David Coffey, an assistant professor in Public Safety, Allied Health and Human Services at Virginia Peninsula Community College, encourages his students to travel.
“And going to New York City doesn't really count. Or going to Disney World doesn't really count. Get out of the U.S.,” he said. “You don't have to go to a place that doesn't speak English. But try to get off the beaten trail, get out a little bit and see the world, because it just gives you more appreciation for what we have here.”
He practices what he preaches, having traveled to about 25 countries in the past 30 years or so. Some of it was for business, some for pleasure.
Coffey attended high school in Los Angeles and was a police officer and deputy district attorney for the city. In total, he lived in L.A. from 1966-98.
“L.A. was a great place to do what I did,” he said, but added he and his wife didn’t want their children going to high school there.
He was hired as the College’s head of criminal justice program in 1998 and has remained, teaching criminal justice classes.
“It lets me travel in the summer and gives me the free time to do other things,” he said.
Most of his trips involved working with international law enforcement. He has helped both Ukraine and Russia, who have been at war for more than a year. A lot of the countries he has visited aren’t so different from the United States.
“They have same problems that we have. … The same street crimes that we had in Los Angeles,” he said. “I mean they have different names (gangs vs. hooligans), but they have the same problems, and they have a lot of the same solutions.”
His experience has been these countries have more in common than they realize and that is the key to a more peaceful existence.
“If you point out all the stuff we have in common first, then you can talk about all the stuff we don't have in common,” he said. “I think that's a cool part of this.”
For him, international travel, no matter the reason, offers huge educational benefits. People who grow up in the United States don’t always realize how easy it is in other places to travel from one country to another. He notes the Pacific and Atlantic oceans “are a buffer for us as far as culture goes.”
He noted children in Germany can go skiing in the Alps and to Italy for the beaches in the summer.
“In the time it takes you and I to drive down to Disney World, you can go from Germany down to southern part of Italy,” he said. “So they have a (broader) view of things. We have this kind of myopic view of things.”
On one of his trips to Russia years ago, he attended a Sunday mass with a Russian sergeant in a church that dated to the early 12th century.
“That church has been there since 1106, that same church. People were standing here in 1106,” he said with amazement. “That's history. It really is.”
Among Coffey’s favorite places to visit are Ukraine, Ireland and Budapest. He noted you might not recognize you were learning at the time, but something might happen a few years later that makes it all sink in.
“You just start thinking, ‘Wow, interesting way of looking at things,’” he said. “And then you start to realize, too, there’s not a right way or a wrong way, just a way.”
He said that was the thought process in many of his training missions with other countries.
“We're going to teach you a way we know how to do, but it's not the only way. It's just a way,” he said.
That also doesn’t mean it was being done wrong in the first place.
“I think that helps our students realize that (sometimes) there's no right or wrong to this,” he said.
Traveling helps students see firsthand cultural and societal differences.
“We're trying to make Virginia Peninsula students lifelong learners. We're trying to let them know that there's more out there and the world is becoming a smaller place with travel,” he said.
All faculty should encourage students, and it doesn’t matter what the major is. Traveling offers non-stop benefits. And as with venturing beyond New York City and Disney World, he has another caveat.
“It doesn't count if you're on Gray Line tours,” he said. “You got to eat at the local restaurants and try to converse with the local people and all that. And you learn, you really do. There's so much to see out there.”
He knows because he has seen a lot of it.
For more information on VPCC, visit www.vpcc.edu.