The internationalisation of higher education is a fast-developing phenomenon that entangles most universities around the globe. Without a doubt, it is a complex process with different meanings, practices and consequences, and as such it has been gaining prominence in academic debates, inspiring a growing body of literature. Internationalisation facilitates knowledge production and sharing across the globe and has been hailed on multiple occasions as contributing to the production of the global community of researchers and students, and to the knowledge economy more broadly. In practical terms, the internationalisation of higher education usually takes the form of staff and student mobility, research collaborations, and institutional partnerships.Footnote1 While celebrating the benefits of internationalisation for learning, teaching and research, an increasing number of works question what it means in the face of global inequalities in knowledge production and distribution, and how alternative forms of internationalisation could be made possible.Footnote2
As internationalisation has become widespread and a key strategic policy area for many higher education institutions around the globe, it is even more urgent to scrutinise its practices as well as the challenges internationalisation may be creating or exacerbating. Over the past four decades of higher education (HE) research, the critique has mostly been directed towards the subordination of internationalisation to economic results. Other challenges related to internationalisation, in particular its impact on academic freedom, have been largely underexplored.
In this special issue, we seek to broaden the scholarly and policy-practical understanding of the relationship between the internationalisation of higher education and academic freedom. The scholarly debate on internationalisation has been developing primarily within the field of Higher Education Studies. The time is ripe to open the discussion to insights and considerations from beyond this discipline, including politics, international politics and area studies. Such broad interdisciplinary dialogue should help illuminate not just the components and actors of internationalisation but also its wide-ranging consequences.
The special issue has its origins in a workshop organised by the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group (AFIWG) between 4 and 6 November 2020.Footnote3 Contributors to the special issue elaborate on the themes raised at the workshop and go beyond the panel discussions to elucidate the concept and definitions of academic freedom in the context of internationalisation, the impact of internationalisation on various national systems of higher education, modes of university governance and the global communication of research. Furthermore, the special issue seeks to advance our understanding of the academic freedom-internationalisation nexus by introducing new datasets, exploring the ways in which China partakes in international collaboration, and investigating the perspectives of women of colour and displaced academics on academic freedom. The special issue brings together scholars, researchers, policy advocates and publishers in order to shed light on the complexities of HE internationalisation and to emphasise the multifaceted nature of internationalisation processes.
Free to Think annual reports by the Scholars at Risk Network show that the number of attacks on higher education communities worldwide has been growing over the recent years. Academics and students are subject to censorship, physical attacks and imprisonment for criticising their governments and other power structures. As a number of contributors to this special issue point out, challenges to academic freedom take different forms in different national contexts. They may arise from excessive marketisation and the resulting opportunistic approach to building global ties, for instance with a narrow goal of securing a greater number of fee-paying students. Underfunding may leave universities vulnerable to interference by foreign donors. In some national contexts, the challenges to academic freedom stemming from marketisation have been aggravated by authoritarian governments pushing national higher education sectors towards internationalisation while exercising ever stricter control both within and beyond their borders. Indirect interference has increased as well, for instance anti-terrorism and national security legislation has been used against academics in countries such as Brazil, India, Hong Kong and Turkey.Footnote4 The return of great-power rivalry to international politics has been creating challenges to both internationalisation and academic freedom. Russia’s growing isolation from and antagonism towards the West encouraged the Russian government to withdraw from the Bologna Process. China’s leadership vows to build world-class universities while calling for ‘social sciences with Chinese characteristics’. Challenges to academic freedom have been mounting also in Western democracies. In the UK, besides the drawbacks of HE marketisation, academic precarity and pay erosion (UCU 2017),Footnote5 critical intellectual agendas have been stifled through mechanisms such as the Prevent Duty.Footnote6 A government bill proposed in May 2021, arguably aiming to strengthen the freedom of expression, targets practices such as ‘no platforming’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’, which had been introduced to challenge racist and hate speech at universities.Footnote7
Further to such challenges, the dominant forms of internationalisation of higher education pose the risk of reinforcing existing inequalities in knowledge production and distribution between the Global North, Global South and Global East. Internationalisation proceeds in an already unequal terrain. While hopes are high that the increased mobility of scholars and collaborations between higher education institutions translate into richer curricula and better ways of producing knowledge, these outcomes are far from predestined, requiring critical scrutiny and continuous reflection.
