World Englishes and Linguistic Imperialism

That English is a ‘global’ or ‘international’ language is uncontroversial in the first years of the 21st century. (McKay, 2003) The English language dominates the sciences and technology, business, international relations, mass media, and youth culture, and is the most widely taught and learned foreign language (Phillipson, 1992). Around a quarter of the world’s population is proficient in the language (Crystal, 2003), and approximately a third (Fishman, 1998-1999; Kachru, 1992b) have been estimated to be users of English. While these facts are generally uncontested, how they are to be interpreted has been the subject of controversy among applied linguists, and the interpretations put forward have implications for the teaching of English throughout the world, including in education programs in the United States that accept international students. Although these implications have been explored extensively vis a vis the teaching of English internationally, there is as yet little work on their influence in higher education institutions in the U.S. The purpose of this review is to survey the main themes that have arisen in scholarly discussion of English in the world, and to consider whether and how they might influence the teaching of international students in U.S. higher education. The review focuses particularly on the debate surrounding the question of world Englishes, and on Robert Phillipson’s theory of linguistic imperialism, two broad and related themes that have been influential not only in scholarly debate but also in the creation of language policy. The conclusion explores how these themes might inform research into English language teaching and learning in U.S. higher education institutions.

Phillipson’s theory of linguistic imperialism, expounded in his book of the same name (Phillipson, 1992), gave rise to much argument over the place of English in the world, but there was already plenty of disagreement over the nature of global English. A widely accepted model of English in the world had been formulated by the linguist Braj Kachru, who proposed three concentric circles: (e.g. Kachru, 1992b) an Inner Circle, representing the countries in which English has its traditional base (e.g. the UK, Australia, and the USA); an Outer Circle comprising former colonies in which English has some form of official status (e.g. Bangladesh, Ghana, and India); and an Expanding Circle, made up of countries where English is learned and used as a foreign language (e.g. China, Egypt, and Indonesia). Kachru pointed out that most users of English communicate not with native English speakers from the Inner Circle, but with speakers from other Outer and Expanding Circle countries. Consequently, it is wrong to assume that English is learned in order to understand western, English-speaking cultures; that the forms of English spoken in those countries are necessarily the model for learners the world over; and that newly arising forms of English are inferior or incomplete forms of Inner Circle English. These consequences in turn call into question other assumptions: that ‘native English speakers’ from the Inner Circle countries make the best teachers, for example, or that forms of English that deviate from Inner Circle norms are necessarily ‘wrong.’ (ibid.) Hence, English conceived of as monolithic entity is incorrect: the new reality is one comprising Englishes. This view continues to be accepted: Pennycook (2009) has recently endorsed a view of pluricentricity and multicompetences in English.
Kachru’s assumptions about English in the world were opposed by Quirk (1990), who argued that English learners have a right to learn, and English teachers have the responsibility to teach, Standard English, that is, the institutionalized varieties found in Britain and the USA. Only through Standard English could learners hope to connect internationally with others and thus be freed from their economic and social limitations. Kachru (1991) declared Quirk’s argument an example of deficit linguistics, in that it assumes that English speakers in the Outer and Expanding Circle countries are inferior speakers of the varieties spoken in the Inner Circle countries such as the USA and the UK. Quirk’s position, argued Kachru, was reflective of the view of English from a monolingual perspective, a view which failed to take account of the complex realities of multilingual societies. Quirk’s proposal was in any case unrealistic, according to Kachru, since in a world with hundreds of millions of speakers, most of them in non-Inner Circle countries, there is no authoritative, codified version of English which can serve as a global model.

Strevens (1992), aligned with Quirk, suggested that learners should aspire to teach, and learners should try to learn, ‘educated’ English, which, he claimed, is characterized by a standard grammar and vocabulary everywhere in the world; and that learners should not agonize over whether to choose British or American English as their model, but choose the one they feel is most useful to them. In spite of his recognition of world Englishes, Strevens appears to recommend that the educated native speaker in the U.S. or Britain should serve as the model for English learners worldwide. This, he argued, would have the effect of “preserving the unity of English in spite of its great diversity.” (ibid., pp. 39 - 40)

The debate over world Englishes versus standard English emanating from Inner Circle countries continues to exercise English language teaching practitioners almost two decades later. In one recent study, for example, five Taiwanese university teachers expressed the dilemma posed by, on the one hand, recognizing that ownership of English should not be limited to the Inner Circle countries; and on the other, their own desire to teach a standard model of English in the classroom. (Lai, 2009) The case for World Englishes, and how it is related to linguistic imperialism, has been taken up by numerous scholars, and is described in further detail below.

Phillipson was not by any means the first to acknowledge the role of colonialism in the spread of English. Kachru, for example, wrote: “The spread of English has been viewed both as a unique phenomenon of our times and as an unprecedented form of linguistic and cultural colonization.” (Kachru, 1992a, p. 4) Yet Phillipson provided the most fully elaborated explanation for the worldwide dominance of English grounded in colonialist history and imperialistic intent (Phillipson, 1992). He situated linguistic imperialism within Galtung’s imperialism theory, in which imperialism is described as a relationship in which one society dominates another, and which comprises six interconnected forms of imperialism: economic, political, military, communicative, cultural, and social. In this framework, linguistic imperialism is a form of cultural imperialism, which is both enabled by and enables the other forms of imperialism. Basing his work on an analysis of what he saw as dominant and dominated cultures, he divided the world into “core English-speaking countries,” (Kachru’s Inner Circle countries) in which the dominant group are English native speakers, and “periphery-English countries” (Kachru’s Outer and Expanding Circle countries) where English was either imposed during the colonial era or is learned as a foreign language. In this relationship, the peripheral-English countries are dependent on the core English-speaking countries for language norms, and learners tend to aspire to ‘native-like fluency,’ which is the situation advocated by Quirk and Strevens. Phillipson defined linguistic imperialism as, “the dominance of English…asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages.” (Philipson, 1992, p. 47) It is founded on what Phillipson calls linguicism, analogous to racism and sexism, and described as the “representation of the dominant language, to which desirable characteristics are attributed, for purposes of inclusion, and the opposite for dominated languages, for purposes of exclusion.” (ibid., p. 55)

Phillipson argued that the spread of the English language, while uncritically accepted by many of those who teach and learn it, is far from benign; it is, on the contrary, a carrier of ideology – it carries ideas relating to customs, beliefs, and ways of thinking, through teaching and its materials – textbooks, literature, and other media. It thereby serves the interests of the countries that have made a deliberate policy of spreading it, most notably Britain and the USA, suppressing indigenous languages and suppressing other imperialistic languages, such as French, in the process. Phillipson describes Britain and the U.S. as having deliberately engaged in the promotion of English and cultural transmission, through agencies such as the British Council and the United States Information Agency.

None of this necessarily implies ill intent on the part of the individuals who are involved in English language teaching; nevertheless, according to Phillipson, these individuals “function in an imperialist structure.” (p. 46) Ignorance of the social and cultural implications of English language teaching among teachers tends to be perpetuated by their education and training, which focuses on methods, techniques, and language learning theories, to the exclusion of the broader social context, an exclusion reflected also in core-English country produced textbooks. (Canagajarah, 1999b)

Hence, the growing number of English language ‘expert’ English language teachers working in Third World countries have been largely ignorant of and insensitive to the local social, cultural, and linguistic context, and have tended to promote monolingualism, both as teaching practice (English only) and as a societal goal. Education is therefore implicated in, as Phillipson described it, “stifling local languages and imposing alien tongues and values.” (p. 28) The implicit understanding of monolingualism as the norm and bilingualism or multilingualism as aberrant is contrary to the language situation in many countries of the world. Monolingual teaching is one of five tenets adopted, Phillipson claimed, by the English Language Teaching (ELT) field that originated in core English-speaking countries, and which are still prevalent in English language teaching worldwide. Phillipson’s complete list is as follows:
• English is best taught monolingually.
• The ideal teacher of English is a native speaker.
• The earlier English is taught, the better the results.
• The more English is taught, the better the results.
• If other languages are used much, standards of English will drop.
(p. 185)

Phillipson called these tenets into question and recast them as fallacies.

