Will Brehm 1:21
Kalyani Unkule, welcome to FreshEd.

Kalyani Unkule 1:23
Congratulations to FreshEd on completing 200 episodes, and I could not be more pleased to be here Will.

Will Brehm 1:29
Thank you so much. It is really nice to hear those words. So, I want to talk and ask you a little bit about your own experiences in the internationalization of higher education. Would you say you are part of this sort of process and movement?

Kalyani Unkule 1:45
So, Will, I was brought up to appreciate the importance of my own culture and my own roots, while at the same time nurturing a curiosity for what else is out there? I would say that in the first place, my interest is in intercultural dialogue and understanding. Of course, I see higher education internationalization as a powerful tool for working towards this end goal. But coming back to your question, yes. I have had the great fortune of completing my undergrad and first master’s degree in India, then earning further master’s degrees in the UK and continental Europe, and now working towards a doctoral degree in the American system. Sometime in between, I launched a startup dedicated to higher education internationalization called ‘The Whiteboard Initiative’ with support from the European Commission, and the Erasmus Mundus alumni community, and then down the road a leadership role in the international department of an Indian university became my day job. Most recently, and as a way of actually building on all these experiences, I have been contributing to training, thought leadership, and publishing on the subject including with my monograph published last year. So, indeed, I consider myself lucky to have experienced the internationalization of higher education in so many different capacities, but I would qualify and add two further influences which shaped my thinking around it. First is that my broader teaching and research interest is in international relations, which does inform my thinking about internationalization of higher education. And the second influence is that being a practitioner of internationalization based in the Global South, as you can imagine, I envision and interpret internationalization of higher education from that sort of lens.

Will Brehm 3:59
Yeah, and we will get into a lot of this because I do think this is what is so fascinating is the internationalization sort of within, across, and from the Global South, and how that might look different and possibly similar to conceptions of internationalization from the Global North? But before we get into this, I mean, we have to talk about the current pandemic. How has COVID-19 upended the internationalization of higher education in your opinion?

Kalyani Unkule 4:35
The most immediate and obvious reason why the internationalization project has been vulnerable to the fallout of the pandemic is that so much of it was built around physical mobility and international travel. But while certain adjustments in the short run will no doubt be powerful, in the medium-to-long term, I see this as an opportunity. And why is that? Innovation in the internationalization space had really slowed down in recent years. And it had become sort of more formulaic. And we had started doing just more of the same in the name of some sort of notion of quote unquote “best practice” -which by the way, I find to be an incredibly arrogant term. On the bright side, the speed with which universities have transitioned to online teaching, learning assessment, as well as the surge in participation in online conferences and webinars, I think gives one hope that universities are not so status quoist and slow to change as we often berate them for being after all.

Will Brehm 5:58
So, do you think that internationalization is going to get beyond this focus on mobility?

Kalyani Unkule 6:04
That is a complex issue and of course, there are various perspectives on it out there. But I would say that in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, the phenomenon that is the internationally mobile student became much more real for institutions than a mere statistic or a source of bragging rights on the league tables. Much like, I mean, you will remember the refugee crisis from a few years ago, and much in the same way, we were forced to contend with the structural reasons that cause flows of people in such large numbers from one part of the world to another. And I think we also had to face the consequences of such flows reaching a tipping point at this very moment in the wake of this particular crisis. For the internationalization paradigm to really move beyond mobility, what we should not be asking is, well, how can we quick fix the current system? What we need to be asking now I believe is what kind of a system we have been feeding over the years, which serves institutions and societies in the Global North while the going is good. But the moment there is an exogenous shock, this very system quickly transmutes into a great liability, which is what we see happening all around us. There has also been a blurring of the line between home and abroad, and host and home institutions. And I say that because when campuses are forced to close down, when international travel is suspended, and when there’s a heightened sense of insecurity about the presence of “the Other”, the reach and the ambition of the internationalization project is truly exposed. And I think we are in the midst of such a moment right now.

Will Brehm 8:16
Can you give any examples of this distinction between the home and abroad and how that sort of dichotomy fell apart? And how the project of internationalization, as you say, was exposed?

