The legacy of Cold War anti-racism: a genealogy of cultural distance in the internationalisation of higher education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies’ tenets of culture shock and skills deficit. To trace their emergence, we map the discursive shifts which underpinned cultural anthropology’s involvement in the administration of US colonial, domestic, and international affairs respectively in the early 1900s and 1950s. These shifts are concomitantly linked to the formation of the field of intercultural communication, of which popularisation in the form of Hofstede model of “cultural distance” has structured international education when turning from a Cold War tool of total diplomacy to an export industry. Taking the development of international education in Australia as a case study, we demonstrate how the shifts in the disciplinary fields aforementioned are best understood as an anti-racist strategy, which mobilisation of the concept of culture has led to the paradoxical evacuation of the heuristic of race from the lexicon of intercultural contact between “Asian” international students and presumably white host institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• international education
• Colombo Plan
• race and education
• intercultural communication
• cultural anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Sharon Stein, “The Persistent Challenges of Addressing Epistemic Dominance in Higher Education: Considering the Case of Curriculum Internationalization,” Comparative Education Review 61 (2017): S1, S25–50.

² Ibid., 4. See Ramon Grosfoguel, “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 73–90.

³ Stein, “The Peristent Challenges,” S29. See John Willinsky, Learning To Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

⁴ Stein, “The Peristent Challenges,” S29. See Grace Kyungwon Hong, “The Future of Our Worlds: Black Feminism and the Poltics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 2 (2008): 95–115.

⁵ Stein, “The Peristent Challenges,” S30. See Walrer Mignolo, “Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: The Role of the Humanities in the Corportate University,” Nepantla: Views from South 4, no. 1 (2003): 97–119.

⁶ Stein, “The Peristent Challenges,” S30. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, “To Be Announced: Radical Praxis of Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice,” Social Text 31, no. 1114 (2013): 43–62.

⁷ Stein, “The Peristent Challenges,” S30. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

⁸ University of Cape Town, 2015.

⁹ University of College London, 2014.

¹⁰ University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, 2016.

¹¹ Nathaniel Adam Tobias How Philosophy Was “Whitewashed”, “Gender, Race and Philosophy,” The Blog, August 24, 2015, http://sgrp.typepad.com/sgrp/2015/08/how-philosophy-was-whitewashed-an-interview-with-dr-nathaniel-adam-tobias-coleman-by-aaron-salzer-of-scienceorfat-t.html (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹² See Zhaleh Boyd, “Reflections on a #WhiteCurriculum,” Dismantling the Master’s House, University College of London, December 29, 2014, http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/reflections-whitecurriculum/ (accessed July 20, 2017); Minna Salami, “Philosophy Has To Be About More Than White Men”, The Guardian, March 23, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/education/commentisfree/2015/mar/23/philosophy-white-men-university-courses (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹³ Nathaniel Adam Tobias, “Philosophy is Dead White – and Dead Wrong,” Times Higher Education, March 20, 2014, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/philosophy-is-deadwhite-and-dead-wrong/2012122.article (accessed July 20, 2017); Neda Tehrani, “Why is My Curriculum White?” The Occupied Times, August 27, 2015, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14056 (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹⁴ See Leona Nichole Black, “Why Isn’t My Professor Black? On Reflection,” Runnymede, March 24, 2014, http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/why-isnt-my-professor-black (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹⁵ See National Union of Students (NUS), Race for Equality. A Report on the Experience of Black Students in further and Higher Education (2011), https://www.nus.org.uk/PageFiles/12350/NUS_Race_for_Equality_web.pdf (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹⁶ See Jack Grove, “Black Scholars Still Experience Racism on Campus,” Dismantling the Master’s House, University College of London, December 8, 2014, http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/black-scholars-still-experience-racism-campus/ (accessed July 20, 2017).

¹⁷ James Banks, “Multicultural Education: Characteristics and Goals,” in Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, ed. James Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, 7th ed. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010), 14.

¹⁸ To our knowledge, there is only one study documenting BME students’ university experience which includes international students. Conducted by the Black Students’ Campaign, this report comprises Black international students in the research sample but does not engage with any critique of international education. In this sense, international students are approached the same as their domestic counterparts and differences between the two cohorts framed as a matter of further obstacles to successful study completion: See National Union of Students (NUS), Race for Equality. A Report on the Experience of Black Students in Further and Higher Education, 20 May 2011, https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus_race_for_equality_web.pdf (accessed July 20, 2017). Reproducing an unspoken division of labour between scholars who are concerned with race and those who engage with international education. This division is far from being neutral. Rather, it attests to different histories of discursive formation. These discursive histories, in turn, have limited what can be studied, what objectives can be pursued, and what heuristics can be applied. From where, exactly, does this division stem, and what interests has it served over time? This article addresses these important questions by developing a genealogy of the conceptual tenets informing the field of international education: culture shock, skills deficit and cultural distance. The birth of these conceptual tenets could be traced as far back as the early 1900s – that is, when progressive educationalists in the US and UK began collaborating to inform policies concerning the “natives” in the British colonies of Africa.