There have been three broad and related objections to linguistic imperialism. They can be called the micro-social objection, the world Englishes/appropriation objection, and the political objection. They will now be examined in turn.

Sri Lankan scholar A. Suresh Canagarajah did not object to Phillipson’s thesis as such. However, he pointed out its limitations in his book, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching, and related work. (Canagajarah, 1999a, 1999b) Canagarajah argued that Phillipson, as a representative of the center, could provide only a macro-level perspective on linguistic imperialism that did not represent the situation from the point of view of the periphery, nor the lived experience of those struggling with English in the periphery. Phillipson’s view from the center assumed a reproduction orientation on power: that the power structure, comprising a powerful center and a weaker periphery, was maintained in part through language, teaching materials, methodologies, and institutions. Canagarajah claimed that this view was too deterministic; it ignored the complexity of the foreign language learning environments of the periphery, including the varying cultures, teacher and student agendas, and the socio-political background, in which the individuals in those situations might resist linguistic imperialism. “At the micro-social level of the classroom, then,” Canagajarah argued, “teachers and students enjoy some agency to question, negotiate, and resist power.” (1999a, p. 211) Using a largely ethnographic research approach, he showed how Sri Lankan university students in some cases rejected English, for example by pushing the teacher to use Tamil, and in other cases appropriated English in various ways for self-empowerment, such as tactical code-switching, or defacing donated English textbooks as an assertion of their identity or to subvert the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the American textbook. Though modest, such negotiation at the local level is a step in resisting power, according to Canagajarah. In contrast to a reproduction model of education which relies on a deterministic view of mental conditioning in students to serve dominant social institutions and groups, Canagajarah focused on what he called, “resistance theories (that) explain how there are sufficient contradictions within institutions to help subjects gain agency, conduct critical thinking, and initiate change.” (Canagajarah, 1999b, p. 22) The maintenance of existing power structures is, in the micro-social view, not guaranteed.

A variation on Canagajarah’s resistance theory is what Sonntag (2009) calls linguistic cosmopolitanism. Rejecting the structural determination of linguistic imperialism theory, whereby individuals are depicted as being at the mercy of a dominant global structure, linguistic cosmopolitanism takes the individual as the unit of analysis, and views the individual as autonomous and capable of seeking the good life, trading if necessary his or her identity with a particular culture and engaging with ‘the Other’ in a creative way to empower themselves and fulfill their aspirations. By implication, learners of English are not dominated, as in the linguistic imperialism view, but appropriate language on their own terms, and in a way that, according to Sonntag, “frees culture and language from geographical boundedness.” (p. 16)

Uysal et al. (2007) illustrate how local level situations and processes can influence the level of English dominance. They show that while English has a dominant role in primary school curricula in three expanding circle countries – Turkey, Latvia, an France - factors such as a lack of well-equipped teachers in Turkey, a reaction against Russification in Latvia, and strong public support of English in spite of government efforts to promote other languages in France, serve to encourage or disrupt the spread of English in an unplanned way. They conclude: “contrary to Phillipson’s (1997) claims about the hegemonic expansion of English in Europe resulting in linguistic imperialism, at least at primary level in these three countries, English spread did not seem to amount to linguistic imperialism or linguistic marginalisation of native languages.” (Uysal et al., 2007, p. 203)
The second objection to linguistic imperialism as an explanation for the spread of English can be labeled the world Englishes/appropriation objection, which connects activity at the local level with empowerment through the creation of new varieties of English and gives learners access to new opportunities. The phenomenon of empowerment through the rise of world Englishes (or in Strevens’ (1992) formulation, localized forms of English) has been widely recognized by many linguists. (Crystal, 2003) Ferguson described how ‘control’ of a language can pass from its original native speakers to those to whom the language has spread. “This process is just beginning in English,” he claimed. (Ferguson, 1992, p. xvi) Kachru (1992a) argued that English is adopted because of the status it may bestow on those who know the language, or on the opportunities it opens up to those who learn it.

Fishman (1992) averred, stating that the spread of English was no longer simply promoted by Britain and the U.S., but that it was being actively fostered by non-English-mother-tongue countries in both the Third World and in developed countries. Pennycook (2009) drew attention to the paradox between English as a key to the economic success of nations and their peoples, as well as its contribution to social, political and economic inequality. He acknowledged that people desire English strongly, and that this desire “may be linked to a yearning for particular lifestyles, bodies, images, discourses, and identities.” (p. 87) McKay (2003) pointed out that “many individuals learn English not because English is promoted by English-speaking countries, but rather because these individuals want access to scientific and technological information, international organizations, global economic trade, and higher education.” (p. 4) Strevens (1992) claimed that the desire for English among non-native English speakers meant the end of the role of English “as an instrument of subservience.” (p. 30)

For Widdowson (2003), the transfer of control and the creation of World Englishes formed a basis for challenging the linguistic imperialism theory. Widdowson argued that proficiency in a language is not about conforming to a set of standard rules; rather, he stated, “you are proficient in a language to the extent that you possess it, make it your own, bend it to your will, assert yourself through it rather than simply submit to the dictates of its form.” (p. 42) He went on to argue that no nation now has ‘ownership’ of English; learners the world over are taking possession of the language and creating new varieties. This view, however, runs up against the prevailing dominance of native-speaker norms in the core English-speaking countries’ educational practices. Building on this argument, Widdowson called into question Phillipson’s linguistic imperialism theory. The theory is built on the assumption that the English language has ‘spread’ from core countries to periphery countries, and that this idea of ‘spread’ implies that the thing spread (English in this case) remains intact. Language though, according to Widdowson, “does not travel well because it is fundamentally unstable.” (ibid., p. 46) He continued,
One might accept the conspiracy theory that there was an intention to use
English to dominate, but the assumption that the intention was successful,
which is often taken as a necessary corollary, is based on the concept of
the language as an invariant code with communication as the simple
transmission of encoded messages by ideal speaker-listeners in homogeneous
speech communities. (ibid., p. 46)

Widdowson did not deny the fact of imperialism itself; he did, however, argue that because of its inherent mutability and its adaptation by those who learn it, language itself cannot be imperialistic. Hence, the term linguistic imperialism is a misnomer.

To be sure, Phillipson himself acknowledged the rise of world Englishes, whereby periphery-English countries – such as India, Singapore, and West Africa - establish their own norms, but saw this as a reason to break away from dependence on the norms of core English countries rather than as a denial of linguistic imperialism itself. (1992, p. 198)

The third type of objection to linguistic imperialism took issue with what was seen as Phillipson’s political agenda. Crystal (2003) viewed Phillipson’s account of the global dominance of English as “anachronistic.” (p. 23) He acknowledged that the global spread of English is related to the political and economic power of the countries where it is spoken as a first language, but argued in favor of English as a global lingua franca, and while he recognized his own good fortune in being a native speaker of the language, also claimed that his own book “has not been written according to any political agenda,” (ibid., p. xv) Crystal acknowledged the possibility that global inequality could arise from differential access to the global language, but he argued that it could be minimized by the teaching of English as a foreign language to children starting in the first year of compulsory education.

