What would you do if you ended up in a one-eyed town? A place where “sickness flourished in strange places and strange cures remained unchanged”? How would you make sense of “rivers flowing over bridges and trains running on water, not land”? Would you tell the mice that it isn’t for them to bell themselves and chase the cats? Surely, drumming an empty belly would strike you as an unusual way to accompany a qawwali?
The poet Gulzar messes with our minds with these questions in his poem “The One-Eyed Town”.1
The one-eyed town first evokes mild amusement, next an uneasy bafflement, until, at last, we begin to question the truth in what we know. It holds up a mirror to our tendency to construe the unfamiliar as irrational. In doing so, it represents a whimsically accurate portrayal of a world torn between reaffirming shared identities and renouncing all labels to embrace radical diversity that we inhabit.
1.1 Motivation
After earning my undergraduate and first graduate degree in India, I had the opportunity to earn further degrees outside my home country. A scholarship programme that covered all associated expenses, including tuition, allowed me to take the opportunity that came my way and realise a long-time dream. A well-timed financial crisis (2008) sent me back to India upon completion of my studies. Back in India, qualifications earned overseas opened doors for me. I stepped through one of those doors and a fair share of missteps, stumbling blocks, hurdles, slippery slopes, and detours later, found a path that led to an enriching and gratifying professional life.
Before I became a beneficiary of internationalisation, I gained tremendously from studying in India. I appreciate the motivational drive, work ethic, and ethos of learning which I developed from this experience the most. Having been a product of the subsidised public education system through schooling, undergraduate, and a first graduate degree, I am well aware of the pros and cons of this system and strongly support its continued relevance. The challenges confronting the Indian education system are not to be underestimated. There is a deeply entrenched notion that a degree or qualification is purely a means to an end. On the one hand there are high levels of vacancy in faculty positions across the board, and on the other 80% of graduates from Indian universities are considered unemployable. The pursuit for entry in the league tables is a recent mission launched against this backdrop, once again making reform in education an exercise which is not an end-goal in itself but a necessary evil en route prestige and global recognition.
Nigel Thrift has pointed out that when it comes to seeking explanations for why higher education finds itself in a situation of crisis, there is lack of explanatory biodiversity. He also acknowledges the many accomplishments made by universities over the past years and decades; for instance, promoting inclusion and meritocracy. I, however, have been preoccupied with a specific concern: Are we opening doors for those waiting for their turn behind us?
My experience studying abroad helped me find my passion: to work towards creating similar opportunities for students around the world. In this book I attempt to share the insights I have gained as I embarked on this mission, first from a place of passion and boundless possibilities and further down the road from a place of negotiation between structural limits and hierarchies, resource constraints, and an ever-evolving vision.
The voice in this book is that of a practitioner in the internationalisation of higher education. As such, my approach is comprehensive and the scope of this work encompasses broader questions within global tertiary education. I am concerned with the peculiar situation in which universities find themselves in today—described by many as a crisis—and choose internationalisation as the entry point simply because it is more familiar to me through my work.
It is, further, the voice of someone who is a practitioner based in a certain part of the world. It is a voice that urges serious reconsideration of the notion of best practice and the underlying hierarchies masked by this notion. It is a voice that wonders how internationalisation can promote the causes of inclusion, equality, mutual respect, and peace when the world is routinely divided into sending regions and receiving regions in its discourse. I agree with Thrift when he says that “the university is still the place where we call into question what we know and a sense of the world that has become naturalized over time, where the tradition is meant to be one of breaking with tradition, not in order to pronounce one path as salvation and another as perdition but in order to produce invention. That is a duty.” This book is a statement that the internationalisation practitioner’s duty is no longer limited to embellishing university life but extends to playing a constructive role in determining the future course of higher education globally.
The biggest perk of being in the internationalisation business is the opportunity to interact with students, administrators, and professors from various parts of the world. Whether through serendipitous encounters that bring joy and happy memories or stressful situations that demand adjustments and stock-taking, everything adds up to immense learning. A student from Mozambique once shared this story:
I was feeling homesick and really wanted to go to church on Sunday. But when I walked out of campus, I didn’t know which direction to go in. I met a man in the street and he helped me figure out the route. Then he called me at frequent intervals throughout the day to make sure I hadn’t got on the wrong bus until I made it back to campus safely. I visit his home often now and we share meals together.