Expanding the field of academic freedom studies
Transboundary practices of academic censorship, used more often for instance by China, pushed scholars to consider the global nature of challenges to academic freedom.Footnote8 Contributors to this special issue discuss those in detail. The first two articles, based on novel datasets, attempt to fill the gap stemming from the lack of systematic sector-wide data on the perception of academic freedom and the impact of internationalisation on academic freedom. Prelec and colleagues discuss the results of the 2020 survey conducted among UK-based social scientists and humanities scholars. The survey was the first UK-wide attempt at gathering data on perceived threats to academic freedom in higher education related to internationalisation. The findings show that two-thirds of scholars who partook in the survey perceived academic freedom on campus as being at risk. Among those, academics working in the disciplines where internationalisation is inherent to the field – such as Politics and International Relations or Business Studies – were most concerned. The authors also found that scholars who specialise in specific regions or countries experienced more challenges to academic freedom. The survey showed that the anxieties about academic freedom at the individual level were not reflected at the collective/institutional levels. Two-thirds of surveyed scholars did not know whether their departments had any guidelines on academic freedom and only 15 per cent reported that they discussed academic freedom issues ‘often’ in their universities.
Kinzelbach and colleagues focus on the absence of the academic freedom dimension in global university rankings. The emergence of global rankings in the early twenty-first century was closely related to the processes of internationalisation of higher education. The ‘academic freedom-blindness’ is notable in rankings produced in both authoritarian (e.g. the ShanghaiRanking) and democratic settings (e.g. the Times Higher World University Ranking). The authors introduce a new global dataset, the Academic Freedom Index (AFi), that could act as a remedy, were it incorporated in global university rankings. The country-level index is composed of five expert-coded indicators that include (1) the freedom to research and teach; (2) the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination; (3) institutional autonomy; (4) campus integrity; and (5) the freedom of academic and cultural expression. This conceptual innovation has both scholarly and practical implications. It facilitates comparative research on academic freedom across time and across countries as well as enables the analysis of the extent to which advancing internationalisation has been accompanied by improvements in the level of academic freedom. The Index also paves the way for a better protection of the rights of scholars and students worldwide.
Wright and colleagues approach academic freedom from a unique vantage point – that of an academic publisher. They emphasise that while research communication is highly internationalised, the bulk of actors that may be willing to influence it, including research institutions and funders, remain at the national level. This local-global tension has serious implications for academic freedom in the publishing process as some states attempt to control and influence the scholarly record. The authors discuss such problems as the manuscript content and the limitations on research material stemming from restrictions on academic and political freedoms. They reflect on ethical issues encountered in the publication process and provide a series of recommendations that have the potential to minimise challenges to academic freedom in the research communication domain.
Taken together, these three articles broaden our understanding of the academic freedom- internationalisation nexus by considering economic and political incentives to internationalisation, which can often be at odds with academic freedom. The next three articles analyse the challenges existing at the intersection of academic freedom and internationalisation by focusing on the case of China, its higher education sector and its ties with the global higher education realm.
Burnay and Pils explore transnational aspects of China’s rise, in particular its implications for the cosmopolitan academic citizenship, a conception centred around academic freedom. They demonstrate how internationalisation enabled the emergence of an alternative conception of an authoritarian academic citizenship, one which poses a direct challenge to academic freedom. Reflecting on both the impact of authoritarian practices on higher education and the challenges generated by an increasingly marketised higher education landscape, they argue that both practices have a silencing effect on academics and limit their intellectual and public role. In the case of China, the authoritarian concept of academic citizenship encompasses the expectations for scholars to espouse proper political views, accept censorship and participate in ‘policing’ other members of the community. The authors argue that increasingly dense ties with and reliance on China in the Western university world, coupled with the latter’s lack of understanding of how the higher education sector in China works, have inadvertently facilitated the expansion of the Chinese concept of authoritarian academic citizenship far beyond China’s borders. While analysing various ways in which China interferes with academic freedom outside of its borders, Burnay and Pils also warn against the understanding of such interference solely from a national security perspective as ‘state actors tend to treat such threats as justification for interference with universities’ decision-making processes’. This is precisely why overcoming challenges to academic freedom by authoritarian governments requires well-resourced and institutionally autonomous universities.
