Terry Borg was a high schooler in his native Livonia, Mich., when he set his compass for a lifetime in public service and international affairs.
Fifty years later, his direction remains unchanged.
Borg, senior director of the College of Education’s Office of External and Global Programs, retired in December after 16 years of facilitating connections, partnerships and educational and cultural experiences that have positively impacted students from around the world.
Educate Global. Open Imagination. The School Counselor Institute. The Children’s Literature Conference. The Reading Conference. The Graduate Student Research Association Conference. The Illinois Global Economics and Finance High Schools. School-University Partnerships. Bilingual Transition to Teaching.
Although the list is far longer, spanning from Chicago to the Mississippi, from the state’s northern border with Wisconsin to I-80 and from South America to Europe and Asia, Borg is quick to share the credit.
“In order to make any of these programs work, to borrow an adage from Hillary Clinton, it really takes a village. It’s nothing one person can do. It’s a matter of people coming together and championing the cause. Be it support from the dean’s office or faculty commitment, it takes a team,” Borg says.
“To do anything successfully takes a group of people with different skills and expertise, all usually working beyond their normal job description, coming together to create a winning program,” he adds. “The one thing that I have learned is that to be a success, you must have a strong team working with you.”
HIS NIU STORY OPENS in 2002, when he joined the Illinois Council on Economic Education, but his life’s journey as a first-generation American began in a small apartment above the grocery store his parents owned and operated.
Borg, his three siblings and their parents, Demetry and Elsie, shared two bedrooms and one bathroom.
Demetry, an immigrant from Gozo – a small, agricultural island of Malta about halfway between Sicily and North Africa – worked for 38 years on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Co. Elsie, born and raised in Toronto, managed the store.
When Borg enrolled at Michigan State University, he chose the James Madison College for its public affairs programs and earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations. He was awarded a Rotary Fellowship at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, where he completed a master’s degree in Contemporary European Studies.
Returning stateside, he expected to find work in government relations or something similar – but found, instead, a recession and a bleak job market. It led to teaching at a two Michigan community colleges, although the part-time pay wasn’t enough to make a living.
Nonetheless, Borg says, “I found that I really enjoyed working in higher education and, always in the back of my mind, I had thought, ‘You know, if there’s one thing that I want to do before I grow up is to be a Graduate Resident Advisor.’ I just wanted to do that before I got serious about life.”
He returned to Michigan State for his Ph.D. in university administration and student affairs and became a graduate advisor for residence life: “I got to live in the hall, assist students and have purpose,” he says, “and I began a doctorate.”
That degree ultimately earned him student affairs leadership positions in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Contributing over a decade to the student affairs profession, he felt that he had reached a crossroads.
The phone rang.
“A friend of mine from graduate school who was working at Penn State University contacted me and said, ‘We have an opportunity in Penn State’s Continuing and Distance Education unit. You should check it out if you’re trying to look at different things to do, but still be in an university environment.’ ”
Borg took the job in Happy Valley, staying for a few years. Then, his friend left for a job in Corporate America – in St. Charles, Ill.
That employer was Arthur Anderson, and Borg soon found himself recruited to work at the giant accounting firm. The year was 1998.
“I’m a flatlander at heart, and living in the mountains of Pennsylvania was not a great fit. My family’s from Michigan, so Illinois was a little closer. Arthur Anderson offered me a greater salary and better benefits than I would ever be making at Penn State, so I went.”
Four years later, in 2002, Anderson ceased operations and Borg suddenly and unexpectedly was back on the job market.
Son Nic and daughter Kelsey were in high school and middle school by then, so another uprooting move was out of the question. The Borgs were committed to remaining in Maple Park, Ill. He joined Hewitt Associates, a provider of human capital and management consulting services headquartered in suburban Lincolnshire.
“It was a two-hour drive, each way. I did that for about three months, but the drive was killing me,” says Borg, who eventually served 16 years on the Maple Park Village Board in his adopted hometown. “And then this opportunity appeared at Northern.”
BORG’S ARRIVAL AT NIU CAME during boom years.
As director of the Illinois Global Economics and Finance High School program within the Illinois Council on Economic Education, he administered a grant to 13 high schools statewide, as well as provided staff development and student programming focused on economic and financial literacy.
When the funding of this state grant ended in 2005, he fortuitously learned that the director of the College of Education’s Office of External Programs was retiring.
