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Institute of
International Education
809 United Nations Plaza
7th Floor
New York, NY 10017
USA
Tel: +1 (212) 984 5367
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Should We Be Institutionalized? |
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By Nancy A. Marlin
from AIEA Conference
Let me begin by telling you a story.
On a warm summer Iowa morning in August of 1991, I awoke to NPR on my clock radio broadcasting the developing and confusing news reports of a coup in the then-Soviet Union. Within moments I sat straight upright in bed and said, perhaps to myself or perhaps aloud, “Where are our students?” We had what at that time was an extremely unusual program through which Soviet students could study for their entire master’s degree at the University of Northern Iowa, and I had just returned from Moscow a few weeks earlier where I had visited our Soviet students who, owing to the uniqueness to this program, were well known to me individually. Images of them were fixed in my mind as I frantically attempted to mentally reconstruct their travel schedule for their return to campus, and my phone began ringing with other concerned people asking me what I knew. I, of course, knew nothing of what was occurring nor what might occur in a typical coup – if there is such a thing – but I could easily envision airports being closed, visas being cancelled, and because at that time because we were still in a cold war posture, I began to fearfully speculate on a possible U.S. response. Following an anxious series of phone calls, I learned that our students had just arrived and that our one faculty member who was also returning from Moscow had landed that morning in Frankfurt – although being a Russian historian he was actually quite dismayed to have missed witnessing this dramatic chapter of Russian history.
I share this story with you because that experience, and my thoughts during those moments, provided me with a glimpse of thinking from an international perspective at a highly personal level. My international experience had indeed changed my world view; although I clearly thought of myself as a U.S. citizen, I also was thinking in ways that transcended traditional geopolitical boundaries. This is a characteristic I espouse in terms of what it means to be an educated citizen in a global world, that one must have a personal self-identity that includes being a global citizen, but for me this was the first incident I can consciously recall that such a quality was not merely a theoretical concept that we list as one of our aspirational educational goals.
Although terms like global or international citizen seemingly trivialize this profound shift in one’s self-identity and perspective, I fervently believe this concept of global citizenry must be part of the education we provide. In the world in which our students will be living and working, traditional geopolitical boundaries continue to become less relevant and this phenomenon has been described ad nauseum in business and mass media and technology and communication. Borders recede as supply chains, call centers, even warfare no longer fall within established boundaries. And we see such internationalization within almost all of our academic disciplines: the problems are global problems. Environmental degradation, immigration policy, pandemics and global warming are not constrained to any one place, and through globalization everything becomes inextricably intertwined. We are told, for instance, that as maintaining low mortgage rates in the U.S. depends on China’s continuing investment in U.S. Treasury Notes. Everything has become so globally intertwined that an understanding of any academic field demands this global or world citizen perspective.
And long before student learning outcome assessment principles were articulated, because we do care about student learning and human development, many of us were evaluating what experiences and university programs were most effective in producing liberally educated people. Beyond the usual classroom experience, it is clear that student learning is greatly enhanced by programs such as undergraduate research, creative uses of technology, internships, inquiry-based learning, and more recently, programs in community-based service learning. Yet in my own, admittedly limited, evaluation of the effect various university programs had on students, there was nothing as powerful in its educational influence as international experience. Nothing. To a person, and I’m suspect this comports with your observations, students are transformed by their international experience and usually report that it was not only the most valuable thing they had done within the university, but the most valuable thing they had ever done in their lives. They had begun to develop their self-identity as a citizen of our world.
You know all this. You’ve seen this experience repeatedly in your own students, and although you may not be able to specify defining moments, as in my Russia story, you’ve had similar experiences. I suspect that is in part why you’ve devoted your careers to advancing international education – because you want to make a difference in the lives of individual students, and, hopefully, our collective future, and you well know that with international education, you have the opportunity to make such a difference.