¹⁹ Following the introduction of trusteeship by the League of Nations in 1919, US-based philanthropic foundations Phelps-Stokes Fund and Carnegie Corporation extended their involvement in education from the domestic realm of the “Southern Negro” to the international realm of the “native” in Africa. Phelps-Stokes Fund financed two educational commissions for East and West Africa respectively in 1922 and 1925. Directed by the Fund’s Educational Director Thomas Jesse Jones, who was also an ordained minister, the two commissions promoted industrial education and related teaching methods among African “natives” as a means to secure their progressive advancement under British tutelage: Richard Glotzer, “A Long Shadow: Frederik P. Keppel, The Carnegie Corporation and the Dominions and Colonies Fund Area Experts 1923–1943,” History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society 38, no. 5 (2009): 633–4. In 1934, the Carnegie Corporation allocated a substantial grant to support “the imperial and international, as distinguished from the domestic” activities of the soon to be established Institute of Education, University of London. In their vision, under the direction of Fred Clark – who had lived and worked as Professor of Education in Cape Town and Montreal respectively from 1911 to 1929 and from 1924 to 1920 – the grant was to foster common values and practices among all educationalists in England as well as its self-governing dominions of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, while also supporting the training of teachers in the colonies, and research in advancing colonial education: Gary McCulloch, “Fred Clarke and the Internationalisation of Studies and Research in Education,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 1 (2014): 128. On the education of colonial subjects in Africa, see also Edward H. Berman, “American Influence on African Education: The Role of the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s Education Commissions,” Comparative Education Review 15, no. 2 (1971): 132–45; Henry D’Souza, “External Influences on the Development of Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa from 1923 to 1939,” African Studies Review 18, no. 2 (1975): 35–43; Sue Krige, “Segregation, Science and Commissions of Enquiry: The Contestation over Native Education Policy in South Africa, 1930–36,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 3 (1997): 491–506.

²⁰ Nadine Dolby and Aliya Rahman, “Research in International Education,” Review of Educational Research 78, no. 3 (2008): 677.

²¹ Ibid., 678.

²² Ibid., 680.

²³ Ibid., 685.

²⁴ Ibid., 686.

²⁵ Ibid., 710.

²⁶ Ibid., 687.

²⁷ Jane Knight, “Internationalisation of Higher Education,” in Quality and Internationalisation in Higher Education, ed. OECD (Paris: OECD, 1999), 14.

²⁸ Jane Knight, “Updating the Definition of Internationalization,” International Higher Education 33 (2003), 2.

²⁹ Kim C. Beazley, International Education in Australian Through the 1990s, Statement (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1992), www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A41639 (accessed August 10, 2017). Following the Tiananmen Square uprising in June 1989, the Australian government decided to close temporarily their visa facilities in Beijing, which caused the financial collapse of the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector. This inevitably engendered diplomatic tensions with international countries alongside casting doubts on the ethical standard of Australian educational providers and their marketing strategies: see Maria Elena Indelicato, Australia’s New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border, Research in Race and Ethnicity Series (London: Routledge, 2017), 35–8.

³⁰ Elsa Koleth, “Multiculturalism: A Review of Australian Policy Statements and Recent Debates in Australia and Overseas” (research paper no. 6 2010–11, 2010),, 8, http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22library%2Fprspub%2F272429%22 (accessed August 10, 2017).

³¹ “Beazley, International Education, 6”

³² Alex Auletta, “A Retrospective View of the Colombo Plan: Government Policy, Departmental Administration and Overseas Students,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 22, no. 1 (200): 50.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: Australian National University E-press, 2010), 78–80, http://epress.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/whole7.pdf (accessed August 10, 2017).

³⁵ Ibid., 14–15.

³⁶ See Alex Auletta, “A Retrospective View of the Colombo Plan: Government Policy, Departmental Administration and Overseas Students,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 22, no. 1 (2010): 47–58.

³⁷ Elaine Laforteza, “White Geopolitics of Neo-Colonial Benevolence: The Australian-Philippine ‘Partnership,’” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 3, http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/69ElaineLaforteza.pdf (accessed August 12, 2017).

