Internationalisation: Under assault but worth fighting for

Internationalisation is not a static concept; it has morphed over time in response to new thinking and challenges, and survived anew through self-development. The same is true for the internationalisation of higher education.

Internationalisation must evolve to meet present radically changing realities that include: unprecedented changes in the world order; a re-ranking of regional and national capabilities and influence; new global alliances and power balances; resurgent nationalism and anti-immigration policies; the smothering threat of tariffs, trade imbalances and re-emerging protectionism; and changes in leadership and dominant ideologies.

A recently popularised term, ‘polycrisis’, seems appropriate to current conditions in higher education and its internationalisation.

It is a challenging time, especially for internationalists in countries and regions with a history of well-established and popular higher education international efforts (for example, parts of Europe and North America) while other regions remain more or less on course, such as Latin America.

With the immediacy of present-day challenges being front of mind, there is a temptation to be less than sanguine about the future of internationalisation. Such a conclusion appears rash in historical perspective as well as given global realities.

The present environment for internationalisation contrasts sharply with the previous nearly seven decades of global attention to higher education internationalisation when it was accepted more or less at face value.

Internationalisation now faces closer scrutiny regarding its saliency, cost-effectiveness, staying power and motivations. For many internationalists it is the first time they have faced a multi-front (polycrisis) assault. This may not constitute outright ‘hostility’ in all instances, but at the very least there is a fall-off of interest in it which could signal death by a thousand cuts.

Early beginnings

International learning and discovery began thousands of years ago in the form of wandering scholars and students crossing borders and cultures ‘through largely voluntary activities of individuals’.

Jane Knight neatly summarised the post-World War II evolution of the concept, noting key vocabulary progressions, beginning with “international education, foreign students, international development”, before adding “intercultural education, international students, distance education and area studies”, then “globalisation, global rankings, regional education hubs and international competencies”.

More recently new concepts have been added, such as inter-institutional networks or partnerships, comprehensive internationalisation and strategic and embedded institutional internationalisation. These latter concepts manifestly include internationalising the higher education institution itself in all its missions (teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and community engagement).

As a result, rationales for internationalisation have become more inclusive of all core higher education missions and service to students and societies in a global environment. Social responsibilities (global relationships and peace, global co-prosperities, diversity, the Sustainable Development Goals, cross-cultural learning and sensitivities and assistance to helping the local negotiate in a global terrain) all gained visibility.

More recently came, rightfully so, attention to the less than attractive underbelly of cross-border internationalisation:

• Addressing diverse global problems through dominant ideologies from the developed North and West and insufficiently incorporating the rest;

• Inattention to shared global priorities (for instance, environmental sustainability);

• Championing intercultural competence without adequately defining and concretely operationalising it, and asking whether it is a homogeneous concept; and

• Assistance as opposed to co-production models for cross-border projects – co-production meaning joint problem defining and solving and mutual contributions, learning and benefit.

These most recent developments have perhaps blurred views about the value of internationalisation.

Roll over? Or rise into the wind?

Is internationalisation really heading towards its death or just facing a period of ‘quiet’ when it comes to action and rhetoric? Are we simply at the wrong end of a pendulum swing regarding the assumed importance of internationalisation? Or, do we require the next evolution of concept, practice and proactivity by internationalists?

It is true that we have not responded rapidly or effectively enough to calls over the last few years for change. Maybe this is because internationalisation was a relatively easy sell until recently, thereby generating insufficient interest in further change. Does the current environment offer catalysts for change?

The future of higher education internationalisation is in the hands of faculty, staff and institutional leadership. The choice is stark: roll over in the face of the first real set of challenges to it, or rise into the wind and engage in necessary dialogue regarding change and innovation and take part in institutional and public education and public diplomacy.

If they decide to take action, focus needs to be on the intended ends of internationalisation rather than defending how we happen to do it now.

Both internal and external challenges give rise to discussions (if not predictions per se) about ‘the end of internationalisation’.

Internal challenges

We have not sufficiently institutionalised internationalisation in higher education thought and action. My anecdotal discussions with internationalist faculty and staff over the last two to three years in many countries give the impression of increasing numbers who think they have been left ‘standing alone’ by deans, department heads and top administrators. At a growing number of institutions, internationalisation appears low on the priority list for action and attention.

There was a period over the last several decades when institutions in the United States rushed to add internationalisation to their core mission lists.

The American Council on Education (among other higher education leadership associations) was a leader in this, but today it and others seem to speak or act far less frequently on internationalisation topics. One wonders, given fall-off in action and rhetoric in many institutions, whether internationalisation remains a core mission de facto or de jure at many.

