African universities have had complex and contradictory experiences with internationalization rooted in colonial and postcolonial histories and the international division of intellectual labor. Africa’s insertion and positioning in the global knowledge economy have largely been characterized by marginality spawned by asymmetrical and unequal relations with the global centers. This leads to a paradox. Because of the histories of colonial and postcolonial dependence and underdevelopment, African higher education is simultaneously highly internationalized and the most internationally peripheral system.
Some of the challenges and opportunities for higher education internationalization in general and for African universities specifically have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this presentation, I would like to explore possible new directions that may develop in the post-COVID era. I have argued in a series of essays and books, including most recently, The Transformation of Global Higher Education: 1945-2015 (2016) and Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century (2021) that the motivations and rationales of higher education internationalization are as multifaceted as the institutional contexts and actors are diverse.
Some of my next remarks in the next few paragraphs are derived from a chapter in my latest book. For the rest of the presentation, I seek to explore, rather tentatively as the pandemic continues to ravage economies, health care systems, organizations and institutions including universities around the world, the systemic fractures, hierarchies, and inequalities in higher education internationalization and some of the opportunities for imagining and investing in different processes, patterns, and practices that could be more equitable and mutually beneficial for African countries and universities and their global partners.
Anatomy of Internationalization
The incentives and justifications for higher education internationalization are variously articulated at national, sectoral, and institutional levels. They include national development and demographic imperatives. For decades internationalization has followed the historic trails and reproduced the unequal flows of people, programs, and paradigms between and the global South and the global North, the polite bureaucratic terminology for the old imperial metropoles and their former colonial dependencies.
For the developed countries higher education internationalization is part of their arsenal of global soft power, while the developing countries value it for its potential to build high quality human capital. For example, it was reported in October 2021 that “France is strengthening partnerships with the African higher education sector – a move perceived to be part of a broader strategy of higher education diplomacy, or ‘soft power’ aimed at strengthening African alliances to serve France’s cultural, economic and political agendas.” Among the initiatives launched was “a five-year €130 million (about US$151 million) fund to support African digital start-ups through the Digital Africa initiative… a three-year €30 million fund for democracy in Africa, in which African universities could play an important part. In addition, a ‘House of African worlds and diasporas’, will be established.” All paltry gestures and homage to the tired discourse of foreign aid.
For its part, also in October, “The British Council has announced the names of nine South African universities that were awarded grants under the Innovation for Africa project, which is part of its Going Global Partnerships program… The project, which is university-driven and learning- and networking-focused, is designed to support the development of Africa-UK university partnerships that build institutional capacity for higher engagement in entrepreneurship.”
Demographic pressures vary but reinforce these demands. Internationalization provides an important outlet for excess and specialized demands for higher education from the emerging economies and countries of the global South with their bulging youthful populations. At the same time, in the increasingly aging countries of the global North, importing students from the global South is critical to universities facing a youth demographic squeeze.
For the higher education sector, there is an assortment of economic, political, social, cultural, and academic imperatives and rationales. Economically, internationalization is often justified in terms of preparing students for careers in a globalized economy, enhancing national development and competitiveness, and as a means of generating extra-institutional income. Politically, it is valorized for promoting international understanding, global citizenship, and intercultural competency in an increasingly polarized and dangerous world. Its sociocultural imperative lies in the need to cultivate intercultural literacy in progressively multicultural societies.
There are also specific institutional rationales. Many universities pursue internationalization for financial reasons, as a critical revenue stream, since foreign students tend to be charged higher fees than local students are. It is maintained that internationalization facilitates inter-institutional co-operation, competition, and comparison, which can enhance the quality of higher education by compelling institutions to meet or rise to international standards. In a globalized world, internationalization is seen as an indispensable part of institutional recognition and branding, an essential attribute and asset in the intensifying competition for talented students, faculty, resources, and reputational capital among universities within and among countries.
Surveys conducted by the International Association of Universities including the latest undertaken in 2018 show that more than 90% of respondents mention internationalization as a priority in their strategic plans. The most important expected benefits of internationalization included “Enhanced international cooperation and capacity building” and “Improved quality of teaching and learning.” The main institutional risk identified was that “International opportunities [were] accessible only to students with financial resources,” followed by “Difficulty to assess/ recognize quality of courses/programs offered by foreign institutions,” and “Excessive competition with other higher education institutions.”
