Is Internationalisation Essential for Academic Excellence?

Phil Baty, Chief Global Affairs Officer, etc, of Times Higher Education (THE), has quoted with great approval Trisha Craig, Executive Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies:

“From 5th Century BCE Athens, to the great Islamic golden age institutions of the 8th -13th C, to the Renaissance to 19th Century Humboldt, the most influential seats of knowledge have always been international, allowing the enrichment and circulation of ideas, moving human progress forward. America's system of higher education from the mid 20th Century till today has attracted talent from all over the world and is perhaps the greatest source of discovery the world has known. Harvard University has been at the forefront of that. This decision by the Trump administration to kneecap the world's leading university is appalling, damaging to both the US national interest and humanity. This is a national shame.”

Baty goes on to claim that the American elite universities are characterised by internationalisation:

“Perhaps the single most obvious thing I've learned in almost 30 years working in global higher education is that great universities are inherently international - it is in their DNA.
This is why international collaboration and talent mobility is absolutely baked into the methodology of Times Higher Education's World University Rankings.”

First, let’s review the reality of internationalization in higher education or scholarship, starting with classical Athens. The students of the Academy were all or virtually all Greeks, although some were from the Greek diaspora scattered across the Mediterranean. Plato himself visited Greek colonies in Italy, but traveled no further, notwithstanding stories about supposed trips to Egypt and Babylon.

Medieval universities might be a better example. The University of Paris was famous for being organized into four “nations”. That, however, was not quite a shining example of internationalisation in the modern sense. The four nations were the French, the Picards, the Normans, and the English, who at the time could probably speak French and Latin, at least to some extent. The University of Bologna was divided into two nations: Universitas Citramontanorum, further subdivided into Tuscans, Romans, Lombards, and a few other groups, and Universitas Ultramontanorum, mainly comprising students from England, France, and Germany.

Moving into the modern era, German universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, did attract some international scholars, while refugees, mainly Jewish, from the Nazis revitalised American science in the thirties and forties. However, many of the most significant advances in science have occurred in extremely undiverse and monocultural environments. At Isaac Newton’s Cambridge, all fellows, except Newton himself, by royal permission, were ordained Anglican clergymen. Nor were there many non-Muslims at Al Azhar at its peak.

It is also a sad but unavoidable truth that many scientific advances have occurred in the context of wars, or international conflict and rivalry.

I would certainly agree that internationalization is a good thing and that science and scholarship are invaluable pursuits. But because two things are good, it does not necessarily follow that one is essential for the other.

The results of the most recent THE world rankings show that the link between international outlook and overall excellence is modest at best. Most of the top places for internationalisation are held by the Chinese Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau, and some smaller schools in the Gulf. The latter, despite the merits they have in other respects, are not yet leaders in science or technology. The international nature of the former is an artifice of the rankers allowing Hong Kong and Macau universities to count faculty, students, and collaborators from the mainland as international.

Additionally, among the top 100 universities for international outlook, several institutions perform significantly less well in the other THE pillars, including Constructor University, Near East University, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of St. Gallen.

The QS rankings are similar. For International Outlook, world leaders include Canadian University Dubai, American University of the Middle East, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, American University of Ras Al Khaimah ( AURAK ), various Hong Kong and Macau Universities, and the University of Luxembourg.

QS recently introduced a new indicator, International Research Network, which counts the number of countries with which universities have research collaborations, yielding very different results from simply counting the number of collaborations. Here, Oxford, Cambridge, the London institutions, the Ivy League, and the Group of Eight shine compared to the old international metrics. One suspects that might be the point of this innovation.

The leading American universities, according to THE and QS measures, are not as international as their British and Australian peers. Still, they are certainly more so than community colleges or mid-level public institutions. The question arises whether international students and faculty are indispensable to excellence in US research and higher education.

There are three common arguments in favor of recruiting international staff and students in the USA. First, there is something about being from a different country that, all else being equal, contributes to a stimulating intellectual environment.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence circulating about how having international students contributes to enhancing the classroom experience. I recall reading — still looking for the link — about a business management seminar in which everybody supported globalism except for two French students. Thus, it was necessary to admit international graduate students in order to have a proper discussion about globalism. Similarly, there was a law school class — again searching for the link — in which everybody supported the legalization of prostitution except for a pastor from West Africa, who suggested that individual liberty was trumped by community safety. It is telling that it was apparently impossible to find any American student willing to speak for the minority opinions, which would probably have been held by a majority of people outside the East and West Coasts.

However, the arguments for any diversity, after controlling for academic ability, appear to be very weak. That probably explains why diversity needs to be supported by far-fetched studies like this one, which finds that Latinos in Texas or Chinese in Singapore do better at picking stocks in a diverse environment.

Another common argument is that elite universities can only maintain demanding programs, particularly in STEM subjects, by recruiting international students since there are not enough Americans who can cope with the rigors of physics, engineering, or philosophy at the highest level.

That would be more plausible if leading universities did not have such a low acceptance rate and if they did not claim that they needed such an opaque, complex, and intrusive admissions system due to the huge numbers of academically qualified students.

In fact, the real reason for the influx of international students into the USA is financial. International students, or their parents or sponsors, pay a lot more than Americans can or are willing to do. Can Harvard and other universities that may come into conflict with Trump survive such a loss? It would not be easy, but Harvard might consider opening its doors to more non-traditional students, transforming itself into a national and global franchise operation, streamlining its opaque, expensive, and complex admissions process, reducing its bloated bureaucracy, reviewing the salaries of unproductive professors, and so on.