My friend John S., a retired pharmacist, recently resigned from the board of a large regional university. An experienced trustee, he has also served for 20 years on the board of his alma mater, a small liberal arts college. He longs for simpler times he knows will never return. What is different now, I ask? Among other challenges, John responds, today’s trustees are asked to bless new kinds of institutional engagement in the international arena which they do not truly understand.
Over his six years of board service, says John, the management team of his public university sought approval for various global initiatives. One was designed to increase the enrollment of the home campus by recruiting students in Taiwan and Malaysia. Another involved membership in a consortium to operate a campus in Mexico. A third required all undergraduates to spend at least the equivalent of one semester studying abroad.
A recent report, “Strength through Global Leadership and Engagement: U.S. Higher Education in the 21st Century,” from a blue ribbon panel convened by the American Council of Education, noted, “The broadly global nature of many if not most of the relationships in which colleges and universities are engaged today changes the environment for higher education in profound ways. While the evolution of this more complex and interconnected global environment poses unprecedented challenges, it also offers new opportunities.”
Given that hundreds of American colleges and universities are responding to such challenges and opportunities to engage the world in new ways, how many board members, like John S., long for simpler times? How many understand what is appropriate for their institutions, how to evaluate opportunities for engagement, and how to assess potential risks?
To try to answer these questions, I interviewed board members at institutions that already have committed significant resources to global agendas. Such activities run the gamut, from extensive study-abroad programs to partnerships with non-U.S. universities to the establishment of campuses and centers abroad to the development of joint training and research programs with foreign governments and NGOs. These interviewees do not constitute a statistically valid sample, but they do represent a wide range of private and public institutions. All of them have participated for three years or longer in discussions and votes concerning their institutions’ international agendas.
Not surprisingly, I found major differences in how these trustees discharge their fiduciary responsibilities. The interviews, however, also revealed four common themes that could be illuminating to trustees at other institutions considering global forays:
The Add-On Phenomenon. Most board members described their institution’s international initiatives as timely and useful. They wanted to be effective cheerleaders and to encourage their more skeptical board colleagues and even their presidents to pursue such efforts. Yet a majority of trustees stated that they struggled to define a global agenda that was “appropriate” for their institution. When I asked what they meant, the interviewees explained that they wanted to support academic programs and related activities consistent with the character and mission of their institution yet also likely to enhance its academic profile and increase its resources [emphasis added].
From several trustees, I heard language that reminded me of discussions in the 1990s about information technology and distance learning. Those board members supported global engagement on the part of their institutions not in the spirit of changing or expanding the institutional mission but rather in the spirit of keeping up with academe’s Joneses. They did not seem interested in the transformational potential of global engagement. On the contrary, some board members worried that such engagement might become a distraction and a drain on institutional resources. Further, those trustees most supportive of “reaching out to the world” (a frequently used cliché) were also those most likely to expect new revenues and short-term public-relations successes.
There were notable exceptions. Marna Whittington, for example, a business woman with extensive international experience and a trustee of Middlebury College, explained how she and her colleagues oversaw and assisted the transition from “add-on” activities to institutional transformation. That happened when Middlebury, whose core mission of undergraduate education has long emphasized global languages and cultures, formed a partnership and ultimately merged with the graduate-level, professionally oriented Monterey Institute of International Studies. Middlebury, says Whittington, did not lose the historical identity that set it apart from other liberal arts colleges. Rather, that identity underwent a transformation. Monterey Institute’s graduate-degree programs are not a mere addition to an undergraduate curriculum with an international flavor. The changes have enabled Middlebury to extend its influence to new constituencies on the West Coast and beyond. And they have challenged Middlebury’s faculty members to take advantage of new opportunities for research and curricular transformation.
A similar transition from “add-on” activities to institutional transformation occurred at the George Washington University in the 1990s. Despite the founding in the early 1980s of a specialized school of international affairs, the Lloyd H. Elliott School, international engagement remained for several years a secondary concern for a university that traditionally prepared students for the professions and public service in a domestic context.
During a presidential search in 1987, however, George Washington’s trustees discussed this state of affairs and concluded that the Elliott School should be positioned to compete successfully with its well-established peers at Georgetown University and American University in the recruitment of international students and in partnerships with research institutes and universities in the Middle East and in Asia. George Washington’s new president, Stephen J. Trachtenberg, embraced those opportunities and made them part of an ambitious agenda to transform the university’s identity within Washington D.C. and beyond.
Retired international banker David H. Roberts cited examples to me of “addon” international activities that were proposed to the trustees of Occidental College during his tenure on its board. Now, says Roberts, under new presidential leadership, the college is moving aggressively towards a more focused, coherent, and substantive internationally oriented agenda that builds on “Oxy’s” traditions and its location in a cosmopolitan community. The emerging new agenda, although timely and exciting, will require ongoing, thoughtful oversight on the part of Oxy’s trustees.
