Faculty must be at the heart of internationalisation efforts

Faculty are at the heart of delivering the intellectual substance of higher education. Attempts to internationalise higher education without internationalising the faculty are likely to produce intellectually vacuous results that bypass core higher education values and purposes. The future of higher education internationalisation is in the wider engagement of faculty throughout institutions in their teaching, research and service.

While my comments are shaped by North American experience, experiences elsewhere and frequent discussions with colleagues about other world regions lead to a conclusion that there are similarities across regions, particularly in the need for and shaping of greater faculty involvement. However, adjustments to methods will be necessary to fit varying higher education system cultures.

A shifting landscape

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations and World Bank data and the higher education internationalisation literature of the last several decades highlight the significant expansion of student and faculty mobility, the internationalisation of curricula and building of global higher education partnerships and networks.

Recent progress has slowed because we still live in the shadow of COVID. Wars in Europe and the Middle East and instabilities more widely raise concerns about security and stability. Major geopolitical and economic realignments involving Asia and elsewhere cause a rethinking of routes and methods for internationalisation.

There also remains a significant gap between rhetoric about internationalisation of higher education institutions and results. For example, well under 3% of the total global student population is mobile, the majority of faculty are not significantly internationally engaged or active, the internationalisation of curricula is uneven or spotty in its disciplinary breadth and depth, and many cross-border partnerships are unstable or fall short of their planned objectives.

However, higher education internationalisation will continue to be fuelled by spreading global higher education teaching and research capacity, and also by the rising importance of globe-wide challenges (such as environmental degradation, climate change and migration) that require collaborative global solutions and wide faculty involvement.

Diverse shapers of faculty priorities

The global forces outside an institution that ‘pull’ faculty towards international engagement need synchronisation with internal institutional factors that push or facilitate faculty engagement internationally.

There also needs to be a synchronising of faculty job environments. The vast majority of faculty are members simultaneously of an institution, an academic department or school, and a discipline. Disciplines transcend individuals and institutions to define a body of knowledge and practice for national and international members.

The cultures of disciplines and academic departments differ in how receptive they are to international engagement and collaboration. Matters are further complicated, especially in science, engineering and technical fields, over cross-border protections of intellectual property and issues of national security.

Although institutional, departmental and disciplinary environments influence one another, they are not perfectly aligned in prioritising subject matter and action, nor in how they measure benefit or value.

The individual faculty member sits astride these three work environments and in the conflict zone where they overlap. It takes conscious adjustment to smooth contested terrain, defining work priorities and measuring value, including whether to engage internationally at all or, if so, what kinds of engagement to undertake, for instance, education abroad, internationalising courses, scholarship abroad, collaborative research with institutions abroad, or helping communities here and abroad negotiate the local and the global.

Institutional/faculty mismatches

The three environments define and administer reward and incentive systems on different bases.

It is well established that mismatches occur between faculty and institutional motivations for internationalisation.

In a simplistic but real example, the institutional motivation might be revenue enhancement, or supporting a particular institutional priority, for example, study abroad, or enhancing global rank and reputation.

For faculty, by contrast, it is typically scholarly research and publication opportunities linked to disciplinary priorities that expand professional networks and provide access to paradigms of cutting-edge thought in the discipline. These in turn hopefully link to increased personal stature in the discipline, grants to support scholarship, and perhaps improvements in teaching and curricula to reflect student needs for global competencies.

The personal background of faculty also shapes their predisposition towards international engagement (for instance, overseas heritage, personal values, family constraints and previous experience abroad).

Hostile departmental cultures

Departmental cultures can be hostile to international engagement: the idea that if you are over there, you aren’t here doing departmental work; or, as is commonly expressed: “Young faculty should focus on earning tenure or job security and promotion in departmental fields of study before dabbling abroad.”

Another typical attitude is summarised as: “How could our students possibly learn anything valuable abroad that they can’t learn here?” These are not infrequent expressions of parochial minds.

Conflict vs synergies

While the three environments differ in orientation and how success is measured (producing mixed signals), there are overlaps in orientation that provide space for synergies. For example, faculty and institutional stature are mutually reinforcing, and improvements to teaching and scholarship can serve both institutional and faculty motivations.

But synergies don’t necessarily emerge automatically and inattention to building them can produce unwanted consequences. For example, an institutional motivation to increase international enrolments for revenue can sour faculty willingness to diversify the learning environment if the enrolment initiative fails to also support integrating international students into the campus living and learning environment.

As studies demonstrate, goals of commercialisation and commodification often spark negative faculty reactions.

Problems compound with inattention to developing faculty cross-cultural skills and understanding. Some faculty are parochial and not inclined toward multiculturalism or diversifying the classroom.