Kalyani Unkule 8:27
I think that our language in our practice of internationalization has become littered with a lot of binaries, right. For example, there is this idea of a sending region, a receiving region, you know, countries like India are frequently talked about in terms like, “Oh! India is a great market for us”. So, you know, it is these kinds of binaries, which I think fall apart when the challenge posed by something we did not see coming, just is poses questions of a very systemic nature. I think if we are trying to learn anything from this situation, we should be asking ourselves, should the purpose of higher education internationalization be to serve the short-term interests of universities, narrowly defined? Or is it time to maybe broaden the agenda and embrace an understanding of education as a public good. What is it that, through internationalization, we could gain from the local context and constructively contribute back to it is I think the question that is begging to be asked now?

Will Brehm 9:51
So, before we dig into that question that is begging to be asked, what would you define as being the short-term interests that universities currently have when it comes to internationalization?

Kalyani Unkule 10:02
This goes back. You have to take a step back and really see the broader ecosystem and the economic system in which universities have found themselves in recent years, which is something that I’ve delved into at great length in the book. Because I feel that just like you cannot discuss internationalization divorced from the broader context of universities, you should not make the mistake of talking about the role of universities before you address important questions about the global economy, right. And so, universities have been -partly because of systemic reasons- they have had to rely a lot on student tuition for their sustenance. And partly because of certain ideas that they have bought into themselves like the notion of quote unquote “world class”. What does world class mean? Being the first at something or the other, right? Attracting a lot of international students. Well, when that all was bringing resources, nobody questioned what it would mean in the long run. But when it became a question of responsibility, when it became apparent that there was going to be a great rupture that might stem these flows, that’s when people started paying attention to this.

Will Brehm 11:38
I must say, you know working in the United Kingdom, in the press, this is what you read about all the time when it comes to universities and the pandemic, is: the fear of losing hundreds of millions of pounds in tuition fees from international students.

Kalyani Unkule 11:55
Yeah, absolutely. So, what I am trying to suggest is we cannot talk about an alternative vision for universities unless we talk about a different global economic system. And this is why I compared the refugee crisis to the situation we have now because the source of both is that we have allowed global inequality to sustain. Not only that, we have played up this idea of inequality to serve some of our own motivations and to serve some of our own narrowly defined interests. To say that education quality is high in some parts of the world, to say that there is a concentration of good learning in some parts of the world is to sustain an image of inequality, I believe. And this is the same sort of systemic inequality that has been exacerbated by globalization, which internationalization has reinforced in the realm of knowledge, in the realm of education, which is resulting in unsustainable flows of people across borders, which one minute can be very promising -although they have not been promising, they have sapped a lot from the Global South. But which one minute can be very promising for one part of the world and another minute, you know, they can expose some deep-seated weaknesses in our systems.

Will Brehm 13:23
So, I am curious about how in, you know, the universities where you work, and you have had experience in India, how is internationalization viewed compared to the way it’s viewed in, say, the United Kingdom or in Europe or in America or in Australia, where we do see this discourse of world class universities, where we do see this reliance on fees from international students? You know, what does it look like in India?

Kalyani Unkule 13:53
The reason I felt so compelled to write the book, Will, is because my frustration is not with the rest of the world. My frustration is much more so because countries like India, our part of the world, has bought into this global rhetoric of world class, or capacity building, or best practice, which I find to be terribly derogatory and divisive language, you know. So, I wish I could tell you that there is a different sort of thinking about internationalization in our part of the world but the fact of the matter is that the allure of this language of world class is such that nobody will stand back and say, you know “We don’t want to be world class”, right? The way in which this aspirational standard has been set based on a Western experience needed to be talked about and that is what I have done in my book. What I have also done is talk about how the Global South is not really, based on history, not a newcomer to higher education internationalization. In fact, I have written about stories of monks who traveled from ancient China to ancient India in the fourth century and you know they had been searching for Buddhist texts, which were believed to be better maintained in India. So, going back to this sort of tells us two things. First, that spiritual learning has always been inextricably linked with international education. And second, what we today recognize as the Global South is, as I said, no newcomer to the internationalization of higher learning. Also, interestingly, such travel, which was primarily educational in nature, was assisted by, and in turn benefited various classes of society as opposed to just the elite who benefited, or a narrow, you know, section of the population who benefited from higher education. And therefore, such an inclusive system today, to my mind, could serve as a great model for the Internationalizing Higher Education for Society, what we call the IHES agenda, which as you know, is being paid much greater attention to now. Of course, this is not about nostalgia and, you know, the answers are not in nostalgia. The answers are in looking at historical experience. Seeing what is the diversity of models that is really out there and trying to make the most of them by interpreting how they are relevant to the present.