The incentives and justifications for higher education internationalization are variously articulated at national, sectoral, and institutional levels. They include national development and demographic imperatives
At the societal level, the main risks to internationalization were “Commodification and commercialization of education programs” as well as “Brain drain.” Institutional leaders were seen as the main internal drivers, while externally it was “Business and industry demand”, “Demand from foreign higher education institutions”, and “Government policy”. As for obstacles, they include “Insufficient financial resources,” followed by “Administrative/bureaucratic difficulties,” “Lack of knowledge of foreign languages,” and “Difficulties of recognition and equivalences of qualifications, study programs and course credits.”
In all regions the most critical internationalization activity remains student mobility, followed by strategic partnerships, and international research collaboration. Many institutions have identified geographic priorities for internationalization. To quote the report, “Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America are considered priority regions by all other regions, while Asia & Pacific is the top priority region for North American HEIs and the second most important region for European HEIs. Africa and the Middle East were identified as priority regions only by their own institutions who replied to the Survey.” Sehoole and Lee show that not all internationally mobile African students want to go to the global North; they prefer the comforts of familiarity in studying in other African countries that have quality education such as South Africa. Overall, North American responses in the IAU report diverged from the global norm, and there were some differences within regions as well.
Historically, higher education internationalization has entailed the flows of people, programs, and paradigms. When it comes to people the focus has largely been on student flows, and far less on faculty mobility. Globally, student mobility has been decidedly unequal. According to UNESCO Institute of Statistics datasets, the number of outbound international students rose from 4.8 million in 2015 to 6.1 million in 2019, the latest date for which data is available. It is important to note that internationally mobile students represent a small proportion of tertiary students, a mere 2.2% in 2015 and 2.6% in 2019.
The largest share of internationally mobile is claimed by Asia 2.4 million or 50.2% of the world total in 2015, which rose to 3.1 million in 2019 (51.8%). Europe came next accounting for 919,192 in 2015 (19.2%) and 1,001,931 in 2019 (16.52%) in 2019. Africa accounted for 510,491 (10.7%) in 2015 and 577,308 (9.5%) in 2019. The share for Latin America was 285,451 (6.0%) and 386,532 (6.4%) and for Northern America 132,161 (2.8%) and 152,541 (2.5%), respectively.
The script is flipped when it comes to inbound internationally mobile students. Europe and North America claimed the lion’s share. In 2015, Europe received 1.95 million international students (40.9%), while Northern America got 1.08 million (22.6%), or a combined total for the two regions of 63.44% of the world total. Asia increased its share numerically from 999,348 (29.9%) to 1.5 million (24%). Africa’s share declined from 226,155 (4.7%) to 224,312 (3.7%). Latin America and the Caribbean received 162,511 international students in 2015 and 239,769 in 2019. Oceania, principally Australia and New Zealand, which exported very few students (29,610 in 2015 and 31,285 in 2019) received 359,434 in 2015 and 570,180 in 2019.
In each of these regions there were notable differences. The bulk of Europe’s mobile students went to other European countries. In Asia, China, Japan, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates dominated. In Africa, South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco claimed a disproportionate share. Globally, the United States led followed by the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, and China. Several countries benefited from the anti-immigration backlash of the Trump administration in the US and Brexit in Britain. In July 2021, the Biden administration called for “Renewed U.S. Commitment” to international education in an unprecedented joint statement issued by the Departments of Education and State that promised to reverse policies of the Trump Administration and outlined a comprehensive national strategy.
The Disruptions of COVID-19
The outbreak of the COVID-19 at the turn of 2021 led to the closures of educational institutions from primary schools to universities around the world. Internationalization in the form of physical mobility was brought to a screeching halt. In many countries international students found themselves stranded as campuses closed, unable to go home, study, and work in their countries of residence. Some were subjected to increased racist abuse, scapegoating, xenophobia, and hate speech stoked by right wing populist politicians and pundits for whom foreigners, especially those from China and other parts of Asia and the global South, whose presence and bodies were pathologized as diseased and deadly vectors of the pandemic. Students planning to go abroad languished at home as their dreams of overseas study were unceremoniously postponed.
