As a bright young doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mary Kathryn Thompson was headed toward a job as an engineering professor at a top American university. But a conversation with a prominent professor at MIT changed that, virtually overnight.
The professor, Nam-Pyo Suh, who was from South Korea, had worked in science policy for the Reagan administration and had chaired the mechanical-engineering department at MIT. He told her he was leaving to be a dean at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, known as Kaist. He wanted Ms. Thompson to consider coming along.
Ms. Thompson knew little about Korea, but Mr. Suh made a career at Kaist sound like a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she says. It didn’t take long for her to think of his suggestion as “a huge, flashing neon sign from the universe saying, ‘You are moving to Korea. Have a nice day.’”
Mr. Suh is now president of Kaist, South Korea’s premier science-and-technology university, and Ms. Thompson has been there for two years, as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Some people still ask if she left the United States because she couldn’t find an academic post at home. But she’s had more opportunities in Korea than she ever would have in the States, she says. She directs the required engineering-design course for 800 freshmen at Kaist, a job that at American institutions is typically reserved for more-seasoned professors. And as a young, female, American engineer, Ms. Thompson is a novelty in Korea, something that gives her a soapbox. She has spoken on the radio about women in science and engineering, and she writes a column for The Korea Herald, the country’s largest English-language newspaper.
“I have the job of a lifetime,” she says. “But some people can’t see beyond some narrow definition of what they think the good life is.”
Ms. Thompson is one of a very small number of American academics who have left the United States to make careers at foreign universities. The Chronicle talked with more than two dozen of them, who have moved to Bosnia, Egypt, England, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, among other places. A few work for foreign universities with strong American ties, but most work for institutions established and financed by foreign entities.
Conventional wisdom may be that Americans at foreign universities leave because they can’t hack academe in the States. In fact, they take the leap for all sorts of reasons. Some did leave because the American job market was so tight. Others were finishing long academic careers in the United States and wanted a new challenge, while some wanted to pursue research that is centered in other countries. Still others are adventure junkies who hop from one foreign university to another every few years, sometimes with their families in tow.
All of these professors face questions from their colleagues back home, foremost among them: Why did you leave American higher education when it is considered by most to be the best in the world? Some of the globe-trotting academics have wondered themselves whether they can stay competitive while working outside the States, and if they can ever make it back to the American tenure track.
Few American professors advise their Ph.D. candidates to take jobs overseas. The risks of getting disconnected from American higher education are perceived as too high, and the benefits at foreign institutions too few. But that may be changing.
“There is a perception perpetuated by dissertation chairs that if you go outside the U.S., it will be very difficult for you to publish in U.S. journals, you’ll have high teaching loads, and there won’t be good resources,” says P. Christopher Earley, who spent 11 years in London and Singapore before returning, two years ago, to be dean of business at the University of Connecticut. “But that simply isn’t true any more.”
‘Surprisingly Uninterested’
While American higher education has made internationalization a watchword, few Americans scholars spend much time working abroad. In addition, relatively few write journal articles with foreign peers or include international subjects in their research, according to a 2007 survey of 1,084 American professors that was part of a broader survey of scholars in 19 countries.
“The U.S. academy overall is surprisingly uninterested in the rest of the world,” says William K. Cummings, a professor of international education at George Washington University who completed the survey together with researchers at Seton Hall University. Only a third of the American scholars reported spending at least a year abroad after earning their bachelor’s degrees, and just 20 percent said they had spent at least three years abroad. “This is still kind of the center of the academic universe,” says Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education, at Boston College.
A Chronicle survey completed this fall shows that while lots of American faculty members say they would consider taking jobs abroad, a much smaller proportion have actually spent much time working abroad or are actively pursuing posts in other countries.
For this article, The Chronicle asked deans and provosts at several American institutions—Princeton, Pennsylvania State, and North Dakota State Universities and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology—whether they faced competition from foreign universities, either in hanging onto their current professors or in hiring new ones. Their answer: No.
Kevin D. McCaul, dean of science and mathematics at North Dakota State, says scholars with international experience do have “a bit of cachet, that academically they’ve been exposed to a different system and creative ways of doing things.”
But to be hired by his university, he says, scholars who have held posts abroad must have CV’s that look no different from scholars who’ve stayed in the States in terms of research and publishing.
Ronald S. Kane, dean of graduate studies at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, agrees. “We’re still going to look at credentials: Where they got their doctorate, their research activity, do they have a record of grantsmanship and publications?”
