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"Eta Rossiya," Mark Bannatyne's students-and some of
his colleagues-kept warning him. "This is Russia." In
other words: That won't work here.
Bannatyne, an associate professor of computer graphics from Purdue
University, forged ahead anyway. At Tula State University, 120
miles south of Moscow, he raised eyebrows by offering
unfamiliar courses like "Technology, Society and Ethics"
and "Engineering Solid Models," and by setting inconceivable
challenges for his students.
In his class on "American Business Practices and Standards,"
his students didn't think he was serious about wanting them to
learn by establishing their own company-with investments of 50
rubles apiece (one-third of their monthly stipends). Then he pulled
500 rubles from his own pocket to start things off. Half still
refused to invest, but the group did elect officers, sell stock,
conduct market research, and identify and create a product (New
Year's "candy bags" for children). Capitalism triumphed
when the candy was sold on campus: The project returned 97 rubles
for every 50 invested.
During his lectureship in the fall of 2000, Bannatyne won over
faculty skeptics with his talks at the prestigious Moscow Aviation
Institute and with co-authoring papers on computer graphics and
engineering for international conferences in Europe. He urged
students in his computer literacy class to apply for an all-expenses-paid
study grant in the United States, and one of them won! "By
the time I left, they [faculty members] accepted me as a colleague,"
he chuckles. He also committed to several return trips to Russia.
He was in Siberia on September 11, 2001, when the United States
was attacked by terrorists; he was greatly moved by Russian expressions
of friendship.
Internationalism is a way of life for the Bannatyne family. He
and his wife, Tatiana, who had been pen pals since college, had
their first face-to-face meeting in Moscow in 1989. "She
was so beautiful," says Bannatyne, who proposed six months
later. Tula happens to be Tatiana's birthplace, so she and their
children-Yuri, 10, Kirill, 6, and Anna, 2-tagged along for the
semester. The two older children attended Russian schools.
Bannatyne's Fulbright was one of the first awarded to Purdue's
School of Technology, bringing recognition to the school and enthusiasm
for "internationalization." Named to head its International
Programs Committee, Bannatyne took five U.S. colleagues on his
next trip to
Tula. He looks forward to many such trips and has been granted
an extension of his Fulbright project for teaching and curriculum
development, which he hopes to resume in 2002.
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