Internationalizing Education and Its Discontents: A History of the Present

• In Event: World Education Research Association–International Research Network Global Ethics in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper will examine the contours and limits of contemporary discourses of internationalization in higher education in the United States and Canada by focusing on two top-ranked universities as case studies. Within the past decade, both universities have made aggressive commitments in institutional policies, programs, and practices to internationalization, including the recruitment and matriculation of international students and sending domestic students abroad. Understood within neoliberal and multicultural imperatives, such acts of internationalization are generated from rationales of educational and career enhancement as well as cross-cultural awareness and engagement (Olson, Evans & Shoenberg, 2007; Torres, 2009). Less advertised are the economic demands of revenue generation due to decreasing governmental investment in education and of employment prospects due to financial enticements abroad and a limited job market locally. The current neoliberal and multicultural discourse within a transnational frame produces geographically mobile subjects seeking opportunities for individual advancement.

This discourse has historical antecedents that link current internationalization efforts to empire and the educational operations of colonialism. Underpinned by center-periphery dynamics with uneven power relations, empire juxtaposes the construction of modern subjects with the inculcation of Western education (Seth, 2007; Willinsky, 1998). Using the Philippines under US rule in the early 1900s as a historical example, the paper will also analyze the exchange of people across the Pacific: American teachers helping to develop public education in the Philippines, and Filipino students sponsored to attend US colleges and universities. As a result, a Western education system was established with primary and secondary education in the colony and tertiary education in the metropole. Connecting contemporary internationalization of education to the history and legacy of empire and colonialism tracks a history of the present in the current drive in higher education to become more global.

The hegemony of internationalization and Westernization, however, is not complete. Those in the colonies and the global South resist in overt and discreet ways (Foucault, 1997; Scott, 1992). Foregrounding examples of Western-educated subjects, the paper delineates critical strategies of discontent that exceed the regulation of docile and compliant subjects. For instance, in the early 1900s, young, mostly male, Filipinos were sent and sponsored by the colonial government to pursue higher education in the United States. One of them was Camilo Osias (1889-1976) who returned to the Philippines, inspired nationalist fervor, fought for independence, and became a leading education and political leader.

Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Miami University