Crystal’s criticism of Phillipson’s thesis was the first shot fired in academic skirmish between them, which continued in the pages of the journal Applied Linguistics. Phillipson’s (1999) review of the first edition of Crystal’s English as a Global Language, he accused Crystal of having a political agenda, of failure to bring a social science perspective to the topic, of ‘invisibilizing’ oppressed peoples in his narrative, of being Eurocentric and triumphalist, and of failing to recognize the role of English in upholding the global power structure. Phillipson drew on Japanese scholar Yukio Tsuda’s distinction between a diffusion of English paradigm, espoused, in Phillipson’s view, by Crystal, and an ecology of language paradigm. Phillipson argued that the former uncritically endorses, “capitalism, its science and technology, a modernization ideology, monolingualism as a norm, ideological globalization and internationalization, transnationalization, the Americanization and homogenization of world culture, linguistic, cultural and media imperialism.” (p. 274) The ecology of language paradigm, on the other hand, incorporates, according to Phillipson, “a human rights perspective, equality in communication, multilingualism, the maintenance of language and cultures, the protection of national sovereignties, and the promotion of foreign language education.” (ibid.)

In his response, Crystal (2000) charged Phillipson with being one-sided, ideologically-fueled, having a political mindset, and attempting to create a stereotype. The acerbic dialogue between Phillipson and Crystal might be interpreted as mere name-calling and fault-finding, but it does capture the different outlooks that scholars bring to the problems of the spread of English: what one may regard as a good faith attempt to objectively describe and explain the phenomenon by scholars in English-speaking countries, the other may insist that all such attempts are of necessity political in nature and should be called into question. The facts themselves are generally not in dispute: it is the way they are described, the connotations of the vocabulary used, whose side of the story is foregrounded, and how one side of the debate views the other, that are at issue. Because of this, the discourse of the debate can itself become the subject of debate: for example, a teacher and students in a graduate seminar in World Languages at Purdue University argued that Phillipson himself had a hegemonic agenda in that his rhetorical style sought to dominate readers by telling them what to believe, rather than allowing readers to form their own conclusions (Berns et al., 1998, 1999). The criticism was about authorial voice and intention, rather than the factual content of Phillipson’s book.

Clearly, Phillipson’s work was controversial and gave rise to numerous objections. Yet linguistic imperialism theory has informed much thought and practice in language planning and English language teaching. In these areas, linguistic imperialism is generally regarded as a force to be overcome. What follows is a review of some of a sample of the literature in these areas.
Crystal (1987) described language planning as “the creation and implementation of an official policy about how the languages and linguistic varieties of a country are to be used.” (p. 364) As an example, Fishman (1992) demonstrated how indigenous languages can be afforded special protection against English by national governments. For example, in the Philippines, the use of English as a medium of instruction in school is limited to mathematics and the natural sciences, considered to be “ethnically less encumbered,” while Philippino has replaced English in the bulk of the rest of the curriculum – in “ethnically more encumbered subjects” such as history and civics. (p. 21)

Troudi’s (2009) study illustrates how English can displace a major national language. He describes how in the Middle East and the Gulf, English is pushing Arabic into “a minor role in post-secondary education,” (p. 95) because of its use as the medium of instruction in the natural and human sciences, and that additionally, English is being introduced at ever earlier stages of elementary and secondary education. While the twenty university students interviewed in Troudi’s study agreed that studying the sciences through English improved their competitiveness and employability, English also became, according to Troudi, “a challenge and sometimes a burden or an obstacle instead of a medium,” (p. 95) and further that the practice of studying in English resulted in “two sides to the participants’ linguistic identity: the cultural, maintained through Arabic, and the scientific, which is maintained through English.” (p. 96) Habbash (2009), exploring the same phenomenon with a focus on Saudi Arabia, acknowledged the association of English with “modernity, high quality life, technology, science, career, success, etc.” (p. 97) while raising concerns about the potential threat posed to Arabic as a language of instruction. Describing as Troudi did the reach of English not only into higher education but as far as the first grade of compulsory education, he argued that, “such increased reliance on English in the absence of empirical research will not best serve the future of Saudi English language learners nor will it safeguard their Islamic values and cultural heritage.” (pp. 96-97) Both Troudi and Habbash draw on their research findings to recommend the strengthening of Arabic language education in their respective countries.

The example of Nigeria illustrates language planning in a country where English exists alongside a number of other languages, no single one of which is the national standard. English is used as the official medium of instruction in Nigeria, against a backdrop of around 400 indigenous languages, including three that are recognized as national languages – Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. (Adegbija, 2004; Jibowo, 2009) Adegbija described the role of English as an elite language since colonial times, and its dominance today in the media, business practices and technology transfer, the internet, and in public education, where it is introduced in the first years and is required for entry into and graduation from higher education institutions. He argued for proactive language policies which would mandate, for example, the use of indigenous languages in the media and government. He summarized the problem and the challenge thus:

English is thus largely a minority language monopolised by the elite, and the policy of its
use as Nigeria’s official language has resulted in the exclusion of the masses from
participation in national affairs. A major challenge for language policy is thus to
make it possible for the masses to participate in the national scheme of things
without proficiency in English. (Adegbija, 2004, p. 214)

Jibowo’s (2009) study of 300 Nigerian undergraduate students illustrates the challenge in gaining support for such policy. He found that over 50% agreed with the continuing use of English in schools, with only a negligible number against. Respondents commented on the need for English to understand scientific and technological concepts, and on its value as an international lingua franca. Unlike in the Arabic countries, in multilingual Nigeria no other language than English was considered suitable as a national language that could unify the Nigerian people. In spite of perceptions of the need for English, Jibowo pointed out that many students wished this were not the case because of “the difficulty they encounter in learning English language in schools.” (p. 99) This difficulty echoes Troudi’s finding that English can be an obstacle to learning, and is confirmed by Bamgbose, who described Nigerian students “fall(ing) by the wayside simply because of English, which is a compulsory subject.” (Bamgbose, 2001, p. 361)

The current situation in South Korea is described by Shim (2009). The administration of President Lee Myung-bak has set forth a plan to strengthen the teaching of English in public schools through Teaching English in English (TEE). The plan includes hiring thousands of new teachers who are qualified to teach TEE, providing in-service training for current teachers, and offering financial aid to teacher training colleges that hire native English speaking lecturers. Shim discusses the pros and cons of this policy across four areas: economic (the plan as a waste of national resources versus opening up the nation to globalization); educational/developmental (negative versus positive effects of introducing foreign language teaching too early in childrens’ lives); national identity (threat to the national identity versus the view that national identity in the modern world is, in Shim’s words, “complex, fluid, and at times contradictory” (p. 109)); and social conflict (escalation of social inequality through access to English versus the opening up of access to English to all through public school teaching). Shim is persuaded that the arguments in favor of the administration’s plan win out in the public debate, but raises concerns about a number of critical issues that were overlooked, among them: the increased reliance on the American English model, American English speakers, and American textbooks; the availability of American English on the internet, making its presence in the classroom unnecessary; and the marginalization of teachers and students who are not able to become proficient in, or who disagree with TEE and the American English model. Shim ends by making a case for critical pedagogy which would teach students to resist domination by American English, and the teaching of world Englishes, emphasizing the use of English as a lingua franca among non-native speakers as opposed to a tool for communicating with Americans.

