What golden era?
Still other readers questioned if international education ever truly had a golden era. Sabine C. Klahr, associate vice provost for global at Penn State University, said she recently took part in a leadership program for aspiring presidents and provosts. Many topics were covered in the program, she said, but internationalization was not among them.
“It’s not seen as standard knowledge needed by administrators,” she wrote.
Klahr noted that there has been some contraction in colleges’ international work because of the pandemic, “but the bigger issue, I believe, is that it has never been fully embraced and made a priority by the majority of institutions in the U.S. to begin with. The U.S. needs a national strategy, senior international officers need to be part of the institutional leadership, and the role of SIO should be a standard leadership position in higher education.”
One problem, Klahr said, is that international education has often been defined narrowly, as international students enrolling at American colleges and American students studying abroad.
“Most of higher-education leadership hears ‘international education,’ and all they think of is student mobility,” agreed Meredith McQuaid, associate vice president and dean of international programs for the University of Minnesota system. “We can’t even say if we’ve won if all we can count is mobility.”
McQuaid told me that international educators must get better at talking about their work and have clearer and more multifaceted ways of measuring its impact: “Maybe we need new words, new vocabulary, to describe what we do — and to excite others.”
Michael Woolf, deputy president for strategic development for Capa: The Global Education Network, said there’s a need to re-evaluate assumptions about what “good” international education looks like. Too often, he said, the models held up as ideal are Western or even specifically American. For other parts of the world, they may not be culturally appropriate or even achievable. “It takes serious cash to define your community as international,” Woolf wrote, noting that student exchanges and participation in international academic conferences can be costly.
“If institutional commitment to the goal of internationalization is a critical measure of quality, we are, unintentionally and unconsciously perhaps, creating a hierarchy based upon wealth, and re-enacting quasi-colonial attitudes,” he said. “We need to see the principle of comprehensive internationalization critically through a lens of greater humility and an awareness of implicit bias.”
Several readers said that global learning needs to grapple more directly with the significant issues of our time, such as sustainability, human rights, and global citizenship. Linyuan Guo-Brennan, a professor of international and global education at the University of Prince Edward Island, in Canada, wrote that the need for international education has increased, but it must be “a reconceptualized model toward the global common good.”
International education must be mainstreamed into teaching, learning, and research, she added, not walled off in study abroad.
Back to Freed, of the University of Michigan, and his S-curve. He posited that two developments are “the next big thing that will accelerate us back into growth”: internationalization at a distance and “truly collaborative” global partnerships.
With travel halted, the pandemic forced international educators’ hands when it came to virtual learning, leading to the overnight creation of virtual study-abroad programs and internships, and better delivery of online education to students stuck overseas. Such efforts should continue since today’s students are digital natives, Freed said. “We’ve taken baby steps in that direction as a field, but soon we’ll be taking great leaps.”
And too often, partnerships with overseas universities have been one-dimensional, focusing on student exchanges or joint research, Freed said, predicting that international collaborations will become more robust and less siloed.
“We haven’t had to work too hard to gain traction over all in the higher-ed space for the past few decades,” he wrote. “It’s going to feel harder moving forward, but there are still ample opportunities for growth and to extend that ‘golden era.’”
As I mentioned, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I’ll be back in the coming weeks with more responses, including how some veteran international-education administrators see the field and its challenges. In the meantime, please continue to send me your thoughts: What do you make of the takes shared here? What do you think are the biggest pressure points for international education? Which topics need more airing? As always, you can find me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
