Sharon Stein

This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government’s accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant legislation, and although conquest of the frontier was eventually metaphorized in higher education discourse, public institutions remain both dependent on and vulnerable to the imperatives of accumulation that were established during colonization, as is evident in contemporary privatization efforts. I argue that if efforts to resist privatization fail to address how colonialism has historically shaped US public goods, then these efforts risk re-naturalizing the imperative of capital accumulation and relations of conquest.

This article analyzes U.S. university presidents' public responses to the Trump administration's first travel ban in January 2017. Within these responses, most presidents voiced their support for international students, staff, and faculty. However, it remains necessary to consider the discursive frames through which this support is articulated. I found that support for international members of the campus community was largely expressed in ways that implicitly naturalized the regulation of immigration according to racialized assessments of human value. This article considers the role of universities in reproducing and/or interrupting the logics and practices of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and nationalism, and the ethical limits of responses to the ban that are framed through discourses of conditional inclusion and perceived contributions to the campus and country.

This article addresses the conceptual challenges of articulating the ethical–political limits of ‘higher education as we know it’, and the practical challenges of exploring alternative formations of higher education that are unimaginable from within the dominant imaginary of the higher education field. This article responds to the contemporary conjuncture in which possible futures have been significantly narrowed, and yet these possibilities also appear increasingly unsustainable and unethical. It invites scholars of higher education to rethink the epistemological and ontological frames within which most imaginaries and institutions of higher education are embedded. If we fail to denaturalize these frames, then efforts to pluralize possible higher education futures will risk reproducing existing conceptual limitations and enduring colonial harms.

For decades, critical approaches to global and development education have pushed back against mainstream liberal – and more recently, neo-liberal – approaches.  Many of these more critical approaches are rooted in the Freirean tradition of critical pedagogy, including several contributions to this Issue 27 of Policy & Practice.  Critical perspectives on education remain more important than ever, and critical pedagogy in particular has fostered fruitful strategies for denaturalising the presumed inevitability of capitalism as an economic system, and resisting its influence on educational systems.  It has also been the subject of feminist, post-colonial, and post-structural engagements that consider its potential limitations and circularities alongside its potentially transformative gifts (e.g. Andreotti, 2016; Ellsworth, 1989; Lather, 1998).  There is much value in reframing and reclaiming critical traditions in order to consider their implications for our own time, as both Cotter and Dillon do in their distinct but complementary contributions to this issue on the history of development education in Ireland, and as McCloskey does in his contribution on the renewed relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism. However, rather than debate or advocate the relative merits and limitations of a particular tradition of critique, in my brief editorial introduction to this issue, my intention is to take a step back and consider whether any single arsenal of educational tools – including liberal and critical approaches – can adequately equip us to respond generatively, strategically, and ethically to the complex local and global challenges that we currently face.  Rather than defend a particular perspective or approach to global and development education, I suggest it is crucial that we prepare students with the self-reflexivity, intellectual curiosity, historical memory, and deep sense of responsibility they will need in order to collectively navigate an uncertain future for which there are no clear roadmaps.  This in turn requires that we prepare educators to engage confidently with a range of conflicting perspectives so that they can make critically-informed, socially-accountable pedagogical choices that are responsive to the complex shifting conditions and challenges of their own contexts.

Critical accounts of contemporary higher education are often emplotted by a demand that the state make good on its post-War promises of distributed affluence, inclusion, and social mobility. Oriented by the critical interventions of Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in this article I suggest that despite significant differences between the post-War (liberal) model of students as engaged citizens and the current (neoliberal) model of students as customers and entrepreneurs, both are rooted in the same template of humanity. That is, they are different iterations of the same modern subject that requires the violent racial and colonial architectures of the nation-state and global capital to enable their reproduction and legitimate their claims to progress, autonomy, and universal reason. Yet most efforts to address the contemporary problems of higher education fail to identify this constitutive violence, because these efforts are rooted within liberal frames of justice that self-preservingly cannot challenge their own conditions of possibility. I suggest that the orienting framework of transformative justice offers possibilities for dismantling the modern subject and reimagining and remaking higher education in ways that affirm the ethical and political obligations that are rooted in our entanglement with each other and the world. However, these possibilities are not without complication and must be engaged in their full complexity in our efforts to imagine and practice justice otherwise in the context of higher education.