While international educator associations (for example, NAFSA, the Association of International Education Administrators and the European Association for International Education) remain vocal advocates, who are they effectively influencing?

There are many reasons for such indicators of softening support: the tightening of resources to fund all key higher education missions and functions is one. Rising higher education costs across the board have further stretched thinned resources. Maybe internationalisation has also lost a kind of ‘flavour of the month’ appeal, especially when responses to decade-long calls to document its valued outcomes have been less than robust.

If internationalisation has not established itself as a core institutional function in terms of delivering key outcomes, it is at a disadvantage when competing with other programmes for scarce resources. Competition for scarce resources is exacerbated for everyone under conditions of polycrisis.

Internationalisation has offered its own contributions to the polycrisis, for example, when it comes to instability in mobility numbers (both outbound and especially inbound, with negative impacts on institutional revenues), national security roadblocks on cross-border research partnerships and shifting geopolitical skirmishes which affect the stability or safety of cross-border financial and human resource investments.

Mobility fluctuations offer a case in point about the ‘fair weather’ friends of internationalisation. Many higher education leaders were motivated by the pecuniary advantages of international student mobility. When numbers fell, the support for mobility did also. Perhaps this calls into question how good (or bad) a job internationalists have done to intellectually convert leadership to the core value and intended outcomes of internationalisation.

External challenges

There are a combination of factors in social, political and geopolitical environments that challenge the road to internationalisation. COVID taught us you could stay home, the ultimate anti-mobility whack.

Even though many institutions developed ‘non-mobile’ mobility options, it wasn’t quite the same. COVID also taught us not to come into contact with others. It also reminded us that ‘bad’ crosses borders, whether originating abroad in a lab or a ‘wet’ meat market.

There are other powerful environmental factors that challenge higher education internationalisation, either directly or indirectly.

• First, there has been a failure to distinguish between internationalisation on the one hand and the negative impacts of globalisation on the other. Globalisation (the easy passing of a myriad of forces and factors across porous borders) is not the culprit on its own.

Under neo-liberal models of unfettered global free markets in just about everything (from money to culture, power, influence, manufacturing and services), there arose strongly negative consequences, such as trade imbalances, squashing of local cultures, upending of local labour markets and, of course, pandemics – to name a few negatives.

Higher education’s response was far more tepid than it should have been. Instead, it built branch campuses abroad, engaged in social, economic and political development and economic markets abroad and touted the formation of multinational higher education associations.

Meanwhile, all was not good at home, and the benefits of higher education internationalisation were not well and thoroughly documented at home through public education, problem solving and public diplomacy.

Globalisation and internationalisation are not synonyms, but there may be some ‘guilt by association’ given their co-histories and interactions. Yet, the core values of internationalisation seek, among other ends, to educate and prepare people and societies for interactions in a global environment; to mediate between the local and global; and to enable collaboration and cooperation, ideally resulting in mutual benefit.

All this is facilitated by cross-national, cross-cultural knowledge and understanding. It is not how we internationalise but rather the core values or ends that we pursue that define its raison d’etre. At any point in time particular programmes and priorities (for example, mobility, transnational education, etc) are the current means to larger ends. However, the viability and utility of particular means shift over time.

A recent article used the term ‘post internationalisation’. I don’t know what that means if it is not about jettisoning the core values, ends and goals of internationalisation. With resurgent nationalism, the importance of the original meaning of (inter)national remains. It is an alternative to attempts to build a fence, to ‘wall off’.

Walling off is impossible given the internet, relatively easy and cheap travel, instant global communication and idea spread and complex economic and political cross-national interdependence, which the recent moronic experiments with tariffs demonstrate. Internationalisation is about recognising the impossibility of isolation.

A welcome recent publication in University World News touts the importance of internationalisation of community development and problem solving.

While the role of higher education institutions in internationalising community engagement is not a new concept, it is a welcome reminder about a key component to building internationalisation: public support. The future of internationalisation of higher education and elsewhere is heavily dependent on its value as seen in the eyes of various publics.

• Second, the recent rise of largely (but not only) neo-conservative nationalist politics in many world regions has added fuel to the discussion. Nationalism and unbridled globalisation join to create an environment of hostility towards other countries and cultures.

US President Donald Trump is currently the most visible poster child for this, for instance, the USA first policy, his tariffs on goods from abroad, anti-immigration actions and opposition to diversity. But he has many bedfellows on every continent. One wonders if adherents to this litany of prescriptions realise that it is at best a zero-sum game, and most likely, far worse.

