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It was a special day in early October, when a delegation from Turkmenistan visited ������ and signed an agreement that would open the door for this Central Asian nation to explore an educational partnership with a Western university.

Included in the group was the Turkmen ambassador to the United States, the deputy minister of education, and the heads of several Turkmen national institutions of higher learning.

In geopolitical terms, the agreement could give Kent State a presence in a former Soviet-bloc nation whose neighbors to the south are Iran and Afghanistan.

The signing marked the first venture by Turkmenistan to create a formal pathway for a Western education for its people. Six Turkmen students already study at Kent State, and the agreement carries with it not just the promise of more, but the opportunity for the U.S. State Department to help sow the seeds of Western ideas in Central Asia.

Sixteen months before this historic signing, Marcello Fantoni, Ph.D., Kent State’s vice president for global education, was on the ground in Turkmenistan for an initial meeting with the Turkmen Minister of Education and the American ambassador to Turkmenistan.

“Our new horizon is Central Asia,” Fantoni said, explaining that similar opening talks are underway with the countries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan. “We can’t leave any stone unturned and Kent State, because of its DNA, its identity, must be ahead of other universities going where American universities have not yet flocked.”

The DNA Fantoni refers to is the legacy of the May 4, 1970, shootings on campus, and the creation of a School of Peace and Conflict Studies in its aftermath to ensure that Kent State remains a leading voice for peace and freedom of thought through education.

The 2023 visit was fruitful and resulted in a follow-up meeting in March, organized by the U.S. Embassy in Turkmenistan, which led to the October signing that formally opened the door for Kent State and the Turkmen government to sit down and determine what kind of relationship will happen.  

In addition, the Office of Global Education recently was awarded a grant from the U.S. Embassy in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat, to study the higher education system of the country and make proposals on how to best internationalize it.  The $100,000 grant is expected to be renewed for three years.

New Beginnings

It’s another new beginning for Kent State’s Office of Global Education, where Fantoni has served as vice president for 12 years.

The globe-trotting Fantoni is Kent State’s statesman-in-chief, visiting more than 40 countries during his tenure and producing new relationships with 22 nations not previously part of Kent State’s global family.

Under his tenure, Kent State’s American Academy in Curitiba, Brazil, was opened, as well as its office in Kigali, Rwanda, for the university’s expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa, both for education-abroad and to attract increasing numbers of African students seeking higher education. From the Rwanda office, partnerships with Kenya and Ethiopia are being discussed, as well as partnerships in Morocco and Egypt in northern Africa, reflective of Africa’s growing importance in the global economic sphere.

Fantoni also expects further expansion of programs in the Southeast Asian countries of South Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, and has his eye on Thailand and Indonesia.

Kent State is home to 2,200 international students, with the number of first-year international students nearly doubling this academic year over 2023-24. Students from more than 100 nations come to Kent State, while Kent State sends about 1,200 students to programs in more than 60 countries annually.  

“Today, ������ is a global university. We have a presence on nearly every continent of this planet,” Fantoni said. “We want to not only offer more opportunities to the students, but we want to broaden the horizon of our education. We send students to nearly every continent, because we believe there is something to learn from everybody around the world, and obviously the world has changed.”

And keeps changing.  

Education is always at the heart of Fantoni’s work, but his job is much about reading the geopolitical and economic tea leaves of an ever-changing world. 

Reading the Map

Seven years ago, Fantoni’s eye was on Brazil; three years ago, Rwanda; last year, Cambodia and Vietnam. Now, in addition to the Central Asian “stan” countries, Fantoni is sharply focused on India.

“At this point, India is the No. 1 country where students are coming from to the United States,” he said. “What’s critical is that the parliament of India, a couple of years ago, passed a new law that opens India to international universities. We took advantage of that immediately and we signed our first agreement last year with a university in the State of Odisha, and we are building a 2+2 program there.” 

A 2+2 program has students complete their first two years of university at a home institution, followed by two years at Kent State, with a coveted degree from an American university the anticipated outcome.

Other Indian universities have requested similar partnerships, and India is now the top country for sending students to Kent State. When Fantoni looks at the map of India, he sees all of Southeast Asia sprawling next door.  