At the end of a semester-long stay in North India, a Fulbright scholar once shared with me his observation: “I have never been to any other country where women perform so much of the total physical labour.” Despite having travelled extensively around India and abroad, this fact had never struck me. More than once, an international student has posed the question: “How can this happen in a ‘global university’?” (And I have wanted to respond: “This is a ‘glocal’ rather than a global university.”)
Elsewhere, I have reflected on how the expectations from partner institutions are conditioned by how things are done at the study abroad practitioner’s home institution, curtailing diversity of practice.2 Certain practices followed by universities “could potentially set misplaced expectations about how things work in the wider socio-cultural milieu and deprive an individual of the opportunity to experience, successfully navigate and gain from more authentic, well-rounded exposure and, therefore, develop practical skills”. An example of such a practice would be the insistence on a structured orientation programme for international students at the beginning of their stay. If study abroad programmes were envisaged as life experience rather than a sub-part of an academic degree, they would no doubt amount to more enriching learning for the student.
With this book, I hope to convey the message that internationalisation practitioners do indeed have much to contribute to the broader discussion on the future of higher education. At the same time, I am of the view that to allow this to happen, we will have to re-examine the comfortable operative templates we have settled into. I find that we are already aware of certain areas of improvement but shy away from working out solutions, instead opting for the stance “it is what it is”. The book is an attempt to illustrate how professionals primarily interested in internationalisation could contribute to both practice-based (leading from practice to general knowledge formation) and practice-led (leading from practice back to practice) types of research. Drawing lessons for redefining intercivilisational dialogue based on critical assessment of the impact of internationalisation on intercultural learning—see Chap. 4 (Ilm)—is an example of practice-based research. Proposing new forms of study abroad programmes by applying a spiritual approach to well-defined goals of higher education internationalisation—see Chap. 5 (Shoshin)—is an example of practice-led research.
In addition to being a practitioner of higher education internationalisation, I am a tertiary-level teacher of international relations. I have not only woven strands of major temporal conjunctures into this analysis but also drawn on experiences in the classroom. Staying true to my background and training, I have focused on the social sciences. In addition to the level of confidence that speaking about what you know affords you, I genuinely believe that the social sciences and humanities are uniquely placed to decolonise knowledge and liberate all disciplines to pursue alternative conceptions of knowing. While doing my research it struck me more than once, for instance, that Tagore’s appeal surely was not attributable purely to the quality of his argument but equally to a poet’s unique ability to convey and connect. In terms of situating my argument for spiritual learning on the broader landscape of higher learning, I also found the argument that Kenneth Garcia makes appealing. He writes3:
Here, Garcia argues for inclusion of theological postulates alongside others from various (secular) ideological frameworks. Garcia’s appeal reminds us that ideologies too are after all systems of belief. It also demands that we consider whether theological and spiritual insight can help address real problems and better the human condition, as the political ideologies he names claim to do. Most significantly, I believe that the humanities and social sciences train us in the art of self-reflection which is indispensable to receiving and articulating insight in a spiritual dimension.Social scientists routinely make philosophical assumptions—whether explicitly or implicitly—about the nature of social reality. These assumptions derive from a number of sources: Marxism, neo-Kantianism, postmodernism, feminism, and others. Is it not, therefore, legitimate to bring theological insight arising from religious traditions to the table in a way that does not violate the methodological distinctions of disciplines, even while challenging disciplinary orthodoxies? Theology does, after all, provide some rationally considered and reasoned principles concerning the common good, social justice and poverty, the fair and ethical distribution of wealth, the theological foundation of communitarian life, and the dignity of each human being.
The title of this chapter is Anadi, that which has no beginning. Expertise on internationalisation has attained a high degree of depth and sophistication. And as a mark of my respect and appreciation to this body of work and all the fellow-practitioners who have contributed to it, I disavow any claim to breaking new ground. Anadi together with its sister term Ananta, that which has no end, encapsulates the idea behind this book as a humble chip-in in the midst of an on-going conversation.
Anadi and Ananta are also refer...