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• Fall 2024

In Their Own Words

Professor Frederick Corney

You were the program director in Vilnius this past summer. Was that your first time in Vilnius?

Yes, it was actually my first time in the Baltics. It's only the second time our program was there. We had to switch it from St. Petersburg because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It's a workable solution for our Russian-language students to be exposed to Russian in a practical setting.

Do you have a wish list? A country you haven't been to that you'd love to visit?

You know, I've directed a number of these programs. Now, I'm probably getting to the point where I’m unsure how many more I will do. But in terms of going to a place that I've never been, there are no places I wouldn’t want to see. I would love to go to Australia, to our Melbourne program. I have family connections in Australia. I'd also love to do the New Zealand program that my colleague Andy Fisher set up a while back.

Do you remember the first W&M program you led?

The first was the Cambridge program in 2005. Then in 2006, I led the St. Petersburg program. I went back to Cambridge in 2007, then Prague in 2008, St. Petersburg in 2010… followed by Cambridge, Prague, St Petersburg, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, St Andrews, and Vilnius… Yikes.

You’ve more than carried your weight with William & Mary programs over the years. Had you ever led a program before you came to W&M?

At my last university, I directed a program in Moscow. I took nine students, and there was almost no institutional support whatsoever for various internal reasons. We had none of the safeguards that we have in place here at William & Mary, thanks to Sylvia [Mitterndorfer]* and her team at Reves. But it was an interesting exercise in getting to know how a program works – or doesn’t work -- when you have no institutional backup. That probably shaped how I approach these programs.

I tend not to overmanage them. Lots of things are going to happen, and I'll manage what I can.

I try to give the students space. They're abroad, some of them for the first time in their lives. They're experiencing life abroad, and I would hope that they don't want me -- an old professor -- in their pocket at every turn. Still, if something urgent happens, I know that back here at W&M I have people like Nick, or Sylvia, or Molly or Susan who have dealt with probably every issue that can come up.* I know I can call them and say, “I need help here.” And I have.

So that takes a big part of the potential stress out of it – knowing you're not going to be stranded.

What about being a program director appeals to you?

You get to know the students in a different way. You get to know them a little bit better than you do in class. You’re in different settings with them. You're on excursions, at dinners, with them. And I probably become a little less formal with them too -- within limits.

Do you design the curriculum for the programs you lead?

Yes, although I do use a template approach to my courses that can be adapted for pretty much any site. I focus on history and memory - my own field of research in relation to Russia – namely, how a state and its people construct usable pasts.

For me, the way in which a country designs and shapes its own cultural memory or its official narrative over time is very interesting, and the students seem to find it very interesting as well.

I often tell the students when we're wandering around the city, “Look up. Keep your eyes open. If you see a statue, take a picture of it, and we'll discuss in class what its significance within the culture is or was.” That is infinitely easier than it used to be with the technology we have now.

You can do a lot of those kinds of things with photographs. And probably half the group will be really taken with this methodology. I'll be snapping pictures with my iPhone, and they’ll send me the photographs they take as well. I have accumulated literally thousands of images and videos in this way from the programs I’ve led.

This methodology works very well for programs that are focused on the history and culture of the particular country, but it also works very well for those that involve local language instruction. It helps unlock the language culturally. It is really adaptable to any country and program focus whatsoever.
For instance, in Vilnius, Lithuania this past summer, we took a closer look at the horrendous Jewish experience in Vilnius during the Second World War. There are quite a few commemorative sites there, although not as many as you might expect, as well as in Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia, for that matter. Plaques, museums, art installations mark the deportation of the Jews from the Baltic republics to the Nazi death camps in the East.