Familiar international engagements froze as travel restrictions led to cancellations and rescheduling of professional conferences, research collaborations became harder to pursue as the academic world moved to Zoom, organizations supporting the mobility of students and scholars became paralyzed, and retrenchments by cash-strapped institutions threatened the livelihoods, well-being, and careers of academics. Doomsayers predicted the end of higher education internationalization as it had developed since World War II.
The pandemic is of course still unfolding its lethal effects and consequences on global economies and societies. Many higher education institutions are still grappling with its massive devastations. However, they have also increasingly learned to manage and navigate its disruptions, develop new modalities of teaching and learning, research and scholarship, public service and engagement, and as hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship. The capacities to contain the crisis and plan for a more resilient, robust, and promising future vary enormously between and within countries and institutions. Overall, African universities, and smaller and poorer universities elsewhere, have been the least effective in containing the destructive effects of the pandemic, and plan for reform and transformation; many of them wishfully and desperately hope for a magical restoration of the pre-COVID-19 era.
Demographic pressures vary but reinforce these demands. Internationalization provides an important outlet for excess and specialized demands for higher education from the emerging economies and countries of the global South with their bulging youthful populations
As an administrator, I witnessed this tragic fatalism among some academics at many universities in Kenya including my own and elsewhere on the continent, a pervasive and perverse denial that the pandemic was destined to usher profound changes. Keen to protect their already measly privileges they willfully wallowed in a seductive, blinding, facile, retrogressive and nostalgic hankering for the past to return. The past that some long to rehabilitate was of course no golden age. On the contrary, it was characterized by inequalities, exclusions, hierarchies, and asymmetries. In the case of Africa, it reproduced the marginalization of the continent’s universities, scholarly communities, and knowledge production systems.
I have maintained that COVID-19 should be harnessed as an accelerator for much-needed institutional change. One paper identified seven key transformations exacerbated that were underway: reduced resources, growing competition, the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, the changing nature of jobs, shifts in university demographics, growing public demands on universities, and, of course, the impact of COVID-19. The changes identified above have implications in six key areas for universities in Africa and elsewhere: rethinking the nature of academic programs; delivery of teaching and learning; human resources; resource mobilization and utilization; institutional partnerships; and the nature of leadership skills.
In another paper, I argued that what is at stake for some universities is survival, for others stability, and for many sustainability. Institutional survival is a precondition for stability which is essential for sustainability. Confronting the entire higher education sector is the question of its raison d’être, its value proposition in a digitalized world accelerated by COVID-19. I focused on four critical dimensions: promoting progressive digital transformation, effective leadership, strong institutional cultures, and sustainable funding for African universities. For the first two I proposed a dozen strategies for each, and for the last two seven strategies for each, respectively.
As an administrator, I witnessed this tragic fatalism among some academics at many universities in Kenya including my own and elsewhere on the continent, a pervasive and perverse denial that the pandemic was destined to usher profound changes. Keen to protect their already measly privileges they willfully wallowed in a seductive, blinding, facile, retrogressive and nostalgic hankering for the past to return
The twelve-point agenda for the digital transformation of universities was outlined in considerable detail in a lengthy article. In a keynote address at the quadrennial conference of the Association of African Universities, I crystallized many of my reflections, arguing that quality higher education was indispensable for Africa’s future.
My propositions are not simply based on the appealing aphorisms that opportunity is the flip side of crisis, or that a crisis is too valuable to waste. It arises out of my reading of history as a historian, which shows that moments of global emergencies including pandemics give added impetus to trends already underway and serve to reshuffle the international pecking order, competitiveness, and sustainability of power, socioeconomic systems, and institutions. Those who wish to recreate the past after a crisis as profound as the pandemic are doomed to remain frozen as others charge past them to the future spawned by that very crisis.
For higher education institutions the changes will include the modes of internationalization that have prevailed for decades. During the pandemic universities have generally showed, contrary to their purported aversion to change, an incredible capacity to embrace reform by using digital technologies and experiment with new modalities of delivering teaching, research and support services for students, faculty, and staff.