Will Brehm 16:45
So, I think you call this a “spiritual approach “to internationalization. So, can you expand on what this means? And, you know, how might it look like today? Because obviously, you are not arguing for all of us to become monks to travel to different countries to transcribe Buddhist texts in different languages. But there is something to learn from that history.

Kalyani Unkule 17:06
It is interesting, you should ask about the spiritual approach because during my book tour, I found that this is an aspect that piqued the most interest. And I also got the most questions about it in different parts of the world. Now, the spiritual way of knowing is instinctive. It redirects us back to our inner world. And once our ego is confronted in this way, our inner hegemonies are challenged. And because the external is really a reflection of what is going on inside us, we start seeing the world in a non-hierarchical and non-dualistic way. When we achieve inner harmony is when we fathom our oneness with nature, which as you know, is so important in our time. The ecofeminists have been saying forever, and they have shown how a Eurocentric, masculinized science has set us on this disastrous collision course with nature. So, the first thing I talk about is a spiritual way of knowing before I talk about how spiritual learning can inform our approach to internationalization. Spiritual knowing, another thing about it is that it is never attained fully but is constantly pursued. So, there is no question of holding it. And as you can see, it is taking us away from a dangerous idea of proprietorship over knowledge, which formal science has today entrenched. Spiritual learning also challenges computational thinking, which views the world as knowable and which views the world as predictable. A lot of spiritual learning, I would say actually is, in fact unlearning because computational thinking has trained us to place all our faith in engineered systems, while we completely disregard our own instincts. Now in the context of internationalization, I use the spiritual approach as a proxy for other ways of knowing. Simply put, I am trying to argue that unless, and until, we open up to other ways of knowing, there is no real intercultural dialogue. And if there is no real intercultural dialogue, we are not achieving the original intended purpose of internationalization which was supposed to be to learn from each other.

Will Brehm 19:38
Is it possible, do you think, to have that spiritual learning, that other ways of knowing, that spiritual approach, as you say -to have that in conjunction with the requirement for some universities to need international students to pay higher fees to make the university financially viable? Or are those things not compatible?

Kalyani Unkule 20:05
I think that those things are not compatible, Will, because, as I said before, if we are trying to perform a surgical quick fix on the current system, then unfortunately the model that I am proposing is incompatible with that because the fundamental pillar of the model that I’m proposing is not jettison globalization. It is first, accept that learning is equally available everywhere, right. And the premium that is being charged to international students is basis this idea which we have constructed, which we have fed into, which we have really allowed to fester and to capture our mind, and our language, and the way we think. That learning in some parts of the world is not worthy, is poor, those parts of the world need capacity building. And so, when people come from those parts of the world to these great places where there’s such amazing, you know, learning available, they should be willing to pay a premium for it because after all, they made the mistake of being born somewhere where you know all of this is not available. You know this is in very stark terms, I will admit, but if we peel back the layers of all the language of excellence that we have been using, this is what it means. Because as you know, like the tag of world class is automatically attached to certain institutions in our mind when we find that they are located in certain parts of the world, right. I think that if universities all over the world are to contribute constructively to higher education internationalization and inter-civilizational dialogue, they must first figure out and build on their own unique strengths. And this includes, and is especially true of, institutions in the Global South. At the top, as I keep saying, we need to get rid of this aspirational model of world class which is forcing us all to become the same. The other problem of this model is that it is killing diversity. Once you do not conform with the uniformly applied criteria of the league tables, you are judged for being substandard. And if you want to be recognized as something that is in line with the rest of the world, what are you going to do? You are going to, in fact, move away from what makes you different. So, at the top, we need to get rid of this model of world class because it is pushing us all in the direction of uniformity and homogenization. I found when I was writing the book, the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, who was writing way back in the early 20th century to be so relevant to our time. Tagore has conveyed this message beautifully. He wrote, “for our universities, we must claim not labeled packages of truth and authorized agents to distribute them but truth in its living association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers.”

