GLOBAL: Elephants and tins of paint

The old adage of 'the elephant in the parlour' was rehearsed again by Dave Burnapp, a senior lecturer in the business school of Northampton University. Burnapp has examined the strategic implications of international collaboration in higher education as part of a research project. He wanted to find more about that "embarrassing thing there that everyone ignores".

The elephant problem turned out to be three-fold. How could students in overseas countries following courses designed in the UK manage to cope with studying in their own cultural environment?

How could British institutions ensure that issues of validation, quality control, expectations and styles of study be compatible? How would students manage to make the transition to Britain if they wished to complete their studies here? These issues had yet to be resolved, he suggested.

Burnapp was also interested in the way British institutions had created an international strategy: some collaboration began with a few enthusiastic individuals who started linked courses with overseas colleges or colleagues.

If successful, there was a move to create international offices in UK universities and afterwards came the development of an institutional ethos of internationalisation with senior management taking charge.

"Marketisation" took hold in some universities, with others adopting a more developmental approach, he said. So, there was a conflict between staff in some institutions who had started with the bottom-up approach, and then had been taken over by senior management who had evolved the successful schemes into a highly centralised and managed organisation.

"How do you reconcile everyone into this structure?" he asked.

Finally, there were the students. He was disappointed in the UK student population for it lack of interest in foreign languages, citing an example from his own recent experience as a very mature student in China.

He was the only British student on his course studying Mandarin. "There was even a Swedish engineering student - I don't think any British institution has the imagination to do this."

The take-up of Erasmus courses (student mobility in the European Union) in the UK was equally disappointing. British students preferred to go to English-speaking countries rather than Europe. And he had found a disappointing intermingling of British and overseas students in the same institutions: "A deeply conservative attitude."

Burnapp said there was a danger of treating internationalism in higher education in a superficial way: "It's like selling tins of paint to the world".
There ought to be a philosophical element, he said.