“It’s an enormous market for higher education,” he said. 

Italian Renaissance Historian

Fantoni, an art historian, seems as surprised as anyone at his global career trajectory that resulted in him becoming an American citizen who proudly calls Kent, Ohio, “home.”

His path to Ohio was not the result of strategic planning as much as a series of serendipitous circumstances that began when he was just a young boy growing up on his family’s farm in the Tuscany region of Central Italy.  

“There have been a few key lucky episodes in my life that have brought me where I am, at ������,” he said.

The first was in 1968, when a retired executive from American Express Europe purchased a neighboring farm.  

“This gentleman decided to teach English to the young boy from the nearby farm. I was eight at the time,” Fantoni recalled. Two or three times each week, Fantoni would walk up the hill to the neighbor’s farm for English lessons that continued for five years. Fantoni was the first in his family to go to high school or have a formal education. After high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Florence, Italy.  

“So, there I was growing upon a farm, being perfectly fluent in English and not knowing what to do with it,” he said.

Those English lessons proved their worth, when, in the early 1980s, a friend of Fantoni’s asked him to replace her for a week and teach two lectures at the American University in Florence. The following year, Fantoni was offered the chance to teach the full course.

In the 1990s, Fantoni had the opportunity to travel to the U.S., first to a conference at the University of Chicago, and later, for six months as a visiting scholar at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Fantoni knew then that he hoped to be back in the U.S. someday, a move that got closer when he was asked to teach in Kent State’s Florence program, the university’s first and longest-running education-abroad program.

Fantoni went on to receive his master’s degree from the University of Florence, a doctoral degree from European University Institute and a post-doctoral degree from the University of Florence

For 25 years he was a professor of Italian Renaissance History at various Italian universities, also serving as an adjunct professor for various American university programs in Florence – including Kent State’s, beginning in 1991 – teaching architecture students a course on the history of cities.  

By 2005, Fantoni was named director of the Florence program, and then served as the university’s European manager overseeing Kent State’s campuses in Florence and Geneva, Switzerland, until 2012, when he became vice president for global education. 

Palace of Versailles

While still at the helm of Kent State’s Florence program, Fantoni was tapped to serve in another role, on the Scientific Committee of the Research Center at the Palace of Versailles in France, helping to shepherd art history research on a global scale. Fantoni has served on the committee since 2007, making Kent State the only U.S. university to have a representative on the committee.

The committee’s mission is to serve as a consultative panel to offer opinions on the research center’s planned activities and to examine and assess projects and planned activities presented directly by researchers or teams of researchers.

Fantoni was selected for his role on the Versailles committee due to his lengthy career in Italy as a professor of European and Italian history, art history and architecture. Since joining Kent State, Fantoni has found that his role at Versailles serves him well for making important global education connections.

“It really fits very well into my current position because it allowed me to have good connections in many European cities with scholars, universities and study centers,” Fantoni said. “To organize study abroad or develop international partnerships, this network is very valuable for us.” 

Kent State Is Home

Since arriving at Kent State in 2012, Fantoni has become a U.S. citizen and emphatically professes his love for Kent.

“Kent and Kent State are my home, 100% now,” he said, “Because Kent is not what most people think it is. What I found is Kent is a very open-minded community with a great desire and ambition to grow globally. It is a very welcoming place. I never felt that I was the different one. Actually, me being different was somehow always considered an added value.”

From his office in Van Campen Hall, where the walls are covered in framed watercolor paintings, and the bookshelves lined with American pottery in varying shades of green – his two collection obsessions – Fantoni willingly shares his theories on the complicated world of global education and why it is crucially important for higher education today.  

First, he quickly points out that while he is the head of the department, his staff performs all the behind-the-scenes work to make everything happen. For every success, Fantoni said, “someone else has done all the work.”

Initial ideas for Kent State entering Rwanda and Turkmenistan both came from students who were native to those countries, and Fantoni was a willing listener. Often, it is faculty who propose plans to create programs in a specific country or visiting international professors who come to Kent State to pursue research that results in educational exchanges.

Global education, he said, is multifaceted.  

Bringing the World to Kent State

First, it is about recruiting students from other countries to come to Kent State.