It may be surprising that higher education, which is touted as a haven to open inquiry, could nonetheless be constrained by established departmental, disciplinary or institutional priorities for subject matter and pedagogy. Parochialism embedded in the status quo is a blocker to international engagement.

Push/pull synergies

The search for common ground to encourage faculty international engagement resides in building synergies between the pull of faculty towards an increasingly high-quality global higher education system and the push outwards by institutional practices to do so.

The ‘push’ of faculty out into an international environment needs to be rooted in departments and disciplines. Several years ago, accreditation bodies in business and engineering included international criteria in their guidelines. These had a significant impact on incorporating international orientations in curricula and research.

Engineering, even working globally under largely universal scientific principles and applications, awakened to the notion that engineering problems and solutions are defined differently when interacting across cultures.

Yet, disciplinary cultures are unevenly oriented towards internationalisation. I recall being told by a senior natural scientist that “we are already international because we read international science journals”.

The subject matter of some disciplines is inherently international and acts as a magnet for international and cross-cultural work (for example, classical studies, comparative politics and international relations, world history, languages, international trade and finance, and so forth).

These disciplines harbour potentially ready-made allies for international engagement and offer opportunities for faculty in these disciplines to expand domestically defined disciplinary or departmental cultures to global ones.

The careers and reputations of faculty are largely not institutionally defined, but importantly influenced by departmental criteria which align with disciplinary foci and organising paradigms.

These shape diverse preferences for possible international engagement (for instance, community development, public health, immigration studies, economic development, environmental sustainability, or theoretical vs applied involvement, and so forth). Institutional internationalisation strategies should be wide enough to accommodate such diversity.

Departmental cultures

Academic departments define what counts, and reward faculty accordingly. One estimate is that 80% of university decisions are made at the departmental level.

Oftentimes, it is not what is written in the institution’s strategic plan, mission statement or emphasised by its leaders that governs departmental behaviours. The critical issue for faculty turns on what criteria are applied de facto by home departments’ promotion, job-security and compensation decisions. If departmental measures of value exclude international activity or give it low status in assessments, international engagement will be a tough sell to most faculty.

Developing an institutional culture for internationalisation must reach down to include academic units. Internationalisation priorities need to survive leadership changes at both institutional and departmental levels. Stability in priorities for international engagement is important; otherwise, faculty commitments to an internationalised career are risky.

Faculty orientations toward internationalisation

The experience of senior international officers is that faculty orientations towards international engagement fall into three categories.

• Pre-disposed faculty allies. Typically, pre-disposed allies are already internationally experienced and-or from outside the country. They may have already studied, taught, conducted research or worked in other countries, or they are part of the migration or diaspora of academics from one country to others. Or they have a fascination with other places and cultures.

These pre-disposed allies are a starting point or germ seed for many institutions. They may require fewer incentives to engage internationally. They can serve as role models to spearhead growth in international activity, but not if they are marginalised or isolated from the wider work environment, for instance, from participation in faculty meetings or if they are denied access to research support, or are treated as second-class citizens outside the regular appointment channels. If so, it is problematic for them to be seen as role models.

While it is widely held that faculty migration is substantially growing, there is no detailed and reliable data globally.

One source of data for the United States indicates that currently over 22% of faculty in post-secondary education are foreign born. (Even making allowances to exclude those who migrated in adolescent years, this remains a large number.)

There are significant patterns of such migration to other developed higher education systems and their presence enriches adopted institutions. There are other migration routes from developed to developing systems that are short of qualified local faculty. A few faculty migrants are ‘transient’ academics who frequently move around the globe.

Highly regarded faculty have global reputations; they attract funding and expand network access to the best ideas and talent. Studies document that world-class faculty are attracted to and courted by the better higher education institutions, which in turn strengthens the receiving institutions. There is a growing global faculty labour market which becomes a pull factor.

• Uncommitted bystanders. If faculty participation in internationalisation is to expand, this is the group most likely to feed it. They aren’t hostile to internationalisation per se, but ‘killer phrases’ often build a wall between the uncommitted and international activity, providing an excuse to avoid it.

Such phrases include, for example, “internationalisation is someone else’s job, not mine” or “local vs global is a zero-sum game – we don’t have enough resources to do our present domestically defined job”.

What is lost in these ‘easy ways out’ is that international engagement is beneficial to the individual’s career as well as enhancing responses to domestic challenges. As Professor Simon Marginson and others imply by the term ‘glocal’, local vs global is a false dichotomy.

What is needed as part of the institutional dialogue is conversation on how international engagement can positively impact faculty teaching, research and domestic problem-solving interests. Engagement of the uncommitted depends heavily on institutional strategies to ‘push’ them towards it.