For example, progressive universities have adopted “virtual internships and exchanges, navigating shifting enrollment patterns and student markets and reconsidering best practices in student services. While a certain measure of retrenchment and re-direction is inevitable in the short term, this pandemic is also presenting opportunities for us to broaden the scope and direction of what we do in international education. Whether we welcome these opportunities or not, these changes could potentially move us in very positive and new directions, directions that we might have otherwise not realized or been slower to pursue.”
Rethinking Internationalization
I would like to propose an eleven-pronged agenda to rethink internationalization. None of what I say is new; it simply encapsulates trends that are both old and new. First, there is need for an expansive view of internationalization that integrates internationalization at abroad and at home and embraces internationalization of the curriculum and research. The former refers to curriculum integration that maximizes “students’ learning through international and intercultural experience.” It implies international exposure that is mediated through intentional interactions with local communities that have origins in different parts of the world and embedding global perspectives in the curriculum. “A pedagogy of encounter,” writes Leask and Green, “is a powerful concept because it does not rely on mobility. There are many opportunities to engage students in intercultural and global setting in class, on campus, and in local communities.”
This is an agenda for domestic and international intercultural engagement and understanding, for “border crossing” for all students rather than the privileged few who are able to travel abroad. After all, as noted earlier, only a tiny minority of tertiary students can study abroad. In terms of research, it entails valorizing equitable, transparent, and respectful practices of knowledge production and co-creation of research projects and agendas, and penalizing exploitative, fraudulent, and unprofessional behaviors. Student research, experiential and service learning, and international and virtual internships should be incorporated.
Second, promoting transformative technology-enhanced partnerships through inter-institutional collaborations and consortia that offer innovative enrollment opportunities for students, online program management, virtual and in-person internships, quality assurance and more seamless credit transfer. The widespread adoption and acceptance of emerging digital technologies and online communication and learning platforms and scholarly engagements forced by COVID-19, should be used by universities to develop effective mechanisms for collaborative online course development, curation and exchange through multi-institutional and transnational alliances, registries, and protocols. There are also opportunities for students to create and foster global online communities with those who share their curricular and co-curricular interests.
The development of immersive technologies of virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality offers incredible opportunities for virtual internationalization, foreign language learning, co-teaching, internships, and provision of student services. Particularly exciting are the possibilities of promoting transnational lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional education programs for all those seeking upskilling and reskilling with globally valued shorter degrees and micro-credentials as the nature of jobs and lifespans undergo massive changes upending the three-stage cycle of life (education-work-retirement) to a multi-stage cycle in which education and working life are continually intersected and retirement pushed further away.
At the societal level, the main risks to internationalization were “Commodification and commercialization of education programs” as well as “Brain drain.” Institutional leaders were seen as the main internal drivers, while externally it was “Business and industry demand”, “Demand from foreign higher education institutions”, and “Government policy”.
Given the wide inter- and intra- institutional disparities in access to these technologies it is critical to address the issue of enhancing the capabilities of disadvantaged institutions and communities through bilateral and multilateral forums and the mobilization of business, international and intergovernmental agencies, and philanthropic foundations and donors.
This underscores the third critical issue, how to finance sustainable and equitable internationalization among institutions and countries that sometimes have divergent economic resources and needs. In addition to aggressively sourcing external funding, international partnerships and projects it is critical to foster candid discussions and the development of pragmatic financial models and institutional investments. It entails rethinking student aid for dispersed students and many other financial aspects of the distributed university whose functions and impact are spread across domestic and international domains, and physical and virtual arenas.
Fourth, internationalization should focus more on building faculty and staff capabilities and collaborations, in addition to the traditional focus on student mobility and exchanges. Worldwide international faculty constitute a tiny minority of overall faculty and staff members. The IAU report revealed that “At 20% of HEIs there are no international academic staff members at all and at 34% the percentage of international academic staff is less than 5%. Latin America & the Caribbean is the region with the smallest percentage of international academic staff while Asia & Pacific and North America have the highest.” Internationalization of faculty must be a critical part of what Jane Knight, the Canadian scholar calls ‘knowledge diplomacy,’ a term she deems broader than “cultural diplomacy,” “science diplomacy,” or “education diplomacy;” it refers to the deployment of internationalization to build a horizontal two-way process of bilateral and multilateral inter-institutional relations that is so essential in tackling pressing global challenges.