In the context of the teaching of English in European countries, Mondiano argued that native speaker varieties are carriers of ideology, specifically that:
British English promotes systems of exclusion and marginalization, of class
stratification and the preserving of traditional ways of living and thinking,
while American English represents a New World hegemony insensitive to how
US mass-produced culture and aggressive multi-national corporate programs
impact on both developed and developing nations. (2001a, p. 169)
Such ideologies, like soldiers in the Trojan horse, colonize learners’ minds and negatively impact upon the learners’ “cultural integrity.” (p. 159) Mondiano’s answer, which he claimed is the responsibility of applied linguists, practitioners, and language planners, is to promote English as an International Language (EIL), a neutral variety of English that is stripped of the ideological baggage of nationality and is “in harmony with the spirit of the international movement.” (p. 171)

In another paper, Mondiano (2001b) took up the argument that many of the world’s English learners will not have any need to use the language for communication with core-country native speakers, but with other non-native English speakers. Increasingly, cultural artifacts such as music and film are being produced in English in periphery countries by non-native speakers. Kachru’s concentric circle model of English speakers becomes irrelevant as the center of gravity shifts toward non-native English speakers, and English becomes, in Mondiano’s words, “simply a utilitarian communicative tool, one which allows the non-native user to retain, to the greatest degree possible, their distinctive cultural characteristics,” (p. 344) and thus avoid becoming “coerced into conforming to a nation-state centred view, as opposed to an international frame of reference.” (p. 340)

English as an International Language, otherwise known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) (Jenkins, 2007) may appear to present a solution to the problem of linguistic imperialism, but runs into its own problems, not least of which is that the decision as to what constitutes such a variety of English needs to be defined, and thus far those most interested in the project are scholars from the Inner Circle countries such as McKay (2003), Mondiano, and Jenkins, which potentially opens EIL itself up to charges of linguistic imperialism. Further, merely attempting to pin down what would be the agreed-upon features of such a variety is also problematic, though Jenkins has attempted to do this in the area of pronunciation (Jenkins, 2000). Another problem is the contradiction that exists between the process of appropriation described above, whereby a number of Englishes emerge and serve national and local purposes, and the proposal that English should be a lingua franca, a shared means of communication for people around the world. Even if mutual intelligibility can be achieved among the varieties, it is unclear whether the speakers of different varieties – and in particular those of the Inner Circle countries - will find other national forms acceptable, such as prepone in Indian English (Widdowson, 2003), or the outgone president in Nigerian and Ghanaian Englishes (Bamgbose, 2001), in addition to stylistic, grammatical, pragmatic, and phonological variations. As Strevens (1992) has pointed out, some users of English may speak and write varieties of English that do not conform to one of the (Inner Circle) standard forms, and that many native English speakers – including English language teachers – “overtly or unconsciously despise these varieties,” (p. 37) Such an attitude may be perceived by those non-native speakers as “arrogant, imperialist, and insulting.” (ibid.) McKay (2003) argues in fact that English has not become de-nationalized, but re-nationalized, as speakers in varying locales have appropriated the language and created new forms and usages. Finally, it is not clear whether learners of English around the world will in fact aspire to learning a variety of English that is removed from at least one of the Inner Circle cultures with which it is associated.

As can be inferred from the above survey of the literature, linguistic imperialism and its critics focus on the position of English in what Kachru described as the Outer Circle and Expanding Circle countries. There appears to be little if any work on English teaching or the teaching of international students in the Inner Circle countries that makes reference to the theory, yet travel to those countries for the purpose of study is an aspect of cultural imperialism, or even the “educational imperialism” (Phillipson, 1992, p. 58) with which linguistic imperialism is associated; and the students traveling to the Inner Circle come from countries where questions of linguistic imperialism, resistance, and world Englishes are being played out. It seems impossible to deny the connection between the issues surveyed above and international students in the U.S. higher education, and yet it is also challenging to make a case for linguistic imperialism when students have voluntarily come to the U.S. to study.

Nevertheless, I believe that the themes explored above can inform research in U.S. higher education which is grounded in critical pedagogy theory. According to McLaren (2008), critical theory conceives of culture as “a set of practices, values, and ideologies from which different groups draw and make sense of the world.” (p. 74) A dominant culture determines the prevailing practices, ideologies, and values, within and around which subordinate cultures struggle to express their own cultural meanings. They do this through hegemony, a process whereby the dominant culture creates “consensual social practices,” (ibid., p. 76) in institutions such as schools, rather than by means of force. Because of the ‘default’ nature of the dominant culture’s ideology, practices, and values, to reject these is seen as unusual or rebellious.

Through this lens, the higher education institution can be seen as the meeting point of a dominant linguistic group and various subordinate groups. Expectations around accuracy of language, the use of English only, conformity to American English norms, and so on may be part of the institution’s culture which international students, as well as those belonging to other groups such as U.S. language minorities, have had no say in creating. It may be argued that international students should not expect to have had any say in the creation of American educational practices, and this is of course true; but it does not change the fact that these students, recruited into U.S. institutions, must then negotiate the prevailing culture, including its expectations around language, in order to be successful. As an example, an instructor may expect international students’ English to be free of grammar errors and to conform stylistically with the American norm. A world Englishes/linguistic imperialism view of this might ask whether such an expectation is realistic, given the fact the student has learned English as a foreign or second language, and in a country where the American standard was not the model, or where English was learned primarily for purposes of communication within that country. This gives rise to the questions of whether there should be tolerance of different varieties of English, or whether such varieties are viewed as deficient, as well as who makes such decisions and on what basis. In grounding research in critical pedagogy, and bringing themes of linguistic imperialism and world Englishes to bear, it might be possible to gain insight into the varying perceptions that instructors, international students, and their American classmates hold – implicitly and explicitly - with regard to English. Phillipson described as one of his main objectives, “to influence people from my own group in the Centre, in the hope that they will reconsider their role, their cherished methodologies, and their political ‘detachment.’” (Phillipson, 1996, p. 163) I believe that qualitative research in a U.S. higher education institution informed by (if not necessarily embracing in their entirety) linguistic imperialism theory and world Englishes would be an innovative and fruitful way to encourage such reflection with a view to developing institutional language policies that take account of the international students experience. I would expect such an attempt, like Phillipson’s book, to arouse controversy and disagreement.


References

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The Decline of the Humanities and the Triumph of Human Capital Theory

English departments are closing, the number of undergraduate students majoring in English is in freefall, and the humanities are on the decline in American universities. Meanwhile, with more than one in five undergraduate students nationwide, Business has become the most popular undergraduate major. So writes William M. Chace in an opinion piece titled The Decline of the English Department, which appeared in the Autumn 2009 edition of The American Scholar. In Chace’s analysis, the causes of the impending demise of the humanities and college English departments are manifold. Chief among them is an act of self-sabotage by the English departments themselves, since they have failed to develop in students a love of great literature, and instead have alienated students by embracing esoterica such as identity studies, sexuality, and popular culture as subjects of research and study.

Another reason is that while the private universities have tended to uphold the traditional academic disciplines, the drift of students in recent years has been toward the public universities, which, Chace claims tend to focus more on business, technical, and applied disciplines. Added to these causes are the increasing cost of a college degree, making parents reluctant to direct their offspring into disciplines that don’t offer an obvious return on the investment; and the increasing ethnic diversity of the student body which calls into the question the centrality of the English canon and creates interest in other literatures.

While I wouldn’t disagree with Chace’s reasons, I would argue that his view is too America-focused, and fails to take into account trends at the global level that virtually assure the devaluation of subjects in the ‘love of learning’ category and push to the fore the more practical, work-oriented disciplines. After all, the humanities are not only threatened in the United States: commentators in the UK and Australia are also bewailing their demise. Chace’s analysis ignores two trends: first, globalization, or the increasingly free flow of trade, labor, and knowledge among the world’s nations; and second, the triumph of the human capital theory of education, first conceived by Adam Smith, and refined by Gary Becker in the 1960s, which puts education squarely in the service of economic advancement. In the human capital model, education’s role is to prepare students to be able to compete in the labor market, and its value is judged according to its contribution to economic growth. In a globalized world, this means a labor market in which more and more workers are competing with their counterparts in increasingly far-flung locales, since no matter where they are they can be educated and trained in the same knowledge and skills that they can trade in the global marketplace. Let us consider two examples of how human capital theory has been embraced outside of the U.S., before turning to the U.S. response and a more complete understanding of the decline of English that William Chace bewails.

Exhibit 1: In Western Europe, the human capital view took hold in the last decades of the twentieth century, and state-run or controlled universities, bastions of traditional academic disciplines, learning for the love of learning, and educators of free-thinking citizens, have come to be viewed as a drain on their countries’ economies rather than as a contributor. Simultaneously, Western Europe, already highly invested in political and economic integration, is integrating its post-secondary education systems by way of the Bologna process to create an enormous education zone that can compete on the world stage, and in the process firmly establishing a monolithic training ground for the knowledge workers of the future. The London Communiqué, issued by European ministers in 2007 following a conference to review the Bologna process in that city, urged institutions to communicate with employers and make their degrees relevant to the employment market.