³⁸ Cfr. Jon Stratton, “Preserving White Hegemony: Skilled Migration, ‘Asians’ and Middle-Class Assimilation,” Borderland e-Journal 8, no.1 (2009): 1–28.

³⁹ Rachel Burke, “Constructions of Asian International Students: The ‘Casualty’ Model and Australia as ‘Educator,’” Asian Studies Review 30, no. 4 (2006): 336.

⁴⁰ Oakman, Facing Asia, 20–7.

⁴¹ Ibid., 27–38.

⁴² Burke, “Constructions of Asian International Students,” 337–8.

⁴³ Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 6–7.

⁴⁴ Burke “Constructions of Asian International Students,” 342 .

⁴⁵ Oakman, Facing Asia, 182–3.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 10.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 17.

⁴⁸ Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp, “Allport’s Intergroup Contact Hypothesis: Its History and Influence,” in On the Nature of Prejudice. Fifty Years After Allport, ed. John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, and Laurie A. Rudman (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 263.

⁴⁹ Ibid

⁵⁰ Robin M. Williams Jr., The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions: A Survey of Research on Problems of Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Group Relations (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947), 32.

⁵¹ Ibid., 69–71.

⁵² Ibid., 7–35.

⁵³ Oakman, Facing Asia, 17.

⁵⁴ Beazley, International Education, 11–12.

⁵⁵ See Henry Tajfel and John L. Dawson, eds., Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian and West Indian Students, Institute of Race Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 119–21; Liping Bu, “Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War,” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 405–6; Don Smart, Simone Volet, and Grace Ang, Fostering Social Cohesion in Universities: Bridging the Cultural Divide (Canberra: Australian International Education, 2000), 10–16, http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/8141/ (accessed August 15, 2017).

⁵⁶ Smart, Volet, and Ang, Fostering Social Cohesion, 11.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Melville J. Herskovits, “Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropologists,” Science 83, no. 2149 (1936): 216.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Ibid., 222.

⁶² Thomas D. Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015), 59.

⁶³ Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 59–63.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 88–9.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 136.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 175.

⁶⁷ Frantz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911).

⁶⁸ Fallace, Race and the Origins, 13–14.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 14.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 106.

⁷¹ Ibid., 104–5.

⁷² Ibid., 105.

⁷³ Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, “Writing the Intellectual History of Intercultural Communication,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 25.

⁷⁴ Sherri J. Conrad, “Executive Order 12,333: Unleashing the CIA Violates the Leash Law,” Cornell Law Review 70, no. 5 (1985): 969–70; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy, and Ethics: Mobilizing Culture and Personality for World War II,” in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 184–217; David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 63.

⁷⁵ Price, Cold War Anthropology, 63.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 84–7.

⁷⁷ Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations and Area Studies During and After the Cold War,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 264.

⁷⁸ Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1–6.

⁷⁹ Bu, “Educational Exchange,” 396.

⁸⁰ Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 12.

⁸¹ As Kamala Visweswaran and David Price have shown, the diagnosis of Clifford Geertz, who was a pivotal figure in the US Cold War anthropology, of Indonesia and other “developing” nations as culturally backward, hence economically underdeveloped and poor, was shaped by what we referred to here as the modernisation theory. On the shaping of social sciences in the spirit of the modernisation theory, see Kamala Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 164–88; Price, Cold War Anthropology, 94–7.

⁸² Margaret Mead, “Introduction,” in The Study of Culture at Distance, ed. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, The Institute for Intercultural Studies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000 [1st edn, 1953]), 3.

⁸³ Ibid., 22–3.

⁸⁴ Fallace, Race and the Origins, 108.

⁸⁵ Geoffrey Gorer, “National Character: Theory and Practice,” in Mead and Métraux, The Study of Culture at Distance, 61–6.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 66.

⁸⁷ Margaret Mead, “Introduction,” in The Study of Culture at Distance, ed. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, The Institute for Intercultural Studies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000 [1st edn, 1953]), 23.

⁸⁸ Leeds-Hurwitz, “Writing the Intellectual History,” 22.

⁸⁹ We are here indebted to Alana Lentin’s work on anti-racism as a “heterogeneous phenomenon whose variants reveal differing political allegiances, political aims and representative functions”: Alana Lentin, “Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking Holes in ‘Culture’ and ‘Human Rights,’” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 4 (2004): 432. On UNESCO’s tradition of anti-racism and its working as a political discourse disavowing the entanglement of race with modern state-nations, see Lentin, “Racial States,” 427–43; Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘Race’, Historicizing ‘Culture’ in Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 4 (2005): 379–96; Alana Lentin, Racism & Anti-Racism in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

⁹⁰ As cited in Fallace, Race and the Origins.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid., 58–9.

