GLOBAL: Internationalisation or westernisation?

A new awareness is emerging among policy makers and university heads that a headlong rush towards internationalisation is not always best for students, universities and the countries involved.

This year's Going Global conference debated whether internationalisation was a euphemism for a 'westernisation' of higher education and several speakers suggested some universities might have been wrong in the rush to globalise.

As Professor Simon Marginson of the University of Melbourne pointed out, the consumption of international education was often portrayed as "a happy experience for all, one joy after another". But "is it all a consume-consume, happy-happy, win-win? No it is not", Marginson said.

A new awareness was emerging that internationalisation could also be a one-way street.

"There is great concern that modernisation and internationalisation means westernisation," said Professor Rupert Maclean (shown above), of Hong Kong's Institute of Education, and a former Unesco official.

"Too much education research is imported from other countries," Maclean said, and often the ideas, values and research that were brought in were not relevant. "Internationalisation must be culture-sensitive," he added.

Professor Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice-chancellor of University Sains Malaysia said, "When we talk about internationalisation, how much is internationalisation and how much is Eurocentrism?"

The European Union's Erasmus Mundus programme provides a large number of scholarships for non-European students to spend part of their studies at a European university.

Erasmus Mundus is neutrally described as an education cooperation and student mobility programme but in reality it "promotes the European university as a centre of excellence in learning around the world", Razaki said in a provocative speech that sparked much debate.

Rather than rushing headlong into international partnerships, branch campuses, foreign student and staff recruitment, and setting up international degree programmes, universities needed to think carefully about what they wanted to achieve and how they could do it sensitively, other speakers said.

A growing sentiment against the 'marketisation' of higher education was also discernable. Internationalisation was sometimes a cover for blatant profit-seeking, a number of delegates declared, and this did not sit well with many countries where higher education was valued strongly as a public good.

"If we are to focus on what international education is really like, we need to take off the rose-coloured glasses labelled marketing, and do the social research. But of course the social research budget is a tiny fraction of the marketing budget," Marginson said.

"But when social and cultural issues are neglected, they keep bubbling away under the surface. Once they build up enough steam, they break through," he said, referring to recent attacks on Indian students in Australia.

There was still strong support for universities to internationalise but perhaps on a more regional level. Dr Gwang-jo Kim, Asia- Pacific Director of Education at Unesco, said: "If we are going to globalise and benefit from transnational higher education then more than anything else it should provide students more opportunity to have a better understanding of their own region."

Most Asian students went to Europe and the US. "Eventually one might want to see some kind of even distribution," Kim said.

But Professor Timothy Tong, President of Hong Kong's Polytechnic University, tended to disagree, saying: "As a university we have a responsibility to provide an international education to our students so they will be able to work in an international environment."

"If we do not [go global] we run the risk of becoming irrelevant or becoming less relevant because modern technology has changed everything to make it easier to travel and communicate, and that has transformed society."

But like it or not, higher education is a national endeavour. At the start of the conference, Britain's Higher Education Minister David Lammy said, "I don't think there will ever be some kind of international generic education model that fits everyone's purposes.

"Education will always be called on to serve national ends and, in our present economic difficulties, those who are particularly prominent at the moment are concerned with making our citizens more employable in our domestic economy and helping our businesses compete more successfully than those from other countries."

"That does not mean that education is immune to the fact that we all live in a rapidly changing world. Nor that education must not only adapt to the consequences of globalisation but also play a part in that globalisation."

Marginson suggested that such tensions between the global and national, the profit versus mission-driven should be expected.

"The global research university is at least half global but politics and funding remain national, except for international student fees and some research money," he said, adding: "Universities now operate in all three dimensions at the same time: global, national, local and must work them as synergy, not contradiction."

Higher education and research would remain "central drivers of globalisation", Marginson said. "Research universities are among the most globally connected and driven of all sectors of society, while at the same time global connections, the global flow of ideas, global comparisons and rankings and global people mobility are the most powerful single driver of change in higher education."