The Difficulty of Defining Engagement. Whether or not they reported satisfaction with institutional outcomes, nearly all interviewees acknowledged they and their presidents had struggled to define appropriate forms and levels of engagement. A trustee of a mid-sized, tuition-dependent university, for example, supported her president’s plan to recruit Chinese students who did not require institutional financial aid. But she was not sure that the student-services infrastructure could support more than a token number. Three years into a successful recruitment drive that brought 300 Chinese students to the campus, this trustee learned that the campus had indeed risen to the challenge, but the surrounding suburban community had not. Foreign students who wished to share off-campus apartments encountered unfriendly landlords and found out they needed cars, an expense that their modest allowances did not cover. The university made up the difference, but in the process missed its operatingrevenue projections.
Experiences like that are common enough to explain why senior administrators such as George Mason University’s provost Peter Stearns have urged a “combination of prudence and ambition” in developing new opportunities for global engagement. At some points, relatively modest steps leading to measurable results are the best way to stay in the game without risking major financial or reputational losses. The goal is to blend caution with a dynamic vision of the global mission of higher education. Yet, a few institutions are anything but cautious. They are engaging with the world aggressively because they share a particular vision of the future of higher education.
Sir John Daniel, former vice chancellor of the British Open University, articulated that vision in the 1990s. More recently, John Sexton, president of New York University, and others have made an even more compelling case for the creation of new universities capable of tackling issues of global significance.
Only a few institutions of higher learning, Sexton believes, will be able to assemble and deploy the resources necessary “to design a mode of learning in a world of hyperchange.” Those will be “global network universities … in which students and faculty move fluidly among locations on multiple continents.” These same institutions will offer solutions to such global issues as governance, climate change, poverty, and public health, and by so doing “they will shape mankind’s future.”
Credible candidates for membership in this new elite club are emerging in the United States and around the globe. They are mostly young (as universities go), they are usually not members of old academic elites (Oxbridge, the Ivy League), and they have strong and ambitious leaders at the helm. These dynamic new players in higher education stand out among their peers for their skill at gathering and deploying vast resources and for their drive to establish truly global footprints. They operate at a much faster pace than is the norm in higher education. They also foster an organizational culture of risk-taking and innovation that often has more in common with successful business enterprises than with other academic institutions.
Beyond sheer size, a concentration of resources, and an entrepreneurial culture, the members of this new club have embraced the transformational potential of global engagement. Investment banker Gerald Rosenfeld, a close advisor to the leadership team and a part-time professor at New York University, notes that the educational philosophy of those institutions erases the traditional and increasingly irrelevant distinction between “domestic” and “international” issues. This philosophy, more than anything else, sets the “global network” universities apart from all others.
The emerging new universities are able to sustain greater financial and reputational risks than their more conventional peers. Yet they too must be attentive to the forms and the scope of their engagement with the world. The more ambitious a given institution’s goals and the larger its global footprint, the more responsibility rests on the shoulders of its board members to understand issues, practices, and relationships that, quite simply, were not part of governing American higher education in the 20th century. Are today’s higher-education board members, especially those responsible for the emerging “global network” universities, adequately prepared for the new context and the new challenges?
The Pursuit of El Dorado. Background reading of published sources and several interviews with board members reminded me of those 16th and 17th century European monarchs who put their political weight and treasure behind the great explorers and colonizers of their day. El Dorado beckoned then, and in some cases it still does. One trustee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she chairs the board of a major public institution, stated: “My colleagues and I are in a predicament. We encourage our CEOs to be entrepreneurial, but we don’t always know what is real ‘out there’ and what is not. We like to believe that we review carefully crafted plans and strategies [for international engagement], but often we feel as if we are buying tickets to Las Vegas.”
Her comments may be alarming, but they are not surprising. Twenty years ago, Adelphi University’s Robert Scott, then president of Ramapo College, advised board members to be at once supportive and critical of institutional plans for international engagement, noting the need to eschew fads and to develop frameworks for sustainable engagement. In March 2007, Madeleine F. Green, then the American Council on Education’s vice president for international initiatives, gave similar advice to her constituents. Opportunities for global engagement were increasing rapidly, she noted, but too few American presidents and chancellors had enough professional or personal experience to evaluate those opportunities and to choose wisely for their institutions. Green made the case for training campus and system CEOs, but she also recognized the responsibility of board members to oversee heretofore unfamiliar initiatives and directions. (See box for Green’s current recommendations.)
Most trustees may not be “buying tickets to Las Vegas.” But how do they respond when El Dorado beckons? How do they assess the possible consequences of proposed institutional initiatives and investments?