Exhibit 2: For over sixty years, the World Bank has directed loans to the education systems of developing nations on the grounds that education is key to economic development. The World Bank’s educational agenda is functional, and designed to benefit the poor by helping them to participate in the economy: literacy, science, math, and foreign language learning are promoted as means to this end. It is hard to argue with an education that attempts to equip people with the means to lift themselves out of poverty, but we should note that, in developing nations that receive World Bank loans, a liberal arts vision of education, one which gives instruction in literature, philosophy, and history, may be passed over in the necessary rush to economic development. As workers emerging from these education systems begin to compete with Americans for jobs that can be outsourced or offshored to any part of the world – jobs in health care, insurance, and finance, for example - those American college graduates who majored in English and the humanities may find their knowledge is not very marketable.

Unable to compete with their foreign counterparts on price (since wages are much lower in the countries to which these jobs have migrated), American graduates need to add value to employers in other ways. Thus arises in the U.S. a discussion on what knowledge and skills Americans need in order to beat out the foreign competition. Indeed, human capital theory lies behind much of the mainstream discourse around American education of the past three decades, starting with the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (which addressed secondary education), and reaching into higher education by way of President George W. Bush’s American Competitive Initiative in 2006. The prime motivation for these initiatives was the perception that, with an increasing emphasis on work-relevant skills in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, America was falling behind economically. The education system was to blame because it failed to prepare students to be competitive in the world economy, and education therefore had to be re-tooled to provide workers with the knowledge and skills to make America competitive again. No Child Left Behind, 21st Century Skills, and STEM education are all manifestations of this emphasis in the nation’s educational discourse and practice.

As American higher education takes a more vocational turn, it is not only American students who benefit. Always the top destinations for students traveling abroad seeking degrees, U.S. institutions hosted over 620 000 international students last year, with over 60% of them choosing degrees in business, engineering, math and the sciences, and other vocationally-oriented fields, and the humanities accounting for only 3%. Not surprisingly, considering that most of these students are likely to be paying full tuition, the majority are choosing fields of study with a greater promise of a return on their educational investment dollars. Universities that wish to attract greater numbers of international students – and creating multiple revenue streams is a sound survival strategy, especially during economic hard times - will have to ensure that they are offering, and have the capacity to enroll increasing numbers of students in, the practical, vocationally-oriented degrees that international students wish to study for. Here, U.S. institutions themselves are up against international competition. The UK and Australia have long been an alternative for international students seeking a degree in and English speaking country, and they attract significant numbers of students. New players such as China, Malaysia, and Singapore, are now also becoming significant recruiters of students from abroad. While absolute numbers of international students in the U.S. continues to grow, its percentage of the global international student market is shrinking. All of this puts enormous pressure on institutions to offer the practical degrees that will attract international students.

It is not only in the vocational orientation of degrees that American universities are serving as drivers of economic development. American institutions are held up as an example to the world of how massive investments in research, coupled with strategies to get this research to ‘spill over’ into business ventures, can fuel economic growth and employment through innovation. Universities and departments that can leverage research funding into new discoveries and commercialize them attract greater public and private funding. Although the Europeans are behind the U.S. in turning research into marketable product, they are studying American practices closely. If they can learn to emulate the entrepreneurial university model – through strategic investment in their institutions and planning - they will present the U.S. with a formidable economic challenge and drive higher education further towards an orientation toward economic advancement.

Human capital-based education certainly has its critics: they see education as having been co-opted as the training ground for multinational corporations. Higher education, in their view, has been commoditized, branded, and globally marketed. No longer a good and an end in itself, education has become a means to an end, and the end, though partly the benefit of the student who stands a better chance of being able to compete in the job market, is ultimately the economic advancement of the corporation and the nation state. However, this view is not heard much in the popular discourse, and it is not surprising: the first question asked of a student who has declared his or her proposed field of study has long been, “And what are you going to do with that?”

Is it true, then, that the human capital model has triumphed in higher education worldwide? Some might disagree, pointing to other educational models are alive and well in the world. Progressive education has many adherents and practitioners for example, and many countries offer educational varieties that speak to the cultural roots of their people, but this is largely happening at the elementary and secondary educational levels. UNESCO, the United Nations education and culture agency, is known for its promotion of a different vision of higher education, one that emphasizes social responsibility, but in its recent Paris communiqué it made clear that the chief means of achieving this is through science, technology, engineering, and math education, as well as vocational training and entrepreneurship education. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the human capital model at the higher education level comes from religious schools, which have a decidedly different agenda. Supported by governments in some countries, many will continue to thrive. However, while in the educational free market that is the U.S. many Christian colleges continue the liberal arts tradition, they, like English departments, are threatened by their reliance on tuition and the pull of students in the direction of colleges offering more professionally focused degrees. Indeed, in the current economic climate, many are experiencing financial difficulties and closure, and we can expect to see their presidents and boards, like William Chace, wringing hands over declining enrollments and endowments. There does not, in fact, appear to be an educational model robust enough to give a serious challenge to human capital-based education.

Set against this background of increased global competition for work, the increasing vocationalization of education worldwide, greater access to education in developing countries, and the flow of financial capital into basic and applied research, the teaching of English and the other humanities begins to look like a throwback to a time when the world was less connected, when work was more localized, and when it was easier to compete in the job market even with a degree attained for the love of it. English will not disappear, of course, but it will continue to become less popular as a major, and its faculty will likely spend more time teaching functional writing courses. The good news for those teachers is that the decline of English teaching in the U.S. may not be as much their responsibility as William Chace would have them believe; the bad news is that their discipline is at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. Human capital education theory has triumphed, and only a profound re-evaluation of free-market thinking the world over (think global hippiedom or a revival of Marxism) is likely to be able to bring a return to learning for personal enrichment, learning for the sheer love of it. None of us should hold our breath.



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A Brief History of International Collaborations and Partnerships in Higher Education

For higher education institutions in the early 21st century, the reality of a closely interconnected world is forcing a shift in orientation. Increasing global competition for students drives recruitment efforts onto the international playing field, and increasing demand from a new generation of students for access to the globalized world compels institutions to seek ways to provide such access as part of the educational offering. Meanwhile, emerging global markets for higher education are attracting the attention of long-established institutions in the developed world; and researchers are discovering new opportunities and means to collaborate with colleagues who have similar interests in institutions in other countries.

The most significant way for higher education institutions to gain access for their students to educational experiences in foreign countries, to attract international students and faculty to their own campuses, and to encourage research collaborations across borders, is through the formation of partnerships (also referred to as relationships, collaborations, and alliances,) with institutions and organizations located or operating in other countries. For the purpose of this paper, discussion centers on the collaborations and partnerships between higher education institutions, departments of institutions, or even individual faculty, which aim to achieve some goal, such as student or faculty exchange, or collaborative research. These agreements may be more or less formal, but are usually approved by the institution’s senior administration. Although universities and colleges may enter into partnerships with other types of entities, such as industrial corporations or private recruitment firms, the focus here is on relationships between higher education institutions, or what are referred to as “academic partnerships” (e.g. Boston University, 2006), though with the recent rise of partnerships between universities and for-profit companies for academic purposes, these are also considered.

International partnerships are a not a new phenomenon. However, the rationales for their creation, and the nature and extent of the partnerships, have undergone profound change in the past decade. In order to analyze the causes and the results of this evolution, three periods or ‘phases’ of the growth of collaborations and partnerships are proposed. Stage 1 can be called the pre-globalization phase, which encompasses most of the 20th century. The use of this term is not meant to imply that globalization was not occurring prior to the end of the 20th century; rather, until that time, the process was much more gradual and not widely recognized. Stage 2, the globalization phase, began in the late 1980s with the advent of the internet and mass travel, and was firmly established by the time Thomas Friedman declared in 2005 that “The World is Flat.” (Friedman, 2005) The final stage, the post-globalization phase - in which the interconnectedness of the world is taken for granted, just as the nation-state is today - is yet to come: how will collaborations and partnerships develop in the future? Although we cannot say for sure, there are plenty of clues to be found among current developments to allow us to make some informed guesses.