Now I have to confess that while I use this nomenclature of global citizenship, I, as many, don’t understand completely what it means. I do know that it is an inherently difficult concept because it contradicts citizenship being delineated by country, and determined almost exclusively by birth; hence the term “natural born citizen.” Global citizenship is different. Not only does it lack legal standing but it is certainly not a natural perspective. Psychologically, and I am an experimental psychologist, xenophobia for most of evolution was highly adaptive, just as throughout most of evolution consumption of calorically dense food has been adaptive. But in the environment of the developed world in which calorically dense foods abound, this formerly adaptive behavior leads to maladaptive consequences. Similarly, the previously adaptive xenophobia, in which the sight of strangers evoked strong aggressive responses both by individuals and groups, in our current world is a pernicious response with sometimes pathological results. It requires education to overcome evolutionarily selected behaviors, but, fortunately, we are educators.
Those of us who are passionate about international education, and I include myself, often can become obsessed and view international education as the panacea to all of the economic, political, ethnic, social and religious problems of the world. Hence, my title, Should We Be Institutionalized? is a rather insipid attempt at humor because we do, and I do at times, become somewhat delusional about how we’re going to change our world through the power of international education. But the less delusional side of institutionalization is what I want to now focus on in some detail.
Within our institutions of higher education, international education is often very fragmented or marginalized or the work of a few dedicated individuals, and thus institutionally the status of international education is usually relegated to being an add-on or an afterthought. In the same way we advocate the need to understand culture, we must examine our own campus culture from an institutionally holistic perspective. How is internationalization part of that culture? Is it the norm? Is this type of learning is expected of all students? My primary thesis is that international education and the resultant development of world citizenship is so critical that it must be institutionalized. My mantra of institutionalization means that all facets of the institution, its policies, its budget, and its curriculum must support international initiatives that are sustainable and scalable.
Let me briefly review six areas that pragmatically must be addressed if international education is to be institutionalized within universities. These areas are not orthogonal and I will give examples based on my own experience, which obviously I offer not as the best way to do things, but the way I’ve worked in a concerted attempt to institutionalize international education.
The first of these, which is usually the simplest, is that international education must be included in the institution’s strategic plan and goals. When I began my current position, the university had just completed a two-year planning process that delineated five major goals, including one for internationalization. This laudable goal was tediously arrived at by committees, but included nothing specific of what would be done to achieve the goal. There was a need to operationalize that goal and establish some specific metrics with face validity through which progress could be assessed. I focused on student mobility with the specific goal that within five years 30% of our students would graduate with an international experience. I’ll return momentarily to describe some emerging initiatives regarding inbound international students as the changes with this population require some greater elaboration.
The second component of institutionalization is the administrative structure within the shared governance context of the university. This includes administrative offices and staffing of these offices, such that there are advisors for both the inbound and outbound students, as well as required corollary aspects such as risk management. It is simply not an effective use of faculty time to have faculty purchasing group airline tickets or arranging for health insurance, nor is it advantageous to the institution because this approach only increases institutional liability. Similarly, the appropriate structures within faculty governance need to be established to address international education through committees and councils comparable to those for other institutional functions such as curriculum or promotion and tenure.
Obviously all of the staffing issues have very real costs and this links to the third part of what is required for institutionalization: resources. Beyond direct administrative costs, an approach I found extremely productive and cost-effective is providing small competitive grants for faculty to travel internationally to arrange for their students to study abroad. Without institutional funds for international travel, the budget is not properly aligned to the plan and is not likely to yield the desired results.
The fourth component I see as critical in institutionalization is faculty leadership. The good news is that it is very rare to find faculty who are adamantly opposed to internationalization, but the bad news is that studies of faculty reveal that they don’t see it as critical. For instance, in the 2004 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement here in the U.S., less than half of the faculty indicated it was important or very important that undergraduates at their institution study abroad – and almost a quarter of the faculty (23%) responded to that question by indicating study abroad was not important.
Sustainable changes don’t occur at universities without faculty leadership and support, and yet part of the reason faculty may not be supportive is that international education isn’t an area with which they have necessarily had experience themselves, and the idea of professors not appearing as experts is often rather threatening. This situation makes faculty development important to overcome such faculty reluctance.