Especially, but not exclusively, at large public universities, says University of Tennessee’s former trustee Andrea Loughry, board members are not always equipped to evaluate their institution’s plans for international engagement. The political appointment process typically used for public boards, says Loughry, brings forth nominees with varied professional or personal experience on the international stage. And, she adds, most boards are far from developing solid metrics to evaluate critical success factors and potential risks. The result is that board members rely heavily on the expertise of their presidents or chancellors who may be equally unprepared for the task.
Wooster College trustee James McClung, retired executive of a major global corporation, shares Loughry’s concerns. Private boards of trustees are large, he notes, and thus generally more professionally diverse than politically appointed boards. Yet, says McClung, even those trustees rely heavily on their president’s choice of engagements and investments. And campus CEOs are often much less prepared to understand and evaluate risks than are their counterparts in the corporate world. Higher education’s CEOs sometimes make decisions based on unreliable or incomplete data, McClung observes. Also, most have not yet mastered the art of winning the support of their boards while at the same time educating them to possible financial and reputational risks.
The Ideological Foundations of Engagement. Given that most presidents of American colleges and universities still lack either professional or personal experience in the international arena, what, then, motivates them to seek institutional engagement with the world? Beyond peer pressure and the quest for revenues, many higher education leaders share a powerful set of beliefs about the role and impact of their institutions within American society and abroad.
Ben Wildavsky’s The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World (Princeton University Press, 2010), traces the development of that set of beliefs in the second half of the 20th century. For several generations, Americans have looked to higher education as the key both to social mobility and to economic expansion. In the 21st century, Wildavsky argues, the global expansion of higher education, and of citizens’ access to it, will generate comparable benefits throughout the world.
That ideology of engagement with the world rests on two assumptions: first, the primacy of higher education as driver of social mobility and economic prosperity, and second, the universal applicability of American models—the research university, the liberal arts college, and, to a lesser extent, the community college. Cornell University, President David Skorton, for example, has on many occasions and in many venues not only advocated for engagement of top-tier American universities with the world, but also argued that they can “play a central role to assist countries to meet the needs of their citizens.”
Noble principles and honorable intentions, but this kind of engagement places especially heavy responsibilities on board members to understand issues and to vet plans. It also requires better than usual communication between presidents willing and able to take bold initiatives and the trustees to whom they are accountable.
John Knox Singleton, vice rector of George Mason University’s Board of Visitors, knows firsthand what can happen when an initiative based on noble principles, honorable intentions, and the promise of third-party financing goes awry. Commenting on George Mason’s unsuccessful effort to establish a campus in the United Arab Emirates, he recalled that the university’s governing board had spent much time discussing and vetting the financial and academic dimensions of the plan.
Quite aside from the predictable competition within Virginia public higher education (Virginia Commonwealth University already had a presence in Qatar), the management team and the governing board responded to widely circulated surveys that suggested strong demand for American-style degree programs in the Emirates.
Once again, El Dorado beckoned, with the prospect of new revenues and of unprecedented opportunities for George Mason to become a player in advancing American values and interests abroad. The lesson learned, says Singleton, is not to avoid global engagement, but rather to ask even tougher questions about locales and partners, and to be clear about when and how to implement exit strategies.
Early this year, the London-based Observatory on Borderless Higher Education organized a forum on the topic of global engagement. The forum provided opportunities for advocates of American models of higher education to showcase their programs and explain their beliefs. But it also presented research findings and viewpoints that challenged those beliefs.
The University of Toronto’s Jane Knight, for example, noted the need to explore the relationship between the global expansion of North American universities and the negative social and economic aspects of globalization. Knight’s comments reflected earlier contributions by Nigel Thrift, vice chancellor of the University of Warwick, and economist Philip Brown, co-author of The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Income (Oxford University Press, 2011). Thrift has questioned the assumption
that universities, including the “global network” ones, can do the work that nation states are unable or unwilling to do—that is, to address the fundamental global challenges of our time. Brown and his colleagues have challenged the claim, commonly made in American academic circles, that higher education holds the keys to social mobility and economic prosperity on a global scale. In contrast to Ben Wildavsky’s optimistic predictions, Brown et al. foresee a global race to the bottom, as more college and university graduates compete for limited job opportunities.
Whether Wildavsky’s or Brown’s predictions are closer to the mark, one thing is certain: Presidents and their governing boards in this country live, lead, and make decisions within a context of unprecedented complexity. Global engagements, however limited in scope, entail opportunities and risks too great to be treated as “add-ons” to existing academic programs and infrastructure. Those engagements should be evaluated critically for their potential to transform institutions. Presidents and boards might benefit from taking a retrospective look at what their institutions did, or failed to do, with information technology in the 1990s.
