Internationalization’s intellectual architecture: Rockefeller and the establishment of the International House movement

• In Event: Critical Perspectives of Internationalization in Higher Education

Proposal

Universities have been sites of international exchange since their earliest establishment (Compayré, 1902). In the early 20th century, particularly in the period following WWI, global academic exchange gained a new socio-political and economic imperative. In this phase of higher education development, new organizations and structures emerged, particularly in Western nations, to provide supportive services to international students, with the intention of fostering harmonious global relations to facilitate trade networks. Among the most influential of these were International Houses (I-Houses), funded by American industrial heir John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other wealthy philanthropists. The first I-Houses were created in the United States but the “International House movement” spread to Canada, France, Japan and Australia after World War II. This study aims to better understand the early developmental period of the I-House phenomenon, contextualizing contemporary internationalization efforts within an historical trajectory that is marked by educational imperialism, globalization, gendering, racialization, and ongoing settler-colonial state formation. Our study examines the motivations and capital investments that “built” the International House movement, both as “intellectual architecture” and as material edifices within internationalization’s geospatial landscape.

Conceptual Framework

Internationalization of higher education is frequently presented as a concept developed in the 1990s, arising simultaneously in Europe and the United States, building upon and improving the practice of international education (de Wit, 2023). Nevertheless, evidence of internationalization activities appears much earlier and with a wider set of actors. This paper seeks to explore the early "intellectual architecture" of higher education internationalization, a concept that has been destabilized by recent political disruptions. While many of the assumptions behind the internationalization of higher education (e.g., that the circulation of global talent is valuable and that the presence of international students benefits host communities) have come under attack, it is important to explore the early conceptual formation of practices that are today taken for granted, even as political winds change.

The idea of "potential history" (Azoulay, 2019) is central to our inquiry as the study attempts to retrace an encounter in New York City between "an official with the YMCA, who in 1909 had a chance encounter with a lone graduate student from China" (International House of New York, 2025, para. 3). That encounter at the turn of the century gave way to a movement that established international houses around the world, from Berkeley to Tokyo, and across the Atlantic to London and Paris. The potential history framework is also significant as many other international houses were planned for additional cities but, as our archival research identified, they did not materialize due to changes in funding, priorities and local contexts.

Data Collection and Sources

The paper relies on archival data collected from the Rockefeller archives in New York, supplemented by material from the few digitized smaller archives of individual I-Houses and the scant historiography surrounding the movement (e.g., Shaw, 1995). Contemporary documents and correspondence, along with deeds and bequests, reveal the argumentation strategies and decision making process as the I-House movement grew. With each I-House built, the intellectual architecture of internationalization crystallized, not only tracing a particular direction, but also leaving behind other potential manifestations. The evidence collected points to the existence of ideas about “internationalization” that are broader than the narrow 1990s version that is well-known within university circles, and also distinct from the postwar security-driven discourses that led to the Fulbright program and other state-sponsored academic developments in so-called “area studies” programs (Morton, 1963).

Evidence from Data

The archival research presented in the paper illuminates a set of ideas, or rather ideals, epitomized by the I-House motto "that brotherhood may prevail" that also make evident the boundaries of such thinking. The limited existing literature on the initial concepts about internationalization highlights the influence of “protestant modernism” (Dawood, 2019, p. 898) in the development of early ideas about internationalization. This influence is also evident in the establishment of Tsinghua College in Beijing, then intended to prepare Chinese students to continue their education in the United States through the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, an arrangement that resulted from the Boxer rebellion against Christian missionaries in China (Kilby, 2025). Based on these works, largely unexplored in the Comparative and International Education literature, we identify additional discourses for internationalization that are frequently ignored or taken for granted.

Despite claims of “brotherhood”, I-Houses emphasized the need to help their residents conform to the cultural norms of their host country and emphasized hygiene as a consideration in the design and layout of spaces. Contradictions in the American reformist agenda of that early period abound, with “open door” policies incongruently accompanied by exclusion acts and taxation, while cultural imperialism was utilized as the stepping stones for other “soft power” incursions (Matsuda, 2008).

Originality, Contribution and Relevance

Challenges related to international students and internationalization, including housing crunches (Mu & Soong, 2025) tend to be addressed from present-day perspectives. Utilizing an historical perspective itself constitutes a relatively unusual perspective in the CIES program, but history is valuable to better understand the motivations behind international education policy and its effects (Kumar, 2009; McCartney, 2016; McCartney, et al., 2024).

Recent assaults on international student policies, and on the internationalization of higher education more broadly, in the Big Four “receiving” countries (Australia, Canada, UK, USA), which happen to be the countries that have benefitted the most from academic mobility and globalization, demonstrate an apparent shift. Critiques of this assault tend to circle back to economic and supremacist rationales, i.e., the U.S. will lose the race to attract talent if these policies continue. We argue that without historicizing internationalization and excavating its potential histories to “unlearn imperialism” (Azoulay, 2019), the tools to resist the dismantling of international education will continue to be limited by their circular logics, and therefore self-defeating. Considering the strong focus that I-Houses have placed on universal brotherhood, this proposal is relevant to the 2026 CIES conference theme, given its connection to education and peace in a divided world, but above all, given the need to re-examine such connection and the assumptions beneath it.

Authors

• Gerardo L Blanco, Boston College

• Amy Scott Metcalfe, University of British Columbia