The fifth area – and you’ll note we continue to move deeper into the organization and hence to a greater level of institutionalization – is the curriculum. Faculty leadership and support are obviously essential here because the curriculum, as it properly should be, is the purview of the faculty. It is through imbedding international education in the curriculum that we have the greatest opportunity for long-term sustainability because you all know how difficult it is to ever change the curriculum! One of the most potent curricular efforts in my experience is making international experience a degree requirement. At San Diego State University we now require an international experience for students majoring in International Business, Spanish, European Studies and International Security and Conflict Resolution, as well as for students in the University Honors Program, the International Specialization within Economics, and the performance area of Theatre. I continue to advocate an international experience as a graduation requirement for many of the academic programs where it is most obvious, including majors in the languages and area studies. To me it is simply incongruous and academically bereft that we would award a degree in, for example, European Studies, to someone who has never studied in Europe. Beyond the required coursework in the major, all undergraduate students in the U.S. take the general education sequence, and I think required international components within general education can be extremely effective. Regrettably, I cannot speak from personal experience here because San Diego State University’s general education is not yet at that level, but I am gratified to see many U.S. universities and some professional organizations, notably AAC&U, taking leadership roles in internationalizing the general education curriculum.
Finally, the sixth pragmatic aspect of institutionalization is the university’s self-image as evidenced through its communication strategy. The university’s commitment to internationalization needs to be communicated in purposeful and focused ways. Internal communication is sometimes easiest and is often overlooked because we are busy chasing after increases in public reputation. Although I know some campus people are weary of my emphasis on internationalization – I know this because they tell me so – I try to include this topic in many of my speeches and then use particular examples for specific audiences. For example, when I speak at the Freshmen Orientation sessions during the summer, I tell incoming students and their families about the importance of study abroad and the many opportunities they will have for this at San Diego State University, and I address the myths that our students have of study abroad being exorbitantly expensive and delaying their graduation. I also am beginning to host dinners of faculty who do wonderful work internationally but usually aren’t cognizant of the work of faculty colleagues, even those working in the same regions. It is also important that internal communications repeatedly share data related to internationalization, such as the number of faculty and student Fulbright scholars, and the number of inbound and outbound students. This information becomes not only a source of pride, but promotes viewing internationalization as part of the university culture. San Diego State University has been very purposefully featuring students studying abroad in its external communications. For example, we just began airing a wonderful television piece about a student at the airport about to leave for her study abroad. And this semester, we are launching a new project in which students will maintain web blogs on the university website while abroad.
Allow me to return to the topic of international students, a critical aspect of internationalization that deserves special attention because of what it portends for future international relations and, within the U.S., for the country’s economy and leadership role in science and technology. I’ve often heard comments along the line of simply having international students doesn’t do anything to internationalize the campus. I disagree. Although I realize such comments are intended to urge campuses to make more effective use of this valued resource of international students, their presence does indeed enrich our classes by providing a more multicultural perspective, and I relish the true diversity of our campus as I walk along and overhear languages that I can’t even identify. Moreover, one of the less direct but important effects is that the presence of these international students makes very real and tangible for U.S. students what the results of nationally comparative surveys have been telling us for many years about the quality of education in the U.S. compared to other countries. This allows our U.S. students to understand the true level of competition that exists in an increasingly global world, and is often a sobering and shocking lesson to students who have largely been insulated from this reality.
International students on U.S. campuses have largely, up until the past few years, been a free good. Although they required specialized student services, there was often minimal recruitment required because these students came in large numbers seeking a U.S. education. This has, of course, all changed dramatically in the past few years. You know these data better than I do. The number of foreign students studying in the U.S. has decreased and there are three reasons that I would offer from my own perspective, all of which suggest that the situation is not likely to be easily reversed. First, although some of the more egregious post 9-11 restrictions have been mollified, the U.S. is largely viewed as an unwelcoming country for international students for reasons that range from current U.S. international policy, to the excessive paperwork and delays involved in even the more simplified visa procedures, through the requirement that students return to their own country upon receiving their degree. The second factor is the increasing number of countries that now are effectively competing with the U.S. for international students. The U.S. market share was decreasing even prior to 9-11 to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The third long-term trend is that the countries that formerly sent large numbers of students to the U.S. are now building their own educational capacity that has the immediate competitive advantage of being far less costly.