Institutional indifference, ignorance, xenophobia, and racism often militate against the effective internationalization of faculty and staff. This is as true of countries in the global North as it is in the global South as I know from personal experience working over the past four decades in Canada, the US, Jamaica, and Kenya, where I was ‘othered’ on racial or national grounds. The IAU report continues, “International experience is valued at the majority of HEIs, but it is considered more an added value than a fundamental requirement, and there is still a substantial group of HEIs (30%) where international experience is not perceived as something important for hiring and promoting academic staff. International experience seems to be highly valued in the Middle East but very little so in North America. In other regions, it seems to be valued more in Asia & Pacific and Europe than in Africa and Latin America & the Caribbean.”
Universities that are serious about internationalization should seek to employ more international faculty. They should also collaborate in capacitating each other in their human resources in terms of faculty development and leadership opportunities in ways that are mutually beneficial and leverage on their respective assets. This is to stress the importance of building partnerships from an asset-based mindset, not a deficit-based mindset, in which the focus is on the potential each brings to the partnership, rather than the problems. This is a particularly pernicious problem in North-South partnerships in which the currency is material wealth and brand, rather than possibilities of forging social transformation that comes from connectedness, cross-fertilization, and mutuality that encompasses equity, autonomy, solidarity, and participation.
This leads to the fifth challenge and opportunity we must confront, namely, promoting ethical internationalization. This means pursuing inclusive internationalization in line with the increasingly popular discourses of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging on North American and European campuses, although they are often championed more in rhetoric than practice. We must always ask, how do we integrate students, faculty and staff from marginalized communities, countries, and intellectual traditions in internationalization endeavors that are holistic, rigorous, robust, and transformative? The ethics of internationalization also entails sharing the results of international research, experiences, and interventions widely with the scholarly communities and societies on which the knowledges were produced and being purposeful in making meaningful contribution to society as part of a comprehensive knowledge management process.
Furthermore, ethical internationalization calls for what Luciane Stallivieri calls balance that seeks mutual reciprocity and cooperation regarding “geographic location; valuing different languages for the purposes of teaching, not just English; promoting South-South partnerships to enhance the knowledge produced in other parts of the planet; and creating an equilibrium with regard to incoming and outgoing mobility. Internationalization goals should be based on equal opportunities, symmetry, equivalence of interests and a focus on the equilibrium of international activities, especially when we design our internationalization plans and policies.” This implies institutional and intellectual accountability and integrity. These efforts must be part of the larger agenda of what some call decolonizing international partnerships, stripping them of enduring imbalances bequeathed from the histories of imperialism and colonialism.
Sixth, smart internationalization as Damtew Teferra, the renowned Ethiopian HE scholar calls it, requires integrating internationalization in institutional mission, values, strategic plan, budgeting priorities, and culture. It entails university administrations taking the leadership, the university community developing a shared understanding and commitment, engaging and mobilizing faculty and staff, and developing dual purposing resource strategies in which existing programs are enriched by incorporating internationalization initiatives and orientations.
The issue of differential tuition for domestic and international students is part of the calculus of dumb and smart internationalization. Many universities in North America, Europe, and Australasia impose much higher tuition on international students sometimes as much as four times. They rake in billions—$45 billion in the US in 2018, $15.5 billion in Canada in 2016, £22.6 billion in the UK in 2015/16, and $37.6 billion in Australia in 2018 according to official data. These revenues help many a university to balance their books and subsidize domestic students.
Treating foreign students as “cash cows” raises troubling moral questions and is unsustainable. Some studies indicate that “evidence from tuition fee reforms for international students suggests that the number of international students coming to a country can fall dramatically following an increase in tuition fees. For example, Denmark (in 2006) and Sweden (in 2011) introduced tuition fees for international students from outside the European Economic Area and experienced a sharp decline in the number of international students, by 20% and 80% respectively.” However, in the United States when the Big Ten Academic Alliance of research intensive universities raised tuition by 29% between 2007-2008 and 2014-15, they experienced “an increase of 74% in international student enrollment.”