This paper invites readers to engage with analyses that diagnose the racial-colonial foundations of US universities as the root cause of many contemporary higher education challenges. To do so, it traces the “underside” of violence that subsidized three moments in US higher education history: the colonial era; land-grant legislation; and the post-War “golden age.” I argue that confronting these foundational violences, and our complicity in them, is a necessary part of any effort to unravel the harmful inherited patterns of representation, relationship, and resource distribution that continue to shape the present.

The recent growth of internationalization at colleges and universities in the Global North has amplified the need to address the ongoing colonial politics of knowledge in these institutions. In this article I argue that a failure to denaturalize and interrupt long-standing patterns of curricular Euro-supremacy may result in internationalization becoming yet another means of economic expansion and epistemic erasure. However, rather than offer a prescriptive roadmap for epistemic decolonization, this article is an effort to consider the paradoxes, challenges, and difficulties that often arise in efforts to do this work

Internationalisation of higher education has within the three decades become a strategic focus of universities worldwide. In this chapter, we take a Critical Discourse Analysis approach towards contemporary internationalisation strategies in Finland and Canada to examine how they frame the role of higher education, and consider the ethical implications of these framings. We find that both documents largely naturalise the role of higher education and international- isation in the service of a knowledge economy, and uncritically reproduce global power inequities and Western supremacy in ways that narrow possibilities for ethical engagement. We also find that the Canadian strategy is less ambiguous in its commercialised aims, while the Finnish document contains a mixture of social and economic rationales for internationalisation. We suggest that these spaces of discursive ambiguity point to distinct models of internationalisation, and argue for the importance of scholarly spaces that support open and critical inquiry about the implications and ethical commitments of these different models.

As higher education is increasingly called upon to play a central role in addressing the challenges and crises of today’s complex, uncertain, and volatile world, internationalization efforts are intensifying. Emphasizing higher education as a space for critically-informed, socially accountable, and open-ended conversations about alternative futures, in this paper I reframe common approaches to complexity, uncertainty, and critique by offering a social cartography of three critical approaches to internationalization: soft, radical, and liminal. Mapping and historicizing diverse perspectives can complicate existing analyses, interrupt the prescriptive tendencies of critique, and illuminate new possible horizons of thought and action in higher education.

Canada's recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of developments at the intersections of higher education internationalization and marketization. In this paper, I examine the EduCanada website to consider how national exceptionalist and 'othering' narratives are reproduced in the recruitment of international students. From these findings I ask how internationalization relates to the overlapping and ongoing legacies of Indigenous colonization, and racialized regimes of personhood, citizenship, and immigration in Canada. Finally, I argue that the international marketization of higher education risks foreclosing critical examinations of the entanglements of empire within which we are all unevenly embedded.

In this paper I consider the need to rethink existing ethical approaches to the internationalization of higher education. In particular, I consider the risk that the same developmentalist assumptions that reproduce the highly uneven global higher education landscape also shape many of our efforts to address these inequities. To do so, I situate the current moment within a longer history of colonial relations and identify five pressing ethical challenges for higher education scholars and institutions to address. Ultimately, I suggest the need to be more attentive to the harmful investments and colonial frames of reference that keep us from imagining a radically different ethics of internationalization.

Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in institutional recognition of how US universities and their founders directly participated in and benefitted from Black chattel slavery. However, these developments have largely escaped the attention of scholars who take higher education as their object of study. This article offers a conceptual reading of how apology efforts around slavery have unfolded at a single university. Drawing on the intersections of Black Studies and decolonial scholarship, I consider how revised institutional narratives develop through efforts to address and incorporate these violent histories.

The demand to cultivate global citizenship is frequently invoked as central to colleges’ and universities’ internationalization efforts. However, the term global citizenship remains undertheorized in the context of U.S. higher education. This article maps and engages three common global citizenship positions—entrepreneurial, liberal humanist, and anti-oppressive—and articulates an additional fourth possible position, based in encounters and engagements with incommensurability. Tracing the recurring patterns in each of these positions can allow for more complex and nuanced conversations and engagements to emerge among practitioners and students about global citizenship.

In a moment when scholars are becoming increasingly vocal about the importance of centering international student experiences in educational research and practice, readers of Maria Elena Indelicato