Woodman and Pringle, in turn, focus on the situation inside China. They explore how managerialism and marketisation – typical for the HE sector globally – have intersected with the tightening of political control in China, magnifying pressures on academic freedom in Chinese universities. Admitting that the degree of control exercised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has waxed and waned, Woodman and Pringle scrutinise the return of ideology and control to the universities since Xi Jinping ascended to the top of Chinese leadership. As a result, Chinese academics have been forced to navigate the demands of ideological ‘purity’, increasing monitoring and surveillance in the classroom, together with the pressures on maintaining global competitiveness.
Fulda and Missal analyse China’s transnational practices that pose challenges to academic freedom as well as the responses to such practices – or lack thereof – in Germany. Among the most pressing issues, they identify the CCP's globalised censorship regime, i.e. the attempts to police and censor claims about China made in the international realm, the funding coming from China, and the attempts to control Chinese students studying abroad. The authors argue that German authorities, universities, and learned societies have not managed to mitigate threats to academic freedom resulting from those practices.
Those three texts shed light on numerous and often contradictory implications of China’s more and more prominent position in the global higher education sector. The arguments made by those papers help us understand the recent emphasis of the Chinese leadership and Xi Jinping in particular on building world-class universities on the one hand and ‘developing the philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics [in order to] establish an independent knowledge system’ on the other.
This third part of the special issue illustrates how challenges to academic freedom are entwined with unequal opportunities as well as gendered and racialised forms of discrimination. Blell and colleagues argue that challenges to academic freedom are not experienced equally across the higher education sector and demonstrate how the government’s overlooking of the existing structural challenges and their limiting discourse on free speech and academic freedom create new risks and greater pressures for historically excluded and minoritised academics. Their analysis centres on women of colour, which allows for the exploration of gendered and racialised forms of discrimination. The authors link political challenges to academic freedom with systemic economic factors, such as job precarity. Their study shows that internationalisation increases challenges to academic freedom stemming from political and economic factors. The pursuit of profit generated by international students’ fees, some of whom come from authoritarian and increasingly assertive regimes, is often accompanied by insufficient protection of academic freedom. The paper shows that teaching and research on particular topics, which in authoritarian states may be deemed politically sensitive, faces backlash from state and non-state actors. They underline that self-censorship, which results from such backlash, not only undermines academic freedom, but also threatens the students’ right to learn.
The excessively marketised approach to higher education also means meagre support for academics at risk who are seeking refuge in highly developed, democratic states. Asli Telli, in her contribution to the special issue, focuses on displaced academics, i.e. those forced to flee their home countries due to political conditions, and the challenges they face. Telli compares five European countries – the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany – focusing on their openness and long-term job security. Telli argues that displaced academics are particularly prone to have their academic freedoms curtailed due to the lack of job security and the fact that the initial humanitarian response to their situation, while usually commendable, does not last longer than 2–3 years. As a result, the exercise of academic freedom depends on being able to secure long-term employment.
We conclude the special issue with the presentation of a Model Code of Conduct for the Protection of Academic Freedom and the Academic Community in the Context of the Internationalisation of the UK Higher Education Sector. The Code, prepared by members of the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group,Footnote9 aims to enable UK higher education institutions to adopt common responsibilities that would embed transparency and accountability, thus strengthening the protection of academic freedom and guarding the academic community from risks associated with HE internationalisation. The Code of Conduct calls on the universities to be more proactive in protecting academics, academic freedom and institutional autonomy, by, for instance, including academic freedom criteria in considering international partnerships and funding, supporting academics at risk, protecting researchers and enabling good fieldwork practice under difficult circumstances.