This underscores different markets and institutions attract different types of international students. Choudaha and de Wit distinguish between “explorers” and “highflyers” who have resources and “strugglers” and “strivers” who are more price sensitive. The main Asian markets of India and China will increasingly dry up as these countries build world class universities following the path of earlier major exporters of students, namely, Japan and South Korea. The bourgeoning African market does not have the levels of wealth as in Asia to replace the declining Asian market, notwithstanding the Africa Rising/Rising Africa narrative that finds increasingly fewer cheerleaders as African economies reel from pandemic generated recessions.
Fay Patel argues that COVID-19, which led to sharp declines in international student flows and demonization of foreign students as part of pandemic panic and hysteria, opens possibilities of what she calls “humanizing international higher education.” She believes this will be achieved through the “glocalization of learning partnerships and frameworks from the developing community perspective so that compassion, kindness and empathy will form the basis for shared co-construction of knowledge in a post-COVID-19 world.” She urges international student communities to lead this agenda.
For smart internationalization to progress, the onus is on universities in the global North and global South to put their own houses in order. This entails restoring healthy and sustainable public investment in higher education that fell into precipitous declines with the rise of neo-liberalism at the turn of the 1980s. In the United States student debt has rocketed to $1.6 trillion and is higher than credit card debt. In many African countries many universities are virtually bankrupt which manifests itself in dilapidated infrastructure, poor salaries, low morale, declining instructional quality, and depressed research productivity. The private universities that have mushroomed in recent years are often glorified high schools while the public ones are ethnic enclaves mired in pettiness, corruption, and toxic politics and averse to planning for the future. Internationalization must be built on the healthy trunks of robust, resilient, and responsible universities, not the flimsy reeds of unstable, indigent, insular, and intolerant institutions.
Seventh, as part of the internationalization agenda universities need to become stronger advocates for more progressive forms of globalization as the specter of de-globalization spreads its xenophobic tentacles. The pandemic has led to border closures and retreat into the imagined safety of national laagers and brutally exposed the fictions of national isolation and security as it marched relentlessly around the world across the imaginary divides of race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other social inscriptions. Universities must, as noted in a report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean issued in March 2021, take “active responsibility for our common humanity, promoting well-being and sustainability, drawing strength from intercultural and epistemic diversity, and upholding and creating interconnectedness at multiple levels.”
Universities have a more immediate sectoral interest in developing systems for easier credit transfer and qualification recognition frameworks, especially as transnational multi-institutional partnerships expand. Various regional Higher Education Areas have been created. In November 2019, UNESCO adopted the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education, marking “the first United Nations treaty on higher education with a global scope. [It is] designed to facilitate international academic mobility and promote the right of individuals to have their higher education qualifications evaluated through a fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory manner… Moreover, it promotes the recognition of refugees’ qualifications, even in cases where documentary evidence is lacking.”
The latter follows the European Qualifications Passport for Refugees that “provides a tested method for assessing and describing qualifications that cannot be adequately documented.” This was an important move given the scale of global internally displaced and refugee flows, which reached 82.4 million in 2020 double the number in 2010 and higher than it has ever been. One of the initiatives I am most proud of during my tenure as Vice Chancellor at USIU-Africa was the $63.2 million scholarship program with the Mastercard Foundation that earmarked 25% of the recipients for forcibly displaced youths. Similar programs exist at several European and North American universities.
For example, progressive universities have adopted “virtual internships and exchanges, navigating shifting enrollment patterns and student markets and reconsidering best practices in student services. While a certain measure of retrenchment and re-direction is inevitable in the short term, this pandemic is also presenting opportunities for us to broaden the scope and direction of what we do in international education.
Eighth, there is need to interrogate the impact of rankings that have become increasingly influential and ubiquitous. They have helped sanctify global academic capitalism by generating fierce competition among universities in a relentless race for reputational status that validates the hegemony of institutions in the global North and the primacy of research often at the expense of teaching and learning and social impact. To be sure, the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings were introduced a few years ago to assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The indicators compare institutions across four broad areas: research, stewardship, outreach, and teaching. However, the impact of the traditional rankings in which the top performers trade places among themselves still hold sway.