The analysis that follows illustrates an evolution in international partnerships that is closely related to the onset of globalization and institutions’ responding through a process of internationalization. During this process, the trend has been for international partnerships to evolve from relatively informal to relatively formal; from relatively simple to relatively complex; from relatively small in number to relatively large in number; and from the status of institutional ‘add-on’ to being an essential component of an all-encompassing process of internationalization.

The Pre-Globalization Phase

Altbach and Knight (2006) described medieval universities as international – de Wit (1999) used the term “cosmopolitan” - in that they attracted “the wandering scholar looking for knowledge and an understanding of other cultures.” (de Wit, 1999, para. 7). The rise of the nation state turned the focus of universities inward, and by the twentieth century study abroad and other international activity initiated by the university was an attempt to reach out into ‘foreign’ countries and cultures. Far from being an imperative in a rapidly shrinking world, study abroad was an experience to be had when relatively autonomous nation states still held each other at arm’s length.

International collaborations and partnerships arose mostly in an unplanned and piecemeal way, with collaborations being formed to serve the needs of institutions, departments, and faculty to work together on research, conduct faculty and student exchange, and permit students to engage in study abroad experiences. Mostly this was a sideline or ‘add-on’ activity, reserved for a small number of faculty and students with international interests, such as students of modern languages who wanted or were required by their departments to spend some time studying in a country where the language of study was spoken, or an architecture department that offered its students exposure European architectural styles and ideas through a period of study abroad (for example, Wentworth Institute of Technology, 2010). A characteristic of a program like this was complementarity: students were able to gain an experience in their discipline, or use facilities in the host institution that the home institution was not able to offer. As Boston University’s Subcommittee on International Partnerships described them, “Academic collaborations allow for scholarly exchange and alliances where the two institutions might have complementary programs.” (Boston University, 2006, p. 4)

In the case of study abroad, the visit may have been organized by a study abroad office, or it may have been organized at the departmental level, sometimes the result of personal relationships between faculty members of the home and host institutions. Typical of the approach was that of Michigan State University, which described various types of agreements for various purposes, such as faculty and student exchange, study abroad, and collaborative research, but which did not necessarily articulate an institutional vision for internationalization. (Michigan State University, 2010)

Collaborations and partnerships arose also to some extent out of a desire on the part of students to explore the unknown, the world out there, to broaden one’s mind by experiencing a new country, somewhat in the tradition of the European “Grand Tour” that was undertaken by young aristocrats starting in the sixteenth century in order to round out their classical education. Indeed, as Altbach points out, “American colleges and universities, especially those in the upper tier of prestige, have long declared their interest in providing students with an international consciousness and, if possible, an overseas experience, as part of their undergraduate education.” (Altbach, 2004, p. 6)

Other rationales for international initiatives included serving Americans overseas; serving students abroad who wanted an American degree; and, in the case of the many branch campuses opened by U.S. institutions in Japan in the 1970s, for financial reasons. (ibid p. 8 – 9) The University of Chicago Business School opened a branch campus in Barcelona in the 1990s to extend its brand internationally, serve executives who would not be able to attend a program in Chicago, and, by having top faculty teach in the program and then return to Chicago, to have them “create courses that can be taken back to Chicago” (Trapp, 1993) and thus enrich the program there. None of these rationales represented, either individually or in combination with others, a conscious and articulated strategy for internationalization at the institutional level. Nor were they, as Altbach and Knight (2006) have pointed out, a particularly profit-making activity, though Altbach and Knight acknowledged that “such activities may enhance the competitiveness, prestige, and strategic alliances of the college.” (Altbach & Knight, 2006, p. 3)

Beyond such institutional-level rationales for international activities, political rationales played a part in promoting some international activity in higher education. De Wit (1999) pointed out that with the rise of the U.S. as a global power, especially after World War II, knowledge of other cultures and languages became critical, and universities received federal funding to deliver area studies, foreign language, and study abroad programs, ostensibly in the interest of furthering world peace, but likely also, in the context of the Cold War, in order to gain a better understanding of potential allies and opponents. (Andringa, 2001) The Fulbright Program, established in 1946 and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, offered further encouragement to American students to pursue studies abroad for similar reasons. (CIES). One of the key impacts of the Fulbright program, according to a 2002 evaluation, was to initiate long-term partnerships between the participating faculty of the home and host institutions: “75% have continued to collaborate with colleagues since their grant’s completion,” according to an SRI International report. (SRI International, 2010) A federally sponsored initiative like Fulbright, in other words, provided a part of the ‘backdrop’ against which institutional collaborations and partnerships could arise.

Thus, in the pre-globalization phase, international collaborations and partnerships among higher education institutions arose in a somewhat piecemeal way, initiated at the faculty, department, or institutional level, but in most cases not representing a strategic push toward institutional internationalization.

The Globalization Phase

By the end of the 20th century, the Cold War was over, the world was rapidly becoming connected via the internet, international travel was easier and cheaper than ever, and multinational (now global) businesses were developing worldwide networks and integrated supply chains, aided in part by the removal of trade restrictions. The process of globalization was rapidly creating a global market for goods, services, and culture. Although the start of the process of globalization might be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years, the rapid integration of world cultures made possible by a combination of factors at the end of the 20th century can be seen as a “tipping point” (Gladwell, 2002) in the process which increased the rate and level of cross-border flows of information, people, goods, and services enormously.

Knight defined globalization simply as “the flow of technology, economy, knowledge, people, values, and ideas…across borders.” (Knight, 2003, para.10) Higher education became involved in this process. According to Altbach and Knight, globalization constituted an amalgam of “economic, political, and societal forces pushing 21st century higher education toward greater international involvement.” (Altbach & Knight, 2006, p. 1), and de Wit characterized the response of institutions thus:
Not only are nations and international bodies placing greater emphasis on international cooperation and exchange, but the institutions themselves are developing their own strategies to internationalize research and teaching. (de Wit, 1999, para. 1)

Simultaneously, there was a growing awareness among the populations of developed countries of the importance of international experiences in higher education. With globalization came the realization that to succeed in the work place, people needed the knowledge and skills to be able to succeed in cross-border and cross-cultural interactions. They needed intercultural competence, language skills, knowledge of the wider world beyond their own country’s borders. Universities were perceived as a means to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in a globalizing world. According to a 2000 American Council on Education report, over 70% of respondents to a public opinion survey believed that students in higher education should study or work abroad before graduating. (American Council on Education, 2000)

As a result, in many institutions, a more consciously implemented strategy of institutional internationalization was initiated, one that was to supersede the unplanned array of activities already in place. Referring mainly to the international activities of universities in the U.S. and other countries of “the industrialized north,” Altbach expressed this evolution thus: “While higher education has always had an international dimension, with more than a million students studying overseas and with many collaborative arrangements among universities, this multinational thrust is a new development.” (Altbach, 2000, para. 3)

This notion of higher education institutions becoming strategic about their international activities is a defining feature of the globalization phase. As de Wit explained, this new strategic approach to higher education internationalization was distinct from the implementation of a few internationally focused activities; and distinct also from the rationales given for these activities, such as “peace and mutual understanding” or “the needs of an ever more international labor market.” (de Wit, 1999, para. 3)

Jane Knight, in a 2003 paper, defined the new internationalization as, “the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions, or delivery of postsecondary education.” (Knight, 2003, para.5)

Key to this definition is the word integrating: Knight elaborated on the term as follows: “the process of infusing or embedding the international and intercultural dimension into policies and programs to ensure that the international dimension remains central, not marginal, and is sustainable.” (ibid, para.8) She distinguished between an activity approach to internationalization – comprising study abroad, faculty exchange, research collaboration, and so on – and other, ‘deeper’ institutional approaches that she referred to as the competency approach, the ethos approach, and the process approach, each of which embeds internationalization into the fabric of the institution. (Andringa, 2001) Hence, a globalization-inspired approach to collaborations and partnerships differed from previous practice in that collaborations and partnerships were starting to be seen by some institutions as integral to a more comprehensive institutional approach to internationalization, rather than an add-on or a series of unplanned and unsystematic linkages.

