The Institute of International Education just released the results of its annual survey on study abroad participation, and the findings show that for the 2007-08 school year Georgetown had the 8th highest percentage of undergraduate students studying abroad.

Out of a graduating class of 1,730 students, 989— or 57.2 percent—had gone abroad last year.  That’s an increase over the 2006-07 percentage of students studying abroad, 52.3 percent.  The 2006-07 seems to have been a bit of an anomaly, though: in 2005-07, the rate was 55 percent, in 2004-05 it was 58.7 percent, and in 2003-04 it was 58.9 percent.

Other D.C. schools also had high rates of study abroad participation.  American University had the 7th highest percentage nationwide, with 59.5 percent of its students studying abroad.  George Washington University came in 18th with 45.9 percent studying abroad.

Overall, 262,416 American students studied abroad during the 2007-08 school year, an increase of 8.5 percent from the previous year.

The survey also looks at the most popular study abroad destinations.  The top five destination countries were the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France and China.  While the majority of students (56.3 percent) went to Europe, there were slight gains in the percentage of students going to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The regional trends nation-wide are largely in line with what Vox found when it looked at the top study abroad destinations for Georgetown students, except for the Middle East.  While only 1.3 percent of all students who went abroad in 2007-08 chose to go to the Middle East, at Georgetown, 5.5 percent of students who went abroad during the 2008-09 school year studied in the Middle East.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a Jerusalem Post piece that attacked two Georgetown centers, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, and championed the Program for Jewish Civilization as an antidote to those two.

Since my initial post, a few more of the relevant faculty members have chimed in with their responses, with professors on both sides saying that the article was ill-informed about what actually goes on here on campus. Listen to what CMCU Director John Esposito and PJC Director Jacques Berlinerblau have to say, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The fighting in Gaza may have cooled for now, but the Arab-Israeli conflict seems to have set its sights on Georgetown.

Amir Romirowsky of the Jerusalem Post published an article earlier this week lauding Georgetown’s Program for Jewish Civilization and lambasting the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) and the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU), alleging that the Centers have a pro-Arab bias.

CMCU Associate Director John Voll called the article “basically ill-informed” and took issue with its characterization of his Center as “the locus of academic apologetics for Wahhabism in America”:

“I have seen the article and am glad to see that the Program for Jewish Studies gets a positive description. However,the author clearly has not bothered to read anything that the people on the faculty of the Alwaleed Center have written. For example, I would find it difficult to describe what I have written on Sufism (the mystical tradition in Islam which is opposed by strict Wahhabi teachers) as presenting ‘a glossy version of Wahhabi Islam.’”

Read the rest of this entry »