For their part, many foreign universities are working hard to attract American scholars. Some governments, particularly those in Asia and the Middle East, are pouring money into creating or expanding universities at a time when public higher education in the United States is retrenching. Some foreign institutions, which see hiring American academics as a way to increase their international prestige, offer hefty salaries and provide substantial perks to American recruits. And English is an official language at many prominent universities abroad, making the transition easy for American professors.
Administrators at foreign universities say American scholars are attracted by competitive salaries, subsidized housing, and the idea of living in highly diverse cities that are jumping-off points to the rest of the world. Some universities make research money easier to get than in the United States, and provide travel funds so Americans can attend important conferences and stay in contact with colleagues back home.
Some American academics also are intrigued, the administrators say, by the chance to play leadership roles in shaping institutions that are much less established than those in the States and are growing rapidly.
Wyatt R. Hume left a top job in the cash-strapped University of California system last year to become provost of the United Arab Emirates University, which wants to transform itself into a top-notch research institution. “Working to maintain quality against a reduction in public funds is much less interesting than working to build quality in a place where there are good resources,” he says.
Four of the 10 deans at Mr. Hume’s university are from the United States, although only about 8 percent of the 800 faculty members are. Mr. Hume says he is trying to persuade American scholars that a job on the Persian Gulf campus will eventually help them move up the academic ladder in the United States. “They can come here, where the resources are much more freely available, and build a program that is a good steppingstone to being a dean or a president,” he says.
Technology, too, has made overseas jobs seem more connected to home. At the same time that foreign institutions have become more lucrative and interesting places for American scholars to work, e-mail, Skype, and the Web have made living abroad, and keeping in touch with colleagues in the States, simpler than it used to be.
“What intimidates people about coming here is that they feel like they are dropping off the edge of the earth,” says Lisa Anderson, who left Columbia University to become provost of the American University in Cairo just over a year ago. “But with information and communication technologies, this is not a backwater any more.”
Under an agreement with the Egyptian government, up to 45 percent of the 420 faculty members at the Cairo institution, which is accredited in Egypt and in the United States, can be American. Ms. Anderson has helped recruit 36 American professors in her first year there.
Recruiting American scholars from halfway around the world can be a challenge, and it doesn’t always work out. Foreign universities can’t always afford to bring Americans in for interviews, so institutions frequently hire the scholars sight unseen. Denis Prcic, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has had to dismiss some American scholars after administrators realized that they were alcoholics or had fabricated their CV’s. Now, when the university hires foreign scholars, they must pass a three-week probation. “We can send them back if it doesn’t work out,” says Mr. Prcic.
View From the 15th Floor
The National University of Singapore has used high salaries, attractive housing, and easy-to-get grant money to help it recruit American professors. Richard D. Arvey was so impressed that he left behind an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities three years ago to join Singapore’s business school.
“I loved Minnesota, but I was there for so damn long,” he says. “I said, Let’s try something new.”
The professor, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, figures he is earning the equivalent of $300,000 per year. He lives in a three-bedroom apartment on the 15th floor of a building overlooking the Singapore Botanic Gardens and pays only $700 a month, because the university subsidizes the rent.
One downside, says Mr. Arvey, is that professors at Singapore have somewhat less freedom than do their counterparts at American universities, because of a bulky bureaucracy. “You have to report where you are and what you’re doing at all times and get approval,” he says.
And Mr. Arvey, who is 65 years old and gave up tenure when he moved, is not eligible for tenure in Singapore, where professors must retire from the tenure track at age 65. Instead he has been working on multiyear contracts. But that doesn’t seem to bother him. “I could work anywhere,” he says. “I never worried about losing my job.”
He is among a group of Americans who have had distinguished academic careers in the United States and want to take what one of them called “a victory lap” at a foreign university.
At the other end of the spectrum are younger academics who find foreign institutions their best chance of making it into higher education.
David R. Koepsell applied for more than 100 academic jobs in the United States over the past few years with no luck. He had earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy in the late 1990s, then did some adjunct teaching at the University at Buffalo before trying to jump-start his academic career in 2006 by taking a postdoctoral position in bioethics at Yale University.
But “it was becoming clear to me,” he says, “that I wasn’t wanted in the American job market, for whatever reason.” So when he saw an opening for an assistant professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, he applied and got it.
