Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not, Says Arthur Levine

The question isn’t whether American higher education will become more internationalized, said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, but rather what a fully internationalized university will look like, and how long it will take for such changes to occur.

“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.

In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”

Colleges today support an array of international activities, such as study abroad, the recruitment of international students, and overseas research. But those disparate parts don’t add up to a wholly internationalized institution, Mr. Levine argued.

He challenged international-education administrators to take the lead in shaping the global university, saying they were well positioned to drive such change.

“We have the opportunity to integrate, to make the parts make more sense,” Mr. Levine said, concluding, “Generations after us will wake up to an entirely different university.”