Catholic identity and internationalisation

Catholic universities, even more than other faith-based universities, are an important segment of the higher education sector in many countries around the world. And one would assume that, by their very nature, they would be more internationally oriented and active than other institutions of higher education. Still, there is little known about the relationship between religious identity and internationalisation.

Based on a study* of three Catholic universities – Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile or PUC de Chile, Boston College or BC in the United States, and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore or UCSC in Italy, three universities of different types and located in different contexts – we looked at this relationship.

The guiding questions were:

• • What is the rationale for internationalisation? Is it mostly financial, social, academic?
  
• • Is it just about the experience of student mobility?
  
• • Should students’ study abroad experience have a Catholic identity and mission component to it?
  
• • How do Catholic institutions cooperate with other institutions?
  
• • Is there an identity-based strategy behind the choice of partners?
  
• • What is the influence of context?
  
• • What is the role of associations of Catholic universities?

Different contexts

Although the sample is small, certain areas of comparison and some common trends are apparent from our findings. First, there is a different cultural space occupied by the Catholic Church in the United States than in Chile and Italy.

Both Chile and Italy have large majorities of Catholic populations and only a fairly recent separation between church and state, in the 1920s in both cases. It is no surprise, then, that Chile has a larger share than the United States of Catholic institutions of higher education among the total of its institutions, and also, a much larger proportion of the student body enrolled in Catholic institutions.

This is less the case for Italy, but it is worth noting that UCSC is the largest private and Catholic university in Europe in terms of enrolments.

In all cases, the Catholic identity and mission of each of these universities was clearly stated in its main declarations of mission, vision and principles, and accordingly communicated on each institutional website – although the UCSC case shows how the English version of its website downplays the Catholic element in the profile of the university to highlight other features that may be of more direct interest to prospective international students and partners.

Also of interest is the place internationalisation holds in the strategic aims of the three universities. For PUC de Chile and UCSC, internationalisation is a well-defined area of strategic development. While BC has as yet no comparable position for its internationalisation agenda, in its upcoming new strategic plan internationalisation will appear prominently among BC’s key areas for development.

Catholicism vs internationalisation

Alas, while the Catholic affiliation is a strong and explicit component of these universities’ identities and missions, and internationalisation is becoming increasingly important in their plans for the future, the two strands appear unconnected in all three cases.

Internationalisation and identity occupy different and separate organisational domains. They evolve without coordination and a discourse alluding to where the two are woven together in a meaningful whole could not be found, either in official documentation or in the interviews we carried out with university leaders.

Nowhere could we find, for instance, that the Catholic orientation of a prospective partner was a criterion for choosing to collaborate. On the contrary, the partnership strategies of the three institutions seem largely unrelated to this element of their identity.

Of course, some exceptions can be noted. For example, UCSC has used its Catholic identity as a lever for partnerships in Latin America where a large Catholic institution carries weight. It is also beginning to develop relations with the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States to attract students from small colleges to a large European institution (interestingly, however, Italian students do not appear to be interested in going to small colleges in the United States).

One can identify similar cases in the other two universities – for instance, the relationship between PUC de Chile and BC as well as the University of Notre Dame. But again, these are exceptions.

Moreover, we could not even infer a Catholic ‘bent’ in the internationalisation practices and policies in the universities. The approaches taken by PUC, BC, and UCSC seem, as far as we can tell, indistinguishable from those of secular universities.

The Catholic medieval trope of the university as a universal institution has apparently not resulted in a specifically Catholic way of approaching international engagement in Catholic universities. We wonder, therefore, if there is greater engagement in a specifically ‘Catholic’ framework happening at the programme rather than institutional level. This is an area which is worthy of further study.

For instance, the universities exhibit the same emphasis on the notion of ‘internationalisation as student mobility’ that pervades across campuses far and wide. Their degree of realisation of ‘internationalisation at home’ is as unimpressive as it is at the vast majority of universities worldwide.

Of course, at BC and PUC, a strong research mission drives the recruitment of international academic staff as well as the internationalisation of research cooperation and to some extent the enrolment of international graduate students – but it is the research agenda that pushes the universities beyond their national boundaries, not their Catholic identity.

Another shortcoming we found in the manner in which UCSC and PUC are open to the world is the paucity of their web pages in English, which, in both cases, are geared narrowly to the needs of prospective exchange and other international students.

The BC case informs us that Catholic universities are far from being leaders in outbound and inbound student mobility in the United States.

In the case of Chile, PUC leads all other Chilean universities in the proportion of its students who go abroad and in the proportion of its student body who come from abroad. But this probably has more to do with PUC being the number one university in Chile’s national rankings, and the first or second in Latin America, than a function of PUC being a Catholic university.

A changing world

However, in the three cases awareness about the relevance of internationalisation at home seems to be growing, with BC and UCSC ahead of PUC in offering non-mobile students opportunities to interact with the world.

Finally, a word on change and continuity. It is true that deliberate policies to promote a wide experience of internationalisation are rather new to the contemporary university. Compared to this trend, the footprint of the Catholic identity may, at first, be regarded as older, more established and better conceptualised. Yet, as especially the UCSC case shows, the meaning of a Catholic identity in rapidly secularising societies is not as fixed as one may think.

Indeed, transformations in societies and in the Catholic Church itself, as well as unresolved tensions within the Church and inside and across its universities, lend a serious sense of indeterminacy to the idea of an identity and sense of mission of a Catholic institution; this bolsters the sense of elusiveness we encountered with respect to the questions we have investigated here.

In short: Catholic universities are in a state of flux not only with respect to their internationalisation strategies and policies, but also, to some extent, in their understanding of what it means to be a Catholic university at home and in the world today.

Hans de Wit is director of the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, USA. Email: dewitj@bc.edu. Andrés Bernasconi is associate professor and vice dean of the School of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is also head of the higher education research programme at the Centre for Research on Educational Policy and Practice of the same university, in Santiago, Chile. Email: abernasconi@uc.cl. Daniela Véliz-Calderón is assistant professor, School of Education, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Email: dvelizc@uc.cl.

* The research project ‘Catholic Universities: Identity and Internationalisation’ was financially supported through a start-up grant from the Luksic Fund, created to stimulate cooperation between the PUC de Chile, Boston College, and the University of Notre Dame, also in the United States. BC and PUC de Chile received a second grant to broaden the scope of this pilot study and include other Catholic universities from the three continents but also from Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Interested Catholic universities are invited to approach the authors about possible inclusion in this second stage of the research or other relevant information on the topic. The study, including the case studies of the three universities is published by the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, CIHE Perspectives 3, 'Catholic Universities: Identity and internationalization, a pilot project', and can be downloaded for free from its website.