Ways forward
This special issue argued for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of HE internationalisation and its implications for academic freedom. Internationalisation is not solely facilitating the exchange of knowledge globally, but transforming the ways in which knowledge is produced and shared. In that sense it is not separate from the local struggles to transform the higher education institutions. One of the urgent questions before us is how can we talk about internationalisation that offers equal opportunities for all in a world where social, cultural and economic capital are unevenly distributed. As Fakunle et al.Footnote10 suggest, ‘moving forward with a decolonial internationalisation agenda will require institutions to truly welcome diversity of knowledge and confront the persisting hegemonic structures that constrain knowing through an expanded lens’. Besides structural inequalities, our own dispositions could also be an obstacle to an inclusive internationalisation.Footnote11 Burnay and Pils encourage critical engagement and self-examination as the important ways towards the cosmopolitan idea of academic citizenship.Footnote12 Internationalisation of higher education, that respects the key tenets of academic freedom and challenges existing inequalities in knowledge production and dissemination, requires critical scrutiny of higher education policies as well as our individual mindsets, goals and scholarly practices.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katarzyna Kaczmarska
Katarzyna Kaczmarska is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Notes
1 Julie Thondhlana, Evelyn C. Garwe, and Hans de Wit, ‘Introduction: Internationalization of Higher Education in the Global South: Setting the Scene’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Internationalization of Higher Education in the Global South, ed. Juliet Thondhlana, Evelyn Chiyevo Garwe, Hans de Wit, Jocelyne Gacel- Á vila, Futao Huang, and Wondwosen Tamrat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
2 Hans de Wit, ‘Internationalization in Higher Education: The Challenging Road from a Western Paradigm to a Global and Inclusive Concept’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Internationalization of Higher Education in the Global South, ed. Juliet Thondhlana, Evelyn Chiyevo Garwe, Hans de Wit, Jocelyne Gacel- Á vila, Futao Huang, and Wondwosen Tamrat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
3 Please see the AFIWG website: https://hrc.sas.ac.uk/networks/academic-freedom-and-internationalisation-working-group.
4 SAR, Free to Think 2020. Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (New York: Scholars at Risk, 2021).
5 CEART, Final report: Fourteenth Session: Joint ILO–UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of the Recommendations concerning Teaching Personnel (Geneva, 4–8 October 2021), International Labour Office, Sectoral Policies Department. Geneva, ILO, 2021. Karran, Terence, and Lucy Mallinson, Academic Freedom in the U.K.: Legal and Normative Protection in a Comparative Context. Report for the University and College Union, 2017.
6 Lori Allen, ‘Academic Freedom in the United Kingdom’, American Association of University Professors Fall 2019.
7 See the University and College Union’s briefing on the Higher Education (Freedom Of Speech) Bill https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/12919/UCU-briefing-on-the-Higher-Education-Freedom-of-Speech-Bill-Jun-22/pdf/UCU_Lords_briefing_on_the_HE_FoS_Bill__Jun_22.pdf; Evan Smith, ‘The University ‘Free Speech Crisis’ Has Been a Rightwing Myth for 50 years’, The Guardian, 2020, April 22.
8 Sjur Bergan, Tony Gallagher, and Ira Harkavy, eds., Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy (Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 24, 2020); Zhidong Hao, and Peter Zabielskis, eds., Academic Freedom Under Siege: Higher Education in East Asia, the U.S. and Australia (Cham: Springer, 2020), 1–36; Michael Ignatieff, and Stefan Roch, eds., Academic Freedom: The Global Challenge (Central European University Press, 2018).
9 For further information, please see https://hrc.sas.ac.uk/networks/academic-freedom-and-internationalisation-working-group.
10 Omolabake Fakunle, Chisomo Kalinga, and Viki Lewis, ‘Internationalization and Decolonization in UK Higher Education: Are We There Yet?’ International Higher Education 110 (2022): 25–27.
11 Josef Mestenhauser, Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Internationalising Higher Education – Discovering Opportunities to the Meet the Challenges (Minneapolis, MN: Global Programs and Strategy Alliance, University of Minnesota, 2011).
12 Matthew Burnay and Eva Pils, 'Authoritarianism and Marketisation in Higher Education: Implications of China's Rise for Cosmopolitan Academic Citizenship', The International Journal of Human Rights (2022), Advance Online.