"This rethinking exercise is about reinserting the values": An Interview with Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary-General of the International Association of Universities

Eva egron-polak has been the secretary-general of the International Association of Universities since 2002. One of the projects that she initiated at the IAU was regular surveys of higher education institutions worldwide regarding their internationalization efforts. The results of the third such survey, coauthored by Eva Egron-Polak and her colleague Ross Hudson, were published as Internationalization of Higher Education: Global Trends, Regional Perspectives, in September 2010. The survey's findings, along with other developments, as Eva Egron-Polak discusses here, have caused a number of observers to begin to rethink some of the assumptions of internationalization that have developed over the last decade. I interviewed her on February 21, 2012, in Washington, DC, at the annual conference of the Association of International Education Administrators.

MCM:

For those readers of the AUDEM: The International Journal of Higher Education and Democracy who are not familiar with the International Association of Universities, could you explain its mission and goals, and say something about its membership and activities?

EE-P:

The International Association of Universities is, in a sense, a product of the European post-World War II era. It was founded in 1950, in France, on the impetus of UNESCO to create an association of institutions to build bridges between universities to bring together a war-torn world. It has remained a global membership organization of universities and other higher education institutions, and more recently, of university organizations as well. We are linked historically to UNESCO and we are housed at UNESCO, but we are an independent international nongovernmental organization. We are nearly totally funded through membership fees, without any government support and have a governance structure composed of 21 university presidents, from 20 different countries. It is truly a global organization.

The mission of IAU is to promote collaboration and collective action, and to have a normative function about important issues. We are a service organization as well. We publish a journal called Higher Education Policy, a quarterly that is peer-reviewed. We also publish directories of the world's higher education institutions; we have done so for 50 years. And we hold annual conferences, workshops, meetings, etc., that rotate around the world. We have around 650 members from nearly 125 countries.

MCM:

I saw the global survey had 745 respondents?

EE-P:

Yes, this is because the survey goes well beyond our membership.

MCM:

In September 2010, the IAU published its third global survey report, Internationalization of Higher Education: Global Trends, Regional Perspectives. What were the goals of the survey, and why did IAU feel it was needed?

EE-P:

First, this is the third such survey. The first survey covered just IAU members. The second survey had a response of about 500 institutions. This is the largest survey so far, but it's still too small. We try to make it as representative as possible and retain the proportions in the final sample, similar to how many institutions there are in every region. We sent about 5,000 questionnaires to get 745 responses.

My previous job was at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, and when I began there in the '80s, we undertook a survey of Canadian universities' internationalization. When I got to IAU, there was no one who was collecting such information globally, so we initiated the process. From the very interesting information [we collected], I was convinced that the context in which institutions are operating influences what they get out of internationalization and how they perceive and approach it. I was really curious to see whether such a survey would show that, and also to what extent it would tell us how to do internationalization better. I think it's one thing to say "internationalization is this, and it's a good thing," and another to have the data to back it up.

The IAU is in a unique position to undertake such research. Internationalization has really grown exponentially, to the extent that it now raises interest in every corner of...