There are many ironies and inadvertent consequences in these trends. For example, it is difficult to change the perception that the U.S. is an unwelcoming country without having a large number of international students able to experience this country. Similarly, the protectionist motivation of requiring students to return to their own country will likely exacerbate the proclivity of businesses to move their operations to where they can find more educated workers – and increasingly that is not within the United States. As a result of these trends, which I do not think will soon dissipate, it is incumbent upon U.S. universities rather than using the same approaches, although we do need to increase our recruitment efforts, to develop new approaches that are now consistent with the new emerging global conditions.
One such approach that is increasingly being utilized, and that we are presently exploring, is investing in an international center or campus. San Diego State University’s intent here is to establish a true partnership based on the interests of each partner. Although those interests do not have to be identical, the program needs to be shaped to meet the needs of both parties. For my own university, our interests include increasing international students and providing more opportunities for our own faculty and students to be abroad in a situation that is sustainable and scalable, which is far more effective than the efforts required to place one faculty member here and three students there. Note that I do not include “making money” as one of our objectives, although in candor, we do have other international degree programs in which revenue enhancement continues to be the primary motivation. Toward this current initiative we are working with the emerging community college system in Hong Kong to develop a San Diego State University presence there to offer the upper-division work course, provided by our regular tenured or tenure-track faculty who will be there for at least an entire semester, and including some of our U.S. students, leading to a San Diego State degree. This approach is, of course, fraught with problems. Course articulation with the local community college is often challenging enough, but an international partnership usually involves different educational system. This requires grappling with the very difficult issues of how much of our system, including our general education and accreditation requirements, can be viewed as Americanization as contrasted with a willingness to accept the best of different educational approaches because there are certainly other approaches, some of which will prove superior. Just as American technology, communication, and business is becoming less geopolitically bound, so too, American higher education must internationalize through ways that really do institutionalize these sustainable and scalable international endeavors.
Let me conclude by recommending a book to you. Reading it was one of those extraordinary experiences where my own thoughts about what I’ve been clumsily referring to as a world or global perspective were treated in greater depth, eloquence and with far more intelligence than I could bring to bear. The book is In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf, with the sub-title, Violence and the Need to Belong. As Malouf states, his purpose in writing the book was “I wanted to try to understand why so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic, national or some other kind of identity,” and his book emphasizes that whenever one particular aspect of self-identity becomes excessively dominant over all others, it “Encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partisan, sectarian, intolerant, domineering, sometimes suicidal, and frequently even changes them into killers or supporters of killers.” To me his eloquent analysis is totally consistent with my earlier brief reference to the formerly adaptive role of xenophobia leading to the response of aggression. But Maalouf discusses beautifully – again I highly recommend this book – the need for greater balance among the many facets of self-identity. In the epilogue, he concludes, “Every individual should be able to identify, at least to some degree, both with the country he lives in and with our present day world.” Hence this idea that we must provide education such that our students, beyond viewing themselves as citizens of their own countries, that will also develop their identity as a global or world citizen.
If we are to institutionalize international education such that we are able to truly educate our students about the international context in which they are going to be living and working, the onus is on us individually at our individual campuses to promote this institutionalization. There is, of course, much collective good work that needs to be done. Here in the U.S. it is encouraging to see the administration convene the recent Presidents Summit on International Education and exciting to read recommendations such as those of the Lincoln Commission. We obviously could accelerate internationalization with the availability of federal funding and we all should be strong advocates and supporters of these initiatives. But I believe we can’t wait for federal funding. Nor can we continue to issue more reports, no matter how compelling and well- documented, about the needs for international education. As international educators this institutionalization is also our individual responsibility at our institutions. There is always more work for us to do on our individual campuses. Always. There is never enough time, money, staff or support. Never. I typically feel as I suspect many as you do – exhausted – but at the same time extremely gratified. This work is that important. There is an urgency to doing it and doing it well because it is life-changing for our students and our universities, and in my moments of delusion, for our world.
Nancy A. Marlin, Ph.D., is Provost at San Diego State University.
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