The greater the opportunities and the risks, the more important it is for institutions to choose engagements that are mission-appropriate, well understood in the executive suite and the board room, and sustainable. Writing on Inside Higher Ed in July about the current “branch campus bubble” across the globe, Philip G. Altbach, a professor of educational leadership and higher education who has studied issues of global engagement for decades, warns: “Caveat everyone!”
Wooster trustee McClung urges the use of reputable external advisors who are familiar with the trends of the presented topic. If the president is well versed in international matters, says McClung, external experts might strengthen his or her case for institutional engagement. If he or she is a novice in such matters, the advisor might fill significant gaps in analysis and planning and thus reduce exposure to financial and reputational risks.
In the decade ahead, presidents and board members may also rethink what I have called “the ideological foundations” of global engagement. For decades, the liberal arts college and research university have been leading American exports. They are still in demand around the globe, especially where indigenous institutions, for whatever reasons, cannot be reformed and expanded fast enough to accommodate current needs.
These prized American exports, however, are not always culturally appropriate in non-Western societies. They are also expensive. Their success depends on subsidies from the U. S. government, host governments, or private- equity investors. Government subsidies may or may not be sustainable in the decades ahead; private investors look for short-term returns and low risks. In short, it is not reasonable to assume that these leading American exports will fare as well in the future as they have from the 1950s to the present.
Presidents and their boards should also take notice of research-based challenges to the common wisdom concerning the nexus between higher education and democracy, social mobility, and economic development. There is indeed a nexus, Malaysian educator D.A. Razak, vice chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, observed at the London forum this year. But what will the nexus look like in a “non-Western-centric context?”
In another Inside Higher Ed article (March 27), Boston College’s Altbach wrote: “Internationalization requires difficult choices and a full understanding of the possible consequences of specific initiatives.” Boards will have to look to AGB, consultants, and globally savvy peers to help illuminate those choices and understand the consequences. Given the complexity of the current environment, they will need all the help they can get to evaluate how, when, and under what conditions their institutions will “reach out to the world,” and benefit from doing so.
Questions for Trustees
By Madeleine F. Green
A major challenge of internationalization is to go beyond the rhetoric and make it an integral part of the institution’s identity and strategy. A second challenge is to ensure meaningful links between the entrepreneurial and academic aspects of internationalization. If boards are tempted by hard times to see internationalization more as a revenue stream than an academic undertaking, they will miss an important opportunity to improve institutional quality and relevance.
Trustees should consider:
• What do we mean by internationalization?
• What are our goals for internationalization, and how do those goals relate to our mission and core values?
• What benefits do we want to accrue to the institution, students, faculty members, and others?
Board members will also want to ask the following specific questions:
To what extent is global learning articulated as a goal of undergraduate education? As institutions craft their vision for educating students, integrating global learning throughout the curriculum will ensure that it is not marginalized and that all students engage in global learning. Only a tiny proportion of American students study abroad, so how can the vast majority of students gain global competence at home?
To what extent has the board supported internationalization both in words and in deeds? The board must champion internationalization and support it with appropriate policies, investments of human and financial resources, and fundraising.
How do academic policies and practices encourage or discourage faculty engagement? If faculty members are not supported in their efforts (and modest financial support goes a long way) or, worse yet, are actively discouraged by promotion and tenure policies that penalize them for international engagement, progress will be slow.
What are our motivations for enrolling international students? Do we have the infrastructure and services to meet their needs? Institutions must provide the necessary services to ensure international students’ academic success and social integration. Orientation is an important opportunity to introduce American and international students to each other in an intentional way. Buddy programs, conversation partners, and group projects with an explicit intercultural dimension are also useful approaches.
To what extent has the board integrated internationalization into fundraising efforts? At institutions where internationalization is a priority, it is integrated into their overall fundraising strategy, including efforts to raise money for study abroad, faculty-development opportunities, or the construction of buildings that support internationalization.
Have we performed our due diligence on prospective partners or international ventures? When forming partnerships or engaging in work abroad, you must do your homework. It is not always easy to learn about the quality, dependability, motivation, and habits of prospective partners. The challenge is intensified by language and cultural differences. Traditional academic partnerships for teaching and research can be difficult enough; venturing abroad with branch campuses or offshore programs is even riskier business.
How do we know the impact of what we are doing? Some metrics are straightforward, such as the number of students engaged in education abroad or international research projects conducted. Just as important, though harder to measure, is how internationalization actually affects students. What are they learning? What is the evidence? Which learning opportunities are having the greatest impact on students? What effect does internationalization have on campus culture?
Each of the questions on this list could be the basis of a wide-ranging conversation, and many more could be added. American institutions must be engaged with the world now more than ever, and their graduates must be prepared to thrive in the global society.
Madeleine F. Green is an independent consultant and senior fellow at the International Association of Universities and NAFSA: The Association of International Educators. She is a trustee of Juniata College.
For more on this topic, listen to the podcast with Clara M. Lovett.
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