“It’s a dream job,” says Mr. Koepsell, who has been there since 2008. Each year he teaches just three courses, for five weeks each, leaving him plenty of time for research. He just published a book, Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes (Wiley-Blackwell). “I’ve been doing talks in the U.S.,” he says. “It’s a good idea to keep myself known in that market.”
Before Neil Gross took a job at a foreign university last year, he was in a very different position than Mr. Koepsell’s. He had a tenure-track job in sociology at Harvard University, but he didn’t quite trust that option. Harvard isn’t known for offering tenure to its junior scholars: The last time one came up the ranks and earned tenure in sociology was in the early 1990s, he says. “Everyone in the department was telling me to go for it, but it is a very, very risky proposition.”
Mr. Gross knew that if he didn’t get tenure at Harvard, he could probably land a post at another good American university. But when he saw an announcement for a job with tenure at the University of British Columbia, applying for it “was a no-brainer,” he says. “It’s hard to think of an American university that would be in a place we liked much more than we like Vancouver.”
There was a sense among some of his American colleagues that “this was kind of a strange move,” he says, but it doesn’t seem to have taken him away from the center of his field. In August he became editor of Sociological Theory, a journal of the American Sociological Association, making him the only scholar to ever edit an association journal who does not work at a U.S. institution.
Less Academic Freedom?
Norman S. Wright has never been concerned about earning tenure in the United States. He was a professor of business for nine years at Brigham Young University’s Hawaii campus, where there is no tenure track. But for the past five years, he has worked in the Middle East and in Africa. “I’ve always been an internationalist,” he says. “I dreamed of traveling and being abroad ever since I was a little kid.”
Since last year, Mr. Wright has been acting dean of business at Alfaisal University, in Saudi Arabia. Before that he worked at the American University of Sharjah and Zayed University, in the United Arab Emirates, and at the American University of Nigeria. As an American business professor in the Middle East, he says, he is thought of as “something quite special” and has been asked to act as a business consultant to foreign-government officials.
“The U.S. market is quite saturated with executive M.B.A. programs,” he says. “But in many of these places, you are one of the first in that market. You get people knocking on your doors, which you would have to work hard to develop if you were in the States.” An ambitious professor who seeks out business-consulting opportunities could earn close to double his university salary, Mr. Wright says.
Mr. Wright is married with three children, and having his family along for his travels has been exciting but also a challenge. In Nigeria his wife became ill after taking antimalarial medication and had to return with their daughter to Hawaii, where they maintain a home. Mr. Wright was left in Nigeria with his two young sons, both of whom eventually got malaria.
Now his sons are teenagers and want to play on a high-school soccer team and go surfing back in Hawaii. But Mr. Wright is reluctant to call his international career over. “I have trouble seeing myself staying in the U.S. permanently,” he says. “The experiences are just too interesting in terms of work and cultural life.”
Despite the enthusiasm of scholars like Mr. Wright, many Americans who have taken jobs at foreign institutions advise a kind of buyer-beware attitude. Aspects of higher education that scholars might take for granted in America are not always sure things abroad, these veterans say. One of those is academic freedom.
For example, Mr. Earley, who was a dean at the National University of Singapore before returning to Connecticut, says that “in Singapore there is a very, very strong emphasis on social harmony that is regulated and imposed by the government.” Scholars who might write or speak about a controversy involving race or religion “could be seen as trying to imbalance the harmony” and could face government censorship.
In addition, Americans scholars who take jobs abroad often do so sight unseen, and the reality doesn’t always live up to the advertising.
After 10 years in the chemistry department at Emporia State University, in Kansas, James D. Roach Jr., was lured to Alfaisal University by the attraction of a reduced course load and enhanced research opportunities. But when he arrived last year, he says, there were no chemistry labs yet, and the campus—which had just opened for classes—"was very much a work in progress.” This fall Mr. Roach moved again, to become an assistant professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.
So far he’s been pleasantly surprised. During his second day on the job, he suffered from a kidney stone. Residents of Qatar on work permits have access to low-cost health care. “I saw three doctors and two nurses, and the entire visit cost me $1.10,” says Mr. Roach, who lives in a furnished apartment, provided by the university, that overlooks the Persian Gulf.
The quality of his students, the workload, and the availability of research money at his new university are “phenomenal,” he says. “I tell friends and family back home all the time that I feel as though I’ve won the lottery. I could be here awhile.”