One student on the program wrote her final research paper on these sites. We had a local tour that included many of them, and we visited them ourselves as a class. We examined our photographs and discussed them in class. We asked what it took for that particular statue to be there at a particular time, and what it signified. Especially interesting in Vilnius were several sparely drawn, black-filled outlines of Jewish figures on walls in the Jewish quarter. A commemoration of the loss of East European Jewry. Every time I walked past one of these outlines I'd take a new picture. Sometimes it would be next to a café, and somebody would be sitting right next to it at a table having a cup of coffee. Seemingly oblivious to the fateful image nearby. We also searched for and discussed so-called Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) around the city. About twenty years ago, a German artist began placing brass plaques commemorating Jewish individuals in many cities around Europe. Vilnius has its own examples, and are set in front of houses from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

How do you structure the programs?

These weeks go by very, very fast, and one of the balances I try to get right is not to over manage them.
But I do tend to get excited about things when I'm in a new place like the Baltics. When I get there, I see places that I want to show the students, and I’ll say, “Okay, we're going to go here. We have to go here.” But I always try to build at least one weekend into every program when they can leave and go somewhere on their own or in groups. I didn’t manage this with Vilnius this summer though… Each program has its own dynamic, its own pace and rhythm. Students are in class every day doing languages in some of these programs. They have their day divided up. I try not to encroach too much on that day.

What do you think are the qualities of an effective program director?

I think you've got to be pretty calm, pretty even-tempered. I don't engage in doom scenarios in our orientations before we go. It is an easy — and very human — thing to do. If you want to sit around driving yourself crazy about the potential things that could go wrong, you won't enjoy it at all. Instead, you strategize for the potential problems, and set up safeguards and scenarios through Reves, and then you will know what to do if something does go south.

I think it’s essential to convey that sense of calm and flexibility to the students. I try to convey, “I'm organizing this. Everything's going to be fine, and if it's not, we'll work on our feet and do something else.”

The expectations I set out in the one credit course at WM in the spring** are very important. I think good behaviors abroad can be modeled in that course to a certain extent.

Every now and then a colleague will reach out to me for advice on how to put together a new program.
And the first question I ask is, “Is this sustainable without you? Because you might have to be doing this every year for it to survive. If not, you have to think of how to get more individuals involved in its management. And the other question I ask is, “Can you get enough students?” Some of the places that you would think would absolutely have enough students might not.

You studied abroad as a student.

Yes. I was an undergraduate in the north of England, in a really unusual university program. It was a 4-year translating and interpreting program. We did booth-interpreting, and lots of translation into and out of the target languages. Mine were German and Russian at that university. As part of that program, we were required to spend a year abroad.

So, I spent six months in Munich, working at a company as an intern translator. Then I spent six months learning Russian in a Center of Russian Studies near Paris, full of Russia émigrés and exiles.
And we're going back now 40 – almost 50 -- years. It was a different time. I was in Munich and Paris on my own entirely. Little contact with family back in England. No social media (I still don’t…), and of course no cell phones. There was one visit a semester from a professor from our university. That was all.

Where did you live? In dormitories?

When I arrived at the train station in Munich, I saw a board where they posted available rooms. And that’s how I got a room. And then in France we lived in a kind of chateau run by the Russian priests, which was a real experience.

I still remember that year abroad very well, and am still in touch with old friends from that group. It was a life-changing year abroad, and I think these shorter programs have the same impact for some students, especially if it's their first time out of Virginia, or heaven forbid, of the United States.

I've heard this before – that study abroad is life changing. It can mean different things. Can you describe what to you was life-changing? Did it change your vision of yourself? Increase your confidence?

Oh, confidence. Yes. Completely.

I'd learned German in high school, and I'd had a year and a half of German at university. But when I got to Munich, it was the first time that I really felt that my German was being challenged and I could feel it improving exponentially. I was working every day from 7:30 to 4:30 in a German office with Germans, speaking only German and trying to struggle through the first couple of months speaking bad German, it should be said.

And, more importantly, for the first time in my life I was left to my own devices.

I was on my own. No money coming in. My parents had no extra money available, so I just had my grant, my stipend from my university.

To make a bit of extra money, I gave English lessons in this small town outside of Paris. That allowed me to feed my life-long love of French cafes.

