Today’s post looks at the dark side of student
mobility. In her piece from the summer
2013 edition of International Higher Education, The False Halo of Internationalization, Jenny J. Lee looks at how
internationalization efforts that bring foreign students to the US can be
lacking in quality or even exploitative.
Lee investigates the experiences of international postdoctoral research
scientists and student athletes, and finds that while their presence at US
universities is often touted as successful internationalization, often times
the student does not benefit from the arrangement. To start, Lee claims that for International
postdocs, many faculty supervisors hold stereotypes that scientists from the US
and Europe are more skilled at theoretical science, whereas Asian scientists
are more skilled at technical science.
Thus, international postdocs from Asia are often forced into a path of
being lab supervisors on temporary contracts, becoming, in effect, “postdocs
for life.” She argues that despite the
fact that international researchers are being included in US labs, calling this
exploitative pattern “internationalization” is counter-effective to successful
internationalization.
Lee then goes on to discuss the exploitative relationship
that universities often have with international student athletes. International students are often recruited to
US college sports programs as a way of bringing top-notch athletic prestige to
the university. Additionally, these
students can be and often are shown off as a display of the university’s
commitment to internationalization. In
reality, while these students do present an opportunity for
internationalization by sharing their experiences with the university’s
domestic students, the typical result is often the opposite: social isolation
or harassment. In addition, the
universities often put international athletes into less academically demanding
(and beneficial) majors, so that they can focus on their athletics.
The author concludes that “it is naïve and irresponsible to
perceive internationalization as being inherently good. Internationalization is not merely a set of
observable activities but also involves social and education
responsibility.” She argues in cases
like these, internationalization can’t solely represent the interests of the
host institutions, but must represent the interests of the international
students as well. Furthermore, it is not
the international students’ responsibility to fix these issues, but that of the
institution. University administrators
must impress on their faculty and students the benefits and importance of
internationalization. In this
conclusion, Lee reminds me very much of Jane Knight. In Knight’s 2012 piece Five Truths about Internationalization, she posits that “Internationalization
is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.”
In Lee’s scenarios, university administrators are claiming that
incorporating international student athletes and postdocs constitutes
internationalization. This is a mindset
of internationalization being and end goal, not a means to achieving a
goal. Furthermore, Knight claims that
internationalization should “should not overshadow or erode the importance of
local context.” Lee would seem to be
arguing a similar, but converse point: if you are going to incorporate foreign
students into your university as a form of internationalization, you can’t
totally ignore their global context, as is done her scenarios. As she notes, it is the job of administrators
to educate faculty and students on internationalization and its benefits. Much like Knight, the bottom line of Lee’s
piece is that university administrators can’t get so tied up in applying the
term “internationalization” to programs that they lose sight of what the
programs are supposed to be achieving, and that all parties are benefiting from
them.
References:
Knight,
Jane. "Five myths about internationalization." International
Higher Education 62.1 (2011): 14-15.
Lee,
J. (2015). The false halo of internationalization. International Higher
Education, (72), 5-7.
