Rethinking Whose Needs Are Being Met by Internationalization: Purposes, Players, and Aberrations

Internationalization is not neutral. Educators must always ask: Whose needs are being met? Models of internationalization that focus disproportionately on economic and political goals—and not on academic purposes and players—deform education itself. With a focus on private good and private gain, such education is aberrational. Central to any statement of educational purpose are the learners—not simply the student learners, but also the professors, who are learning themselves through research. If students and professors are not learning, with the pursuit of knowledge, wherever it leads, as the goal, then the institution is concerned with something other than higher education. A metaphor—the university as a nucleus—and a graphic model are used to capture a sense of internationalization as a force in the reordering and rearranging of institutional educational variables. Internationalization can strengthen a university's core values—or it can pull them apart. Faculty have an important role in clarifying who is benefiting from internationalization activities. Revisiting concepts and assumptions inherent in widely accepted views of internationalization in a rapidly changing global and local environment offers educators the opportunity to recognize, refresh, and expand their perspectives.