The Principal Global Citizenship Award was presented during the 2024 Global Citizen Forum. The award recognizes Drake faculty or staff who have made outstanding contributions to global engagement and internationalization of the campus and curriculum.
The 2023 recipient of the Principal Global Citizenship Award is Professor Susan Pritchett, director of clinical and experiential education at the Law School.
Professor Pritchett arrived at Drake University in 2018, and from the beginning she has contributed to a multitude of programs at Drake that have shaped the global mindset of students and built their intercultural capacity. She is a teacher, a mentor, and an advocate. Her work is centered on international human rights in action and creating experiences for her students that will not only be transformative for them, but that have tremendous community impact as well.
When Professor Pritchett arrived here, Drake Law did not have any kind of immigration clinic or services and no faculty expertise in the area. In this absence, Prof. Pritchett pioneered opportunities for Drake law students to gain meaningful global experiences. In 2019, she co-created an Applied Immigration Law Course that is still being offered to this day. This course traces the history of the Burmese conflict, allowing student to more deeply understand war and ethnic violence that perpetuates refugee flows. She invites members of the local Burmese community to class to share their experiences fleeing persecution in Burma and starting over in the US through refugee resettlement programs. The capstone experience involves partnering with a local NGO that serves Burmese refugees. As an outcome of that capstone, Drake law students have assisted 45 of the non-profit’s clients in applying for immigration benefits including green cards and citizenship.
In 2020, Professor Pritchett worked to secure a half a million dollar grant to launch Drake’s Refugee Clinic. This Clinic now provides 2nd and 3rd year law students the opportunity to represent non-citizens for asylum and other forms of humanitarian relief. The clinic and Prof. Pritchett’s work has provided meaningful experiences for nearly 50 law students and served over 60 clients, some of whom have been Drake international students and employees. Because of the tremendous impact the clinic has had, it was recently awarded a $1M grant by the Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services to provide representation and legal service to the nearly 1K Afghan refugees who live in Iowa.
Her work and passion go beyond the classroom and the clinic. Professor Pritchett has created volunteer experiences for students to work with green car holders to apply for naturalization. As the director of our externship program, she trains all students taking internships for credit in multicultural lawyering. She is also currently helping explore a collaboration with Drake’s partner university in Uganda, Makerere University Business School, to train faculty in experiential pedagogy and to help them develop a Business Clinic as part of their curriculum.
In the words of her nominator: “Talking about global human rights in the classroom is one thing. But when a student is sitting across from someone who has escaped persecution in their country and is desperately trying not to be sent back, they will never forget it and their perspective is forever altered. Those transformative experiences happen every day in our clinic and in other settings because Suzie Pritchett has created them. She believes so strongly both in the power of this type of education and in the public service we provide to those in need, who truly have no other place to turn. She is the quintessential global citizen and is helping to create dozens more of them every year.”
— Kaiya Kielb Young, Senior, Arts & Sciences