Internationalisation of higher education

IAU Horizons, the Association's news and information magazine is addressed primarily to IAU Member Institutions and Organizations, but is also sent to a selected audience beyond the IAU Membership such as Ministries of Higher Education, international organizations, national and regional associations of universities and others.
Internationalisation of higher education (IAU Horizons Volume 18, No.2)
By Gilles Breton, Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada. A topic becomes the object of deep debate because it cristallises a call for references, a demand for renewed understanding of a situation that seems more and more complex, or the search for new forms of action. This is, to my mind, the impact and interest of the document Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action launched by IAU a few weeks ago.
At the time when I received the IAU text, I was deep in the reading of the remarkable book by Marie Scot on La London School of Economic and political science 1895-2010 Internationalisation universitaire et circulation des savoirs which seems to me a major contribution to the discussion on the internationalisation of our universities. Obviously, the London School of Economic and political science (LSE) is not a representative example, since it is a university that is solely specialised in social sciences and humanities and one of the most international universities in the world. If in 1925, it already had 20% of foreign students, in 2010 they represented 68% of its 10 000 students and 57% of its teachers were foreign. But its history and present position on the world university chessboard make LSE a privileged observatory to give true meaning to the internationalisation of higher education and to understand the impact and limits of the international strategies of an institution on its academic life.
The contribution of Marie Scot’s book seems twofold to me. On the one hand, the analysis over a long period, in this case 1895-2010, enables us to understand the changes in internationalisation and its various contributions to the life of an institution. If the first period of internationalisation that goes from 1920 to 1944 is a time of refoundation of academic life and international expertise in the fields of international relations, colonial studies and economics, it is also a time when international recruitment becomes a prominent line of action and the implementation of embryonic networks of alumni (network of former students). The second period, which covers the years 1945-1974, is that of the years of the Cold War and the special relations between the British Empire and the United States. At the academic level, it witnesses the creation at LSE of new fields of study such as development studies, econometrics, demography and, of course the ‘Area Studies’. The international strategies focus on greater international student and teacher mobility, the redefinition of courses of study to be offered to foreign students according to their cycle of studies, the export to the Third World of the British university model and last the multiplication of networks of former students. Last a period of “world- class university in academic globalisation 1975-2010”, which sees the LSE faced with the crisis in university funding that affects both the education programmes – sale of educational products and factory to produce masters – and research activities which are becoming more and more activities of extrauniversity and international expertise. If the two periods preceding the networks of former students developed in the perspective of their contribution to the funding of the institution, the current period enriches this ‘alumni’ stake by presenting it as an indicator of the soft power of LSE on the international scene.
If the embedding of internationalisation in an historical perspective is welcome, the perspective of the author of the circulation of knowledge seems to me to enrich the discussion and give depth to the concept of internationalisation because the circulation of knowledge does not limit itself to the usual analysis of academic mobility by policymakers, students, professors and ‘alumni’, but also includes the study of the impact of internationalisation on academic and disciplinary mobility, the recomposition not only of training programmes to which an international element would be added, but also of the disciplines themselves and the research activities. In this book, we find a proposal to read internationalisation as something that, by including the circulation of scientific paradigms, opens on to promising axes of research and action and offers a new light on the proposition that internationalisation is an institutional project that is at the heart and not at the periphery of the life of a university. This book should be read by both researchers and the actors of internationalisation. Read more in IAU Horizons Volume 18, No.2.