This is not to say that U.S. higher education as a whole was quick to respond to globalization. In 2000, the American Council on Education reported that little progress had been made: foreign language enrollment was in decline, only 3% of students studied abroad during their university career, the average duration of study abroad was becoming shorter, with few students spending more than a semester in a foreign country, and international awareness among students was low. (American Council on Education, 2000) Although the report stated that, “Increasingly, college and university leaders are emphasizing a commitment to internationalization and its importance on their campuses,” (ibid p. 16) on most campuses there appeared to be little to show for it. The report’s conclusion acknowledged, though that, “It is also likely there are exciting, innovative activities going on in international education about which we are unaware – programs that are missed by traditional measures or reflect innovative techniques using the Internet or other new technology.” (American Council on Education, 2000, p. 29) However, its overall assessment was pessimistic: the data, it stated, “paint a disturbing picture of the state of internationalization in U.S. higher education as a whole, and suggest that we are slipping further behind the poor performance levels found when ACE carried out its assessment in 1986-87.” (ibid)

This view was reinforced by Altbach four years later. He acknowledged the large number of international students studying in the U.S., but pointed out that, “they constitute only 2.7 percent of undergraduate students in four-year institutions and 13.3 percent of graduate students – a much lower percentage than for other major host countries.” (Altbach, 2004, p. 7) However, Altbach recognized that U.S. higher education was on the cusp of what he called “The New Transnationalism:”
We are at the beginning of the era of transnational higher education, in which academic institutions from one country operate in another, academic programs are jointly offered by universities from different countries, and higher education is delivered through distance technologies. (ibid)
As evidence of the onset of this new era, Altbach and Knight reported a significant increase in international alliances, including the involvement by foreign universities in the establishment of new universities in Saudia Arabia, joint degree programs offered by institutions in developing southeast Asian nations and those in developed countries, the setting up of branch campuses in Africa, and others. (Altbach & Knight, 2006)
Institutions that embraced the goal of internationalization made it a part of their mission or strategic plan. Northeastern University announced a new strategic plan in 2009, in which internationalization was to play a key role. Referring to the internationalization goals for the university, Northeastern president Joseph Aoun was recently quoted, “In our rapidly changing world, students need to become inquisitive, life-long learners with a global perspective…higher education today must be driven by the mission to prepare students to succeed in a global economy and become engaged members of a global society.” (Northeastern University, 2010)
Beyond the somewhat idealistic talk of preparing students for the ‘global society,’ however, it can be argued that competition for students has become a key driver of institutional internationalization. This ‘survival rationale’ for internationalization has bred cynicism among some that universities’ enrollment of international students is financially motivated. Altbach in particular has alluded to this, claiming in 2004 that, “the primary goal of many of the branch campuses and transnational programs is to enrich the home campus,” (Altbach, 2004, p. 8) and again, with Knight in 2006, stating that, “many countries recruit international students to earn profits by charging high fees – including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the US.” (Altbach & Knight, 2006, p. 2) While it may be true that internationalization at the activity level – such as through entering into partnerships with overseas universities - is driven in many institutions by the need for new markets, it is unlikely that it will be sustained without a long-term international strategy which embeds these activities in supportive environments and targeted programs. Nevertheless, questions continue to be raised, now that not-for-profit higher education institutions are entering into partnerships with for-profit companies – from individual study abroad agencies to multinational corporations - to recruit international students and deliver international programming. Many universities that may previously have been reluctant to enter into such arrangements now embrace them as a way to ‘fast-track’ internationalization activities.
One means of doing this is for higher education institutions to work with for-profit companies to provide ‘pathway’ programs to prepare non-English-speaking international students for academic study. The most prominent collaborations involved, Navitas, INTO, and Kaplan, (INTO, 2010; Kaplan International Colleges, 2010; Navitas, 2010) have formed recruitment and academic preparation partnerships with numerous universities in the UK and Australia in the past ten years, (Spencer, 2008) and they are making inroads into the U.S. In 2010, INTO and Kaplan have each partnered with two U.S. universities, and Navitas with one.

The period of rapid globalization and internationalization has thus been a time of enormous change for many institutions of higher education. A strategic move into the global higher education marketplace is prompting more and new types of institutional partnerships. To support the activities that will arise from these partnerships, many institutions are making a deeper, more embedded internationalization ethos a part of their vision for the future.

The Post-Globalization Phase

Though we cannot know for sure what the future holds for international collaborations and partnerships, some trends that are already apparent will likely shape their nature and extent in the coming years.

International partnerships will be seen as integral to the mission and operations of higher education institutions.

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia is a new graduate research institution, having opened its doors to students for the first time in September 2009. The university’s vision statement puts forward the aspiration for science and technology research that is “comparable to that of the world’s top 10 science and technology universities…in areas where KAUST can be exceptional by global standards.” (KAUST, 2010b) Even during the university’s start-up phase, research relationships with institutions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America were established to support its Global Research Partnership; Academic Excellence Alliances were formed with departments of leading research universities worldwide to help develop KAUST’s curriculum; and Special Academic Partnerships were created to develop campus facilities and jump-start research. (KAUST, 2010a) The KAUST example illustrates well the priorities of a major new university established in an era of globalization. International alliances are seen as integral and are built into the fabric of the university, not ‘add-ons’ or ‘optional extras.’ KAUST may be an example of the university of the future; existing universities undergoing internationalization are faced with the challenge of integrating their international relationships into its operations, but unlike KAUST, may have to overcome institutional inertia and even resistance.

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is an example of a U.S. university that is embracing this challenge. It sees a strategic approach to international partnerships as a key factor in a broadly based push for internationalization. (Sutton, 2010) While maintaining the partnerships that have been developed at the school or department level, it is in the process of identifying and engaging with ten to fifteen “strategic” international partners, approved by all the university’s schools, which will serve the university’s academic and research goals, in selected parts of the world. The partners will not only provide opportunities for student and faculty exchange, and collaborative research; the intention is also that references to the partners and their countries will be infused into the curriculum, enabling all students to benefit from them. (ibid)

Institutional collaborations and partnerships will be encouraged by government initiatives

Some national governments have come to recognize the strategic role universities have to play in the nation’s economic and political power in the world. Such recognition can lead to political initiatives that encourage the formation of new forms of collaboration. For example, the British and American writers of a 2008 report commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown described the historic links between UK and U.S. higher education, citing the large numbers of students going to the other country to study, and the existence of programs such as the Rhodes and Marshall scholarship funds, as well as similarities in the structure and values of their respective higher education systems (UK/US Study Group, 2009). Based on concerns, however, that American and British dominance in higher education is under threat from newly emerging higher education systems in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, China, and India, and recognizing that many of the world’s problems – climate change and food shortages, for example – require transnational solutions, the report recommends the formation of an Atlantic Trust, which would, among other activities, provide international scholarships for students from the U.S. the UK, and third countries, to study for their undergraduate degrees at institutions in both the U.S. and the UK; and to support research by teams which would include institutions from the UK, the U.S. and a third country. Although the proposed Atlantic Trust has yet to see the light of day, this example illustrates the way that national strategic concerns could influence government policy, which in turn might create an environment that encourages institutional collaboration.