⁹³ As cited in Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures, 59.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 60.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 60–1.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 61–8.

⁹⁷ Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, “Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the Mandate for Intercultural Training,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 261–82.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 266.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 267–8.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 268. On the role played by Edward Hall – unanimously regarded as the father of the discipline – in the conceptualisation of communication as culture, see Leeds-Hurwitz, “Notes in the History,” 267–70.

¹⁰¹ Smart, Volet, and Ang, Fostering Social Cohesion, 11.

¹⁰² Colleen Ward, Stephen Bochner, and Adrian Furnham, The Psychology of Culture Shock, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 34.

¹⁰³ Ibid.

¹⁰⁴ Fallace, Race and the Origins, 13–14.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 85.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 87–8.

¹⁰⁷ Fallace, Race and the Origins, 93–4; Richard R. Valencia, Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice (New York: Routledge, 1998), 13–16. The idea that non-white pupils were better off if equipped with the practical skills and knowledge necessary to be functional in the industrial economy was first introduced by Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia in 1868. Succeeding, Armstrong’s pupil, the former slave Booker T. Washington, founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama in 1881. These two schools became renowned as the Hampton-Tuskegee model and together prioritised the economic standing of the Southern Black population ahead of their intellectual political enfranchisement: Fallace, Race and the Origins, 39. Financially supported by the aforementioned Phelps-Stokes Fund and Carnegie Corporation, it was exactly this model that educationalists such as Thomas Jesse Jones attempted to export in the British colonies of Africa in the aftermath of WWI. Not by chance, Jones had been both the Educational Director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and author of the social studies curriculum at Hampton: Fallace, Race and the Origins, 40. On the Hampton-Tuskegee model, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South: 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

¹⁰⁸ Ward, Furnham, and Bochner, The Psychology of Culture Shock, 35.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 35–6.

¹¹⁰ Cesar A. Guerrero-Garza, “Culture Shock: Its Mourning and the Vicissitudes of Identity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 22, no. 2 (1974): 409–10.

¹¹¹ Ibid.

¹¹² Fallace, Race and the Origins, 134–44.

¹¹³ Ibid.

¹¹⁴ Ward, Furnham, and Bochner, The Psychology of Culture Shock, 371–98.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 36.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁷ Rose Clarke and S. N. Gieve, “On the Discursive Construction of the ‘Chinese Learner,’” Language, Culture and Curriculum 19, no. 1 (2006): 57.

¹¹⁸ Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, Vol. 5 Cross-Cultural Research and Methodology Series (Thousand Oaks: Sage Library of Social Research, 1980), 25.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 65–210.

¹²⁰ Ward, Furnham, and Bochner, The Psychology of Culture Shock, 12.

¹²¹ Ibid., 13–15.

¹²² Janette Ryan, “Teaching and Learning for International Students: Towards a Transcultural Approach,” Teachers and Teaching 17, no. 6 (2011): 637; Trevor Grimshaw, “Concluding Editorial: The Needs of International Students Rethought – Implications for the Policy and Practice of Higher Education,” Teachers and Teaching 17, no. 6 (2011): 705.

¹²³ Brigid Ballard, “Academic Adjustment: The Other Side of the Export Dollar,” Higher Education Research & Development 6, no. 2 (1987): 109–19.

¹²⁴ Smart, Volet, and Ang, Fostering Social Cohesion, 36–41.

¹²⁵ Fazal Rizvi, “Internationalization of Curriculum: A Critical Perspective,” in The SAGE Handbook of Research in International Education, ed. Mary Hayden, Jack Levy, and John Jeff Thompson (London: Sage, 2007) 391–3.

¹²⁶ Knight, “Updating the Definition of Internationalization,” 2–3.

¹²⁷ Glauco De Vita and Peter Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda in UK Higher Education,” Journal of Further and Higher Education 27, no. 4 (2003): 387–9.

¹²⁸ Fazal Rizvi and Walsh Lucas, “Difference, Globalisation and the Internationalisation of Curriculum,” Australian Universities’ Review, 41 (1998): 2, 9–10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Elena Indelicato

Maria Elena Indelicato is a Lecturer at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. She received her PhD from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants, she has published in race feminist and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, and Chinese Cinemas.

Ivana Pražić

Ivana Pražić earned her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney researching Chinese Indonesian cultural politics. As a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow (National Library Board, Singapore) she explored the formation of Confucianism as a modern religion and Chinese identity politics in Southeast Asia. Pražić has published in Cultural Studies and Feminist journals such as China Media Report, Transnational Cinemas, Genero and Musawa.