It’s time to understand the limits of internationalisation

The recent political attack on Harvard University’s international student enrolment – framed under the banner of national sovereignty and fuelled by arguments central to the Trumpist agenda, such as the defence of domestic interests, control over migration and suspicion of foreign influence – has reignited a familiar debate in higher education about the autonomy of the university.

It has also challenged the legitimacy of the most established internationalisation practices and actors.

For many, Donald Trump’s decision appears as a clear affront to the freedom of academic institutions to define their priorities, cultivate global networks, hire and attract foreign talents and remain insulated from political interference.

Not surprisingly, beautifully resonant words surface in such moments: freedom, autonomy, globalisation, and universality.

But these reactions, however normatively charged, may obscure a deeper structural reality. What is being tested today is not autonomy itself but a particular notion of autonomy that no longer holds plausibility under the actual conditions of global higher education systems.

This is not to say that political encroachment is irrelevant. On the contrary, it is precisely because political systems can now so effectively limit the university’s operations – and will likely do so more frequently in the future, aided by new surveillance technologies and regulatory frameworks – that we must ask what kind of autonomy is actually at stake.

Social systems theory offers a productive conceptual lens. Modern society is functionally differentiated into systems – such as politics, economy, law and education – each operating according to its own binary code and internal logic.

These systems are operationally closed: they observe and reproduce themselves through their own communications. And yet, they remain structurally coupled to one another. This coupling does not imply harmony or fusion – it is better described as mutual irritation.

The university is an organisation that is embedded within and dependent upon multiple systems: education, science, politics and economy, among others.

It processes knowledge, but it also negotiates funding, deals with legal constraints and responds to ideological signals from other parts of society, as well as to its territories, whether local, national or regional. Its existence thus relies on the successful management of these couplings.

Internationalisation has historically served as a key mechanism through which universities expanded their external linkages.

It has enabled institutions to secure public and private funding, elevate their prestige through global rankings, attract international talent, promote academic collaboration and strategically position researchers and their agendas with transnational scientific networks.

In doing so, internationalisation became central not only to the academic and research mission of universities but also to their institutional sustainability and global relevance.

However, this global openness was never self-grounding. It depended on legal infrastructures, migration regimes, visa policies and public narratives about the value of science and diversity and equality and, above all, the political will to sustain international flows. This is precisely where the idea of autonomy encounters its structural limits.

The need for cognitive justice

As seen in the confrontation between Trump’s political project and Harvard’s institutional agenda, the university may internally determine that internationalisation is desirable – even essential – but such a decision holds little operational force if it is not reinforced by the broader legal and political environment.

When permissions are withdrawn or external frameworks become hostile, the coupling collapses. Autonomy is not dramatically revoked; rather, it erodes incrementally, revealing its fragile dependence on external conditions for internal action.

At the same time, with these actions internationalisation itself is made painfully aware of its internal limits. The dominant models often overlook intercultural awareness, failing to challenge epistemic hierarchies and neglecting the pluriversality of knowledge.

Without a deliberate commitment to inclusivity and cognitive justice – both of which remain far from universally embraced – internationalisation risks reinforcing exclusionary practices that favour a narrow set of actors and institutions.

In this context, the emerging threats are not only legal or political but also epistemological and cultural – calling into question the overall legitimacy of internationalisation.

It is tempting to respond to these challenges by invoking the classic vocabulary of academic freedom, institutional autonomy and the public good. Yet while these notions carry immense normative weight, they may be descriptively inadequate.

They suggest a form of sovereignty that universities and their actors (academics, students and staff) never fully possessed. What they possess instead is the capacity to manage interdependence and stabilise their relations with other systems.

Universities have never been autonomous entities existing in protected domains; they are organisational nodes that are increasingly required to operate across conflicting systemic logics. And this is not just an expectation – it is becoming a precondition of their legitimacy.

Epistemic justice

The crisis of internationalisation is therefore not merely the expression of increasing political hostility. It also signals a deeper transformation in the relational architecture – particularly in how academic prestige, research collaboration and global interconnectedness are linked with questions of epistemic justice and legitimacy.

When internationalisation is perceived as a liability rather than a strategic asset, this does not represent the collapse of autonomy, but rather a reconfiguration of the systemic couplings that sustain the university’s role in the global knowledge order.

Globally, what the university must now confront is not a single authoritarian leader or populist wave but a changing regime of legitimacy – one in which traditional scripts are being redefined, politically recalibrated and rendered conditional.

What Harvard reveals is not the end of internationalisation, nor the end of the global university. Nor is the lesson, as Trump’s camp might hope, one of submission.

Rather, it marks the end of a particular illusion: that autonomy was self-sustaining or that global integration guaranteed institutional freedom, public good, integration and equitable collaboration.

In reality, autonomy was always a temporary alignment between systems – a moment of compatibility among legal frameworks, political permissions and academic aspirations. That alignment has fractured – and, more importantly, its limits have become visible.

The challenge now is to develop a new grammar of internationalisation, one that is not nostalgic for sovereignty but alert to the complex, contingent and differentiated conditions under which universities and their internal and external actors must survive today.

Julio Labraña is the director of institutional quality and a professor in the department of education at the University of Tarapacá in Chile. Paulina Latorre is a scholar practitioner in the internationalisation of higher education. She has worked for more than 11 years in this area at several Chilean universities. She currently serves as director of international relations at Universidad Catolica del Norte, Chile.

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