Borg applied for the job – and was hired by former Dean Christine Sorensen to oversee outreach activities in conference and professional development; off-campus academic credit courses; degree completion programs and faculty consultations.
As the college’s representative, Borg toured the service region meeting people, securing sites for course delivery and recruiting students for programs that included the Bilingual Transition to Teaching initiative that provided teacher licensure with a Bilingual Endorsement to career changers, which ultimately enrolled ten cohorts producing 200 bilingual educators for Illinois schools.
He remembers helping faculty to set up classes in the Chicago Athletic Club with 100-foot ethernet cables stretching from the NIU Alumni Association office into conference rooms used for teaching.
He remembers Sheldon Woods teaching next to a restroom in the Moody Bible Institute for easy access to water needed for his class in science methods. He remembers booking spaces in church basements and in multi-university centers, including the Quad Cities and Oak Brook.
The work of Borg and teammates Gail Hayenga, Ted Moen and Marti Jernberg to facilitate agency-sponsored credit and non-credit programs produced approximately $1 million-plus annually for the college and the university.
“It was a very exciting time to be involved in higher education, and I certainly don’t view myself as a wheeler and dealer, but it was exciting doing things that people hadn’t done before,” Borg says. “There was just so much demand and so much opportunity.”
Opportunity became international in 2012.
The College of Education hosted the debut of the Summer Youth English Camp, one result of a partnership with Yeungjin College of Daegu, South Korea.
Under Borg’s oversight, NIU welcomed 28 students ages 8 to 15 from the Daegu Gyeongbuk English Village for four weeks. Their time in DeKalb included 80 hours of classroom instruction in reading writing and verbal comprehension provided by ELS under contract to NIU.
This program was followed by a partnership with Taiwan’s National University of Tainan Affiliated Elementary School, where 29 students ages 9 to 16 lived on campus for three weeks participating in College of Education and NIU summer camps.
He smiles thinking about how those students were awestruck by “how much distance and space we had here” as well as by their many excursions to Walmart and Target. (The same sense of excitement also was true of NIU’s Uruguayan educator visitors last year and again in the fall, he says.)
The 2014 launch of Open Imagination began bringing 11th- and 12th-graders from Miaoli County in Taiwan to expose them to a different way of learning in the United States, both in high schools and at NIU.
Eventually, the creation of Educate Global provided those experiences to NIU College of Education students, whether in China, Taiwan and Finland or, soon, in Indonesia and Kenya.
“For me,” Borg says, “making international opportunities available – providing truly transformational experiences, allowing students to see the world differently – was probably the most exciting and important thing I contributed to College of Education students.”
And despite his own background as the son of immigrants, hearing old family stories of Gozo and Malta, and spending some summers in his mother’s native Canada, Borg knows exactly how those young world travelers felt as they stepped off the airplanes.
“Even with that much global perspective in knowing that cultures are different while people universally value the same things in life,” he says, “it was just mind-blowing when I lived abroad and did my master’s work in England. I was there over a year and had so many different and varied experiences, that continue to impact my life today.”
RETIREMENT WILL BRING the luxury of domestic, road-trip adventures with Betty, his wife of 38 years. The couple met at Michigan State, where Borg had landed a summer job processing guaranteed student loans under the supervision of his future spouse.
They’re happy that their children (and spouses) along with their three grandchildren – Louis, Link and Gavin – are nearby. Nic, a self-employed software engineer, lives in Sugar Grove. Kelsey is a speech-language pathologist in the DeKalb School District.
All nine are planning to travel together, post-COVID, to Gozo to see the homeland of Borg family.
Until then, Borg plans to catch up on Betty’s “honey-do list” – she retired six years ago – and to reflect fondly on what he helped to build in the College of Education.
“The one thing that I’ve always felt we were attentive to in this office was providing faculty and students with excellent service,” he says, “or, in the Arthur Anderson language, exceeding client expectations.”
That conforms to the university-wide culture that he believes sets NIU apart from the many other schools where he has worked as well as to his personal philosophy.
“I used to kid around with Marti, Gail and Ted when we’d get into these morbid conversations about what we want on our tombstones,” Borg says, “and for me, it’s always been, ‘a nice guy who cared.’ Exceeding expectations, while serving others in a caring fashion, is the legacy I trust that will continue in the College of Education’s External and Global Programs.”