• Opponents. Institutional internationalisation confronts the reality that not everyone buys into it, and some are hostile to it. Reasons can include fierce parochialism, anti-multiculturalism, fear of change and apprehension over being driven out of the comfort zone of the status quo. We see this playing out globally in largely right-wing politics from which higher education is not immune.

There are the vocal naysayers and there are those who, although they publicly say “amen” to an internationalisation agenda, secretly don’t support it or resist it. Confronting them in the short run is likely to be counter-productive; understanding them less so. The real solution resides in expanding an institutional culture for internationalisation.

The push and the pull

Diversification and strengthening of global sources of cutting-edge knowledge and talent are magnets to draw institutions and faculty to continuously cross borders to access the best in ideas and talent. Knowledge discovery and learning are moving from individuals to groups and to international team models (this is especially obvious in emergent and technical fields).

Continuous learning from the international multicultural environment is a prime source of talent, ideas and institutional reputation, pulling both faculty and institutions into internationalisation pathways.

Strengthening the pull

Intercultural understanding and communication skills are essential for accessing the pull of global pathways. Faculty do not typically come prepared for international or multicultural engagement. This is in part due to insufficient preparation and integration of international and cross-cultural elements in PhD programmes.

Part of a campus-wide dialogue on internationalisation is to educate faculty on what it means and what options for involvement exist in curricula, research and community problem-solving.

Strengthening the push

Research on faculty incentives identify several kinds of motivators:

• Growth in professional stature and recognition (for example, recognition by peers and position in citation indices);

• Pecuniary rewards (such as compensation or research funding);

• Job status (for instance, promotion or job security);

• Access (such as to publication outlets or leaders in the field); and

• Personal connection (for instance, heritage background, experiences abroad and attitudes towards other cultures).

These overlap and mutually reinforce each other.

Money is typically near the top of such lists, but the reality is that money alone won’t achieve the desired end when it comes to internationalisation of institutions and faculty. While some funding to support international activity is needed (at minimum to cover new costs such as travel), it is other factors or variables that will determine whether anything beyond spending money will happen in a stable fashion.

Actions strengthening the push include:

• Developing an institutional culture of internationalisation. As many institutions have discovered, an institution-wide dialogue about internationalisation is an essential early step, covering what internationalisation is, why we do it, how it can strengthen core missions, and so forth.

Such dialogue provided the basis at the University of British Columbia to educate and build awareness among leaders and staff at all levels. Dialogue puts flesh on the bones of mission statements regarding internationalisation.

An institution-wide culture is important, but so is developing departmental support cultures. The dialogue must recognise the great operational diversity that will result in how international engagement plays out across departments and disciplines.

• Developing faculty multicultural skills and sensitivity – an essential for advancing internationalisation, but also for life and work in domestic 21st century environments. Opportunities for faculty to work cross-culturally at home and abroad in active learning environments helps.

• Promoting academic job descriptions, recruitment and hiring practices for faculty that aim to attract those inclined towards international work or engagement and (ideally) with international experience. This is often a tough sell in departments and disciplines with parochial orientations, but resistance can soften over time with dialogue and with an understanding that the sources of cutting-edge knowledge and talent are increasingly global.

• Providing regular institutional awards and other forms of recognition given for faculty international activity and achievements to reinforce its importance.

• Developing faculty appraisal systems for compensation, promotion and job security that include space for international activity and achievement. The platinum standard for recognition of faculty international activity is that it counts towards these things.

• Ensuring the annual budget planning process gives space to and underlines the importance of institutional and departmental budget plans identifying priorities for international activity in the coming budget cycle.

• Ensuring the institution assists academic units to develop internationalisation strategic initiatives that align with departmental priorities.

• With frequent leadership changes in higher education, stabilising commitments to internationalisation across leadership changes.

A culture of international engagement

What is proposed here will be difficult to accomplish; it will not happen overnight, nor evenly across institutions. Yet, the future of higher education internationalisation will depend on a robust and expanded participation of faculty throughout the institution. Success will depend on institutional efforts towards this end.

An essential starting point is an institution-wide dialogue to strengthen a culture of international engagement that reaches down to encompass the cultures of academic departments and is relevant to all missions (teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and community engagement).

The continued global expansion of higher education and sources of cutting-edge knowledge and talent will pull institutions of all kinds into global pathways of learning and research. No less so, faculty will be drawn into these pathways to strengthen their careers and reputations. Institutional efforts to help push faculty out into these pathways are essential.

John K Hudzik is emeritus professor and vice-president of Michigan State University, USA. Stephen Dunnett, emeritus professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, contributed to this article.