s currently polling faculty with similar inclinations about what it would take to scale this approach. Not surprisingly, the feedback is that more resources would help, but it’s mostly on the micro scale. “We’re hearing that a $250 supply budget could get a project off the ground,” Riggs says. “Or transportation is a really big deal. It sounds simple, but if we had a van that faculty could check out, they could be approved to drive students, and then the main cost would be insurance. Or what if you could ‘check out’ an admin from another office for a few hours, because that person already knows how to order from Picasso or use the procurement system? Those are the kinds of things that don’t take a lot of money, but they could really move the needle.”
Riggs says he now sees his office evolving into a sort of incubator of these kinds of experiences. As with study abroad, faculty will still have to lead the charge, but having a clearinghouse for resources and models could make it much easier for them to do so. And as much as he still carries some disappointment over not yet achieving some flashier pieces of his original vision, he finds himself increasingly moved by a different measure of success. “Over the years, I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the impact we’re having on the individual level,” he says. “Because where I’m seeing students’ lives actually being transformed is typically on the one-to-one scale, not because of some massive program launch we did. So, yeah, I’d still love to see things happening at a bigger scale, but when you add it all up, there are a significant number of students who are having their lives changed by this.”
Even after working in global education for more than two decades, Riggs is still visibly moved when recounting stories about the impact even relatively short experiences have. It’s not always what you’d expect, and Riggs notes, most often, the takeaways aren’t anything explicitly intercultural. With regard to study abroad, Riggs says it’s “almost comical” how students are continually blown away by the efficiency of public transportation in other countries. And facing their fears of international travel almost always leads to a surge in confidence that ripples through other parts of their lives. “The thing I’ve probably heard the most from the students who went with us to Poland was how great it felt to be an ‘actual’ college student,” Riggs says. “Like, it means so much to them to have a moment where they’re only taking classes and don’t have any other work or family or life responsibilities. They feel kind of seen as a college student for a moment — like, they can check that off their list. Of course they are actual college students. But this matches some image of what they think the experience should be. It’s very powerful to them.”
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Story by Lou Blouin