A related and more promising example is a recent report by the British Council (an organization that operates under the auspices of the British government), “U.K.-U.S. Higher-Education Partnerships: Realising the Potential,” which proposed an increase in the number and type of partnerships between U.S. and UK higher education institutions, and further, recommended that they leverage their combined strengths to enter into three-way partnerships with institutions in third countries such as China and India. (Fischer, 2010) The British Council also announced that it would finance, to the tune of $500 000, twenty collaborations between American and British institutions, particularly in the fields of science and technology.

Cross-border multi-governmental initiatives will also play an important role. Over the past decade, the governments of the European Union have been involved in the Bologna process, an initiative to harmonize the higher education systems, including degree structures and credits, of participating nations, (Altbach & Knight, 2006) laying the foundation for cross-border collaboration between European institutions. In Europe, the Bologna process has resulted in the harmonization of higher education systems and greater transparency of academic credentials. It is likely that this will encourage the establishment of cross-border collaborations between European institutions – though in a ‘borderless’ Europe, whether these collaborations will continue to be considered truly international is debatable. Further, it is possible that European institutions will become more active in establishing partnerships with universities outside Europe in order to enroll study abroad students, who may be attracted to the low cost and the “common academic space.” (Altbach, 2004) In fact, opening the Higher Education Area resulting from the Bologna process was the topic of the Bologna Policy Forum in April 2009, which was attended by both representatives of participating countries and also by representatives of around 20 countries outside the process seeking to strengthen ties in the field of higher education. (Europa, 2009) If the Bologna process truly has harmonized the higher education systems of participating nations, then in principle it should be possible to devise multi-university programs for students in which the articulation of credits both among those universities and with the home university outside the area is enormously simplified, making the possibility of a ‘global degree,’ earned at several universities over the course of a student’s academic career, more likely - especially if there is continuing funding for intra-European and worldwide academic partnerships through such initiatives as the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus program. (European Commission, 2010)

Governmental intervention is also likely to increase through implementation of Bologna-type initiatives in other parts of the world. The Japanese Ministry of Education, for example, has recently announced plans to work with South Korea and China to standardize methods of evaluating academic credentials in order to allow more study abroad among the three countries, according to an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun. (2010) Currently, the article states, individual institutions exchange academic credits at their own discretion. The three-way intergovernmental agreement may eventually be expanded to include all of the member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Limited government support may drive more collaborations and partnerships

In contrast to the supportive background provided by governments in other parts of the world, institutions in the United States are unlikely to be able to rely on government support for internationalization activity. As Altbach points out, “the United States…has never had a national approach to international higher education, and the federal government has provided scant support for it.” (Altbach, 2004, p. 11) There are no signs that this will change in the future. U.S. universities will continue to be compelled to sustain themselves, and in a period of declining numbers of American high school graduates, there will be a strong motivation to recruit international students. (Curry, 2008)

Changing economic realities for universities in other developed countries is likely to drive the formation of more international collaborations in order to maintain revenue levels. In the UK, for example, universities are expecting reduced government funding and have been told by Higher Education minister David Lammy that they will need to diversify their sources of funding. (BBC News, 2010)


The nature of collaborations will become more complex and more sophisticated.

As universities seek new ways to internationalize their campuses and their students’ experiences, there will likely be a rise in the number of more sophisticated and complex partnerships which bring together various institutions to provide the ‘global experience.’ One example is a new Northeastern University-initiated program, the US.-Sino Pathway program, in which students in China take English and academic courses at various locations in China, delivered by a private, for-profit corporation, Kaplan Higher Education, under Northeastern oversight; after this they spend a summer session at Northeastern or the University of Vermont; and they subsequently matriculate into one of those universities or another of several that have formed a consortium for this purpose. Thus, the student undergoing this experience is handled by three separate institutions in partnership. Another innovative Northeastern program is NUin, which began as a one-semester study abroad experience for freshmen in their first semester, and will offer students a full-year, multi-location option from fall 2010. This may in the near future lead to a program in which students could spend two or three years at various international locations, all the while studying for their ‘Northeastern’ degree. Programs such as these require very close collaboration between the partner institutions if they are to succeed. Indeed, it might be argued that the partnerships involved, which require ‘intermeshing’ some of the operational and strategic activities of each party, and in which each party has an enormous stake in the outcome, will be far closer than the partnerships we have seen in the past. As long ago as 1999, de Wit suggested that universities might follow the lead of industry, with cross-border institutional joint ventures or even mergers. (de Wit, 1999) This does not appear to have happened to any significant extent yet, but with the educational standardization activities of Bologna in Europe, and now in Asia, there may be more potential for this to happen. It is an intriguing thought that where we now have multinational (or global) corporations, we might in the future have multinational – global - universities. Such an institution is most likely to arise in the private, for-profit sector, since private firms tend not to be ‘place-based’ and can in principle establish branch campuses anywhere.

New types of positions and offices will be created

In order to handle the diversity and complexity of partnerships, universities will need to establish dedicated staff positions and offices. These offices and positions will play an increasingly significant role on campus as institutions extend their internationalization activities. At Northeastern University, the NU Global unit was established in the College of Professional Studies to serve as an incubator for international initiatives. The unit is headed by a Senior Associate Dean for International Engagement. Similarly, at Arizona State University, the Office of the Vice President for Global Engagement “was established for the sole purpose of advancing the university’s global initiatives,” (Kussalanant, 2007, para. 4) in large part through creating and maintaining strategic international partnerships. Needless to say, the remit of these offices extends far beyond that of the traditional study abroad office. Indeed, some study abroad offices are likely to be absorbed into these new offices for global initiatives.

Branch campuses will encourage or obviate collaborations, depending on the location

We are currently witnessing a significant rise in the number of branch campuses, primarily of U.S., UK, and Australian institutions, in other countries. The purpose in setting up these campuses may be to facilitate study abroad opportunities for the institution’s domestic students; more importantly, they make it possible for those universities to offer their degrees to those in other localities or regions of the world who would not be able to undertake study in the USA for financial or other reasons. The effect on institutional collaborations will likely vary, depending on the region. In China, for example, foreign universities are not permitted to operate independently, and must enter into partnership with an existing public Chinese university. In some countries of the Middle East, on the other hand, the establishment of branch campuses is not only permitted, but is encouraged through the building of international higher education zones, purpose-built to facilitate the setting up of branch campuses. Dubai International Academic City (DIAC), for example, offers its “partners” not only an educational infrastructure to support academic operations, but also, “special privileges including 100 per cent foreign ownership, tax-free status, full repatriation of profits and seamless visa issuance procedures for students, faculty and the staff.” (Dubai International Academic City, 2010, para. 5) Such opportunities provide institutions the chance to ‘go it alone’ in the global education market, though it is still too early to tell whether branch campuses will meet students’ and institutions’ goals.

Conclusion

This broad-brush survey of the history and future of collaborations and partnerships necessarily leaves out much detail. In particular, it is important to keep in mind that while some institutions have forged ahead in forming international linkages, others have barely begun. Indeed, there are likely to be plenty of institutions that operate in markets that do not compel institutional internationalization, especially vocational institutions that serve local populations, or institutions that can better sustain themselves through other strategies such as online learning. Nonetheless, the overall trends are clear: with the onset of globalization and the subsequent perceived need for many institutions to internationalize, collaborations and partnerships have increased in number, and have become closer, more varied, more complex, and more strategic. Collaborations have come to serve a key role in campus internationalization; and while they are a necessary element in increasing the level of international activity, in order to sustain participants in this activity, institutions will have to make changes to curriculum, faculty, and student support services. Institutions wishing to ready themselves for the post-globalization world – a world in which the interconnectedness of nations and peoples is so pervasive as to be no longer noticeable – must think beyond the piecemeal approach to collaborations and partnerships characteristic of the pre-globalization world. They must devise an institutional strategy which links their students, faculty, and administration to institutions in other countries, and embeds an international ethos into their operations, services, and academic delivery.



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