This year’s enrollment figure, a robust 2,200, has not totally bounced back from its pre-pandemic total of 3,000 students, but Fantoni is confident that it will reach that height again and move beyond.

Determining which countries are sending students abroad is a fickle business, based on ever-changing political and economic factors.  

For years, the king of Saudi Arabia paid to send 50,000 students to study abroad each year. Kent State routinely received about 600 of those scholars. After the king’s death, however, that pipeline went dry. Likewise, China was always a super-supplier of Kent State students, but now, fewer than 200 Chinese students attend Kent State.

Instead of two or three countries making up most of Kent State’s international enrollment, more than 100 countries are now represented. While Fantoni appreciates the enrollment diversity, it has dramatically changed the way his office does business, relying more on virtual meetings for recruitment and training in so many locales.

“Ten or 15 years ago, we just got on an airplane to go to the country,” he said. “Now, what helps is technology.”

In the 12 years he has overseen global education, Kent State has added programs in 22 new countries. Fantoni spends about 90 days traveling each year, cultivating new partnerships, and nurturing existing ones.  

Creating Partnerships

The second prong of global education is creating the right strategic partnerships to help produce new avenues for students or to elevate Kent State’s position internationally. It is a challenging venture and subject to many factors such as war, civil unrest or economic troubles, that can result in the university walking away from plans.

Hopes for a partnership in Lebanon were halted by the economic devastation the country experienced due to the Port of Beirut explosion in 2020, and a nascent program with the University of Chernobyl was shut down due to the war in Ukraine.  

“The first thing we do is exclude all countries that are not safe,” Fantoni explained.

Kent State made great progress in the Middle East nation of Jordan, working to establish an American Academy program with Hashemite University. Those plans, however, are on hold while Jordan deals with the issue of Palestinian immigrants flooding its borders due to the Israeli-Hamas War.  

“We are partners with them, we actually have hosted quite a few students from Hashemite University. We had great plans for Jordan, but they are all on hold,” he said.

However, during a visit to Jordan, Fantoni and Executive Vice President and Provost Melody Tankersley, Ph.D., had the opportunity to meet the uncle of the King of Jordan, who operates a foundation in Amman to promote interfaith dialogue.  

“We were invited to visit the foundation. It was obvious in two minutes that this was a fantastic opportunity to do something together,” Fantoni explained.

The result was a proposed interfaith school to be held at Kent State’s Florence program to bring together students from all parts of the world along with Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders to create better interfaith understanding.

“We had the first meeting in Florence at the beginning of June. There were representatives from Jordan, members of the Jewish community of Italy, the Italian Catholic Church was represented. The Imam of the Muslim community in Italy was present, and the mayor of Florence was invited to the meeting and the city of Florence volunteered to sponsor it and make it into one of the big cultural events for Florence next year,” Fantoni said.

Such partnerships, he said, may not produce droves of students, but make sense for Kent State and the legacy of the May 4. “That very much inspires the type of education we want to convey to our students,” he said. 

Bringing Kent State to the World

Third, and most important, global education is about finding new destinations for Kent State students to go and learn.

Each year, about 1,200 students take part in an education-abroad experience and come home better prepared for today’s global workforce, Fantoni said.

“We want to have as many students as possible from Kent State to have access to this,” he said. “If we send our Ohio students all over the world and they bring their experiences back, we create the conditions in Ohio for much healthier and stronger development of the entire state.”

That involves creating opportunities that can accommodate the needs of many majors, but also address student interest, which also has expanded wildly since education abroad first became popular following World War II.

Even into the 1980s, education abroad generally meant England, France, Italy or Spain, Fantoni said, noting how Kent State’s flagship education-abroad programs in Florence and Geneva, have been operating for 50 years.

“Who was interested in China 40 years ago? Who was courageous enough to send their children to India or Columbia?” he said.

Now, it’s not unusual to have a student to request experiences in countries such as Nepal.

“If it makes sense, we try to make it happen,” he said, “We expand the number of destinations in relationship to the academic needs and interests of the students.”

Fantoni works diligently to ensure that all Kent State education-abroad experiences for students will elevate their education and help to better prepare them for careers in a world where jobs are increasingly global, no matter the field.