In Germany, I had a small salary, and a nightlife of all things! And then in Paris, I was with a group of students from my university, so that was a little community that we had. But I got to know some French people. I actually spoke quite a bit of French while I was there, maybe more than Russian. I got to know Paris really well, and I fell in love with the city. I go back as often as I can.

So, all this stuff I did on my own, and I think I came back a quite different person, much more confident. And both languages improved a lot.

Maybe more sophisticated? You're a 19-year-old from England. And all of a sudden, you're thrown into this new world. So, sophistication may not be the right word, but maybe worldliness?

I’d never use ‘sophisticated’ in relation to me, but maybe an openness, a curiosity.

We were complete rubes. Where I grew up near Portsmouth, in the south of England, very few people went to university. Suddenly, I'm walking around Paris, making friends there, and spending a lot of time with people who didn’t look or talk like the people I grew up with. I realized I liked being out of my element. I like being in different countries where nobody knows me.

So maybe a bit of worldliness is the right word. It’s the idea that there's a bigger world than the one in which you grew up.

What was your career path after your experience abroad? How did it impact your next steps?

Well, I worked as a translator after university for a couple of years in Sheffield, and then at a pharmaceutical company in Frankfurt, Germany for about five years in the '80s.

I’d held on to this vague idea about going back and doing something more with Russian, maybe with Russian history. I had the four-year degree in German and Russian and had come out with reasonably good German and Russian, which still needed work – as languages always do. But I'd always had this idea of going back to get a PhD in Russian. And as the eighties took shape, especially with Gorbachev coming into power, Russia was getting to be a really interesting place to study. So, I applied to do a PhD in Russian History at Columbia University or a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale.
Yale rejected me, Columbia accepted me. I'd already been to New York in 1979 and had fallen in love with the city. And I went there thinking I’ll give it a year. I had a year's funding, and if I washed out after a year, I thought, I’d go do something else. It would at least give me a chance to look around the world a bit more (I got that taste in Munich and Paris). But then I ended up really enjoying it and to my utter surprise I completed my PhD at Columbia in 1997.

Where does your heart lie professionally? Do you consider yourself a historian, translator, linguist?

I tell this to the students who are 19- and 20-year-olds, worried about their careers: I didn't get to mine until I was 32. You might find yourself doing something later that you had not even conceived of at this moment in time. I love history. I was chair of the history department for almost six years, and my department is great. But had I serendipitously gotten into Yale -- at that time I was learning Polish as well as Russian —I probably would have gone to Yale and studied Slavic languages and would have been doing that instead. Some of my closest colleagues and comrades here are in the Russian department. These are the people that I work most closely with on these study abroad programs. Indeed, they’re the ones who did all the legwork setting up the old St. Petersburg and current Vilnius programs. Essentially, I just come and benefit from their good work.

After Columbia, there was the question of what do I do now – the job thingy? And I decided to try to get a job in academia. There are few better jobs than academia, if you like talking about ideas in a classroom full of smart students – something you can do mightily at this university. It’s been a joy to be able to do that for the past twenty years.

And I still get enthusiastic about that -- good responses to good questions from smart students. Sometimes I get better questions to my initial questions. That's the thing. There's always the student here who will surprise you with an insightful response to something you've said in class. I remember those students still. Students who catch me unawares with their agile brains. That’s a pretty good payoff from a class. I'll keep doing that as long as I can.

 

*Reves Center staff: Sylvia Mitterndorfer, Director of Global Education Office; Director of Global Partnerships; Nick Vasquez, Associate Director, International Travel & Security; Molly DeStafney, Senior Associate Director/Deputy Director of Global Education; and Susan Manion, Advisor, Global Education Office.

**INTR 299 - W&M Summer Study Abroad Program Preparatory (1 Course Credit): This course is designed specifically for students going on one of the W&M Summer Study Abroad Programs and is intended to enhance a student’s cross-cultural understanding and experience, and to cover a variety of pre-departure questions. This course includes substantive academic content.