• Third, massive migrations and the appearance of open immigration, especially of the poorer moving to richer countries, are conflated by some as being associated with internationalisation. This is largely untrue. Few, if any, countries, even the United States with its Statue of Liberty, are comfortable with large-scale migrations, even when ameliorated somewhat by those who come bringing intellectual capital that adds to the country’s competitiveness and financial wherewithal for investment or brings cheap labour for jobs no one else will do.

Add racial, ethnic or religious diversity to the immigrant wave and opposition intensifies. Internationalisation’s core values seek to mediate the consequences of migration, rather than opposing or championing it per se.

• Fourth, internationalists have not recognised fast enough how the environment for internationalisation is undergoing radical transformation. Partly, this is the result of confusing end goals with traditional means. For example, for many, growth in mobility numbers is a hallmark of the end game.

While mobility of students and scholars is an essential component of internationalisation, it is but one tool in the internationalisation tool box. Standing on its own, mobility is an easy target in the current reactionary, anti-immigration environment. It needs to be integrated with other actions (for example, internationalising on-campus curricula, faculty scholarship and community engagement) to address the core rationales of internationalisation.

Internationalisation methods are being reshaped by AI, technology and virtual options, by the spread of global capacity and by emerging new centres of both supply and demand for various kinds of partnerships and cutting-edge knowledge. These and other realities require a continuous evolution in the methods of internationalisation.

The genie is out of the bottle

A strong ally exists when it comes to a resurgence of internationalisation. Leaders come and go, so do ideologies and simple solutions to complex issues. But the genie is out of the bottle in terms of our nearly borderless world – and it won’t be put back in.

The unimpeded flows of just about everything through borders is our reality: in capital flows, ideas and discoveries from everywhere, migration, trade, labour mobility, culture and less desirable commodities such as disease, terrorism and cyber threat.

Even a resurgent return to tariffs as a weapon will run its course; trade will continue, but perhaps under different ‘rules of the game’. Nonetheless, exercising a tariff sledge hammer has already demonstrated how such blows activate a myriad of global interconnections, producing both intended and many bad, unintended consequences.

Sooner or later we will find that meat-cleaver and hammer approaches to tariffs or other areas of public policy cause much more negative than positive results.

Global challenges are too complex to be solved with walls, tariffs and sledge hammers or meat cleavers. Have we learned nothing in the last 100 years?

A job still there to do

Internationalisation’s future requires internationalists to step up their action and rhetoric rather than dithering under a banner of ‘woe is us’. The job is tougher than a decade ago, but the job is still there to do.

The prescription has been understood for some time:

• We need to re-energise campus dialogue regarding internationalisation to show it is fundamentally related to academic units and their missions. Quality 21st century higher education requires connections to global pathways of knowledge, ideas and learning. We must build an embedded and campus-wide culture of understanding and support that lays the foundations to integrate international perspectives, knowledge and understanding into all core missions.

• We need to leverage technology in internationalisation reforms. The intelligent integration of technology into the methods of international engagement can reduce costs, expand access and improve results.

• We must renew our understanding of and attention to internationalisation’s end goals and create the space to diversify the methods and means by which international activity is carried out in different environments.

• We must focus on outcomes and define, measure and demonstrate the achievement of outcomes that ultimately define internationalisation’s value and provide the basis to support it. Relying on suboptimal metrics for internationalisation (such as money spent, or numbers of students abroad or incoming, or numbers of cross-border memoranda of understanding) are damaging on their own.

Outcomes, the achievement of goals, are the ultimate measures of value: for example, impacts on student learning, attitudes, beliefs, skills and careers, new knowledge and applications and impacts on people’s well-being and on community problem-solving and advancement.

• We need to optimise cross-border partnerships and de-emphasise the number of such partnerships while focusing instead on their contributions to the core values of internationalisation and strengthening key missions. These partnerships should be engaged under models of co-production.

• We must energise civic engagement. Institutions should mediate intersections of the local and global, and help the local to prudently engage with the global.

Is it no longer of value that our graduates know and experience something of the world beyond our borders, and are able to function in it?

Is it no longer relevant to envision scholarship that is cross-culturally informed and with ready access to the global pathways of ideas and creativity?

Is it no longer relevant that our communities who are often tossed about in a global environment need help negotiating interactions in the global domain?

John K Hudzik is a professor and vice president emeritus at Michigan State University, United States.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.