Will Brehm 23:25
You know, if universities can embrace some of these ideas, and we can actually begin to see a fundamental change in the way internationalization looks, would mobility still be part of internationalization?

Kalyani Unkule 23:38
Mobility would still be a part of internationalization. It would be indeed a very important part of internationalization, but it would be mobility based on the idea, as I said before, that there’s equally valuable learning available everywhere. Let me give you an example. Over the past few years, I have observed that any government backed schemes or initiatives, which fund students from Australia, the UK, or the US to come to India has taken up and embraced this model of a “two-week immersion” type of experience. That we will fund students to go to India for two weeks. Now, the problem with that is that the message that you’re giving students is that well, India is good enough for a two-week cultural immersion experience, but not so much the case when you’re thinking about serious, long-term study, right. So, it is a mobility, but it is a mobility where everyone has recognized that we need to internationalize in the same way that the rest of the world does, right. And I think that it is also, you know – there is two very concrete suggestions I would make for internationalization practitioners here. First is a change in how we approach globalization and how we teach globalization. In the post-COVID scenario, we are going to find that just as governments will have to restructure their supply chains to emphasize proximity and predictability, universities too will need to demonstrate dynamism in their internal strategies. Education in general, and higher education in particular, needs to go beyond preparing students for a global world. I think we now have a responsibility to shape minds who will ethically harness globalization in the service of sustainability, equity, and humanity. So, my first suggestion is, think about globalization itself differently. And my second suggestion is a change in the language, especially the language of globalization. So, when students decide to go abroad, for instance, one of the first things we condition them to expect is, quote unquote, “culture shock”, right. Now, what is culture shock, really? Culture shock is, to my mind, nothing but a realization that you live your life in a very peculiar way and not everyone lives like you do or values the same things that you value, isn’t it? So, this is actually a very liberating experience of just shedding the load of your expected patterns, and of your conditioning when you are somewhere else. But when we talk about culture shock, we turn it into something negative and undesirable. So, when I say that we need to change the language, maybe we should stop using terminology like culture shock, and replace it with a favorite term of mine that I have coined, Culture Shock Therapy, right. By doing so, we will be repurposing internationalization. And this goes back to your question about the spiritual approach. We will in fact be repurposing internationalization as a way of understanding ourselves better as a path to discovering what we have in common with the alien other, rather than simply viewing it as a tool for acquiring a flimsy and superficial cultural competence, which feeds stereotypes and fuels division.

Will Brehm 27:37
So, do you think in this post-COVID-19 world, universities and internationalization of higher education will change in some of these directions?

Kalyani Unkule 27:47
Will, I must say that I am hopeful about how creative people can be, but I am not seeing very encouraging signs at the systemic level. For instance, we have already started measuring post-pandemic recovery in terms of car sales, manufacturing output, consumption and export indicators which tells me that we haven’t fully registered that this whole economic model is what got us here in the first place. So, if we give that a serious rethink, then yes, we may be able to resituate universities as providing an important public good, as catering to the local context, as supporting the idea that there is no one global out there, right. There is no one type of global. Global is actually “glocal”. There are various local manifestations of the global. And this is what internationalization has a great role in teaching the rest of the world and teaching even universities at this point because universities themselves have bought into this idea that global is equal to Western. And so, unless we are able to resituate universities in this way, in our reimagination of a broader concept of globalization, then we cannot expect internationalization to move away from where it has been. I do think that voices from the Global South have a responsibility to make themselves heard. We are often like caught between criticism and nostalgia and we stop at those things. Those things are important, but they should be our points of departure. It is very important to pass through what our own historical experience has been. Not to say that -often, the tendency is to say, “Oh, we had these great universities in the past, therefore, we were very international, and therefore we had a liberal arts model here.” That is, in fact, taking your history and trying to force feed it into an existing, off-the-shelf, template of what is global and what is liberal and what is world class. What we need to do is have a look at that and see how it is actually a variant. How it is a manifestation of the “glocal”, combination of the global and the local. And so, I feel that we as researchers, practitioners of internationalization in the Global South also have a great contribution to make in this respect.

Will Brehm 30:49
Well, Kalyani Unkule. Thank you so much for joining FreshEd and congratulations again on your new book.

Kalyani Unkule. 30:55
Thank you, Will. This has been great.

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