Ninth, there is need to probe the growth of international research and its implications as evident in the expansion of publications with international co-authors, increased funding for international research through grants from international organizations, national agencies, and universities’ own resources. Commenting on a report by the EU titled Benefits and Costs of Transnational Collaborative Partnerships in Higher Education, Orosz and Carcium noted, “There is plenty of evidence that international research collaborations result in more and better publications and patents.”
What are the prospects for forging new modes of academic hospitality that promote productive intellectual exchange, creativity, symmetrical and collective pursuit and production of knowledge? The recent collapse of the prominent academic partnership between Yale University and Singapore National University coming on top of restrictions faced by other major American universities in China, and growing distrust of Chinese academics in the US, has raised questions about the sustainability of such collaborations in the face of geopolitical tensions and rivalries.
Tenth, the phenomenon of international program and provider mobility (IPPM), which constitutes a crucial leg in the internationalization enterprise triad, needs to be critically assessed. The growth of IPPM is evident in the establishment of “international branch campuses, international joint universities, joint and double degree programs, franchise arrangements and distance education.” In the UK, for example, 52% of all international students enrolled in a UK qualification awarding program take some of their program through IPPM provision.” In terms of IPPM host countries such as Mauritius approximately 43% “of all local students are enrolled in some type of IPPM. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Botswana 20 to 30 per cent of all local students are enrolled in IPPM courses.” Thus, programs and providers are increasingly moving to students rather than the other way.
Unfortunately, the growth of IPPM retain and reproduce the enduring asymmetric flows between the global North and global South. In the words of a report by the American Council of Education issued in 2014, “among the institutions surveyed, enrollment in joint and dual degree programs administered by U.S. institutions is heavily skewed towards students from the partner country; participation of American students is limited, and study participants were not optimistic that this situation is likely to change. Given this imbalance, collaborative degree programs may be more of a proxy for recruiting international students and are likely to contribute to the continuing “imbalance of trade” in outward and inward flows of students. The data also reveal geographic imbalances; partner institutions are concentrated in Europe and Asia, with almost no representation in Africa. These issues are worthy of note by institutions that wish to engage their U.S.-based students in international education and to establish truly collaborative, reciprocal relationships with a diversity of inter- national partners.”
The report concludes: “Comprehensive, integrated internationalization requires a holistic approach that includes attention to curriculum, faculty engagement, leadership, strategic planning, and other key areas. Partnerships that not only allow credit transfer back and forth, but truly engage faculty, staff, and students from both institutions around substantive issues such as curriculum design and instructional philosophies have the greatest potential to advance internationalization on all these fronts. Whether through joint degrees or other program models, establishing such in-depth collaborations will help U.S. institutions lay the groundwork for mutuality and sustainability in their international partnerships, and advance not only the internationalization of U.S. higher education but also the global higher education enterprise as a whole.” I couldn’t agree more.
Let me conclude by sharing brief reflections on an important aspect of internationalization, the eleventh agenda. As you might know or would appreciate from my personal and professional biography, as an African diaspora academic I put great premium on the role of the diaspora as an indispensable global partner in Africa’s development drive. This includes higher education. Not only have I written extensively on the subject, my research on the African academic diaspora led to the establishment of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP), whose success has exceeded expectations.
For example, to date, the program has sponsored nearly 500 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with dozens of universities in six African countries that were selected. I firmly believe the African academic diaspora, both the new and historic diasporas, represent huge intellectual assets for the development and globalization of African knowledge economies. However, as is true in other realms of international relations, the relationship between academics on the continent and in the diaspora are exceedingly complex.
As I’ve noted in my own work and is clear in the recently published African Diaspora Toolkit these relations are characterized by collaboration and conflict, misunderstandings and mutuality, and inclusivity and indifference. They are conditioned by historic and prevailing institutional, intellectual, and ideological structures, systems, and values, as well as individual behaviors and attitudes that must be clearly understood and always negotiated and cultivated to ensure reciprocal benefits. African diaspora partnerships must be embraced as an integral part of the internationalization of African higher education. This is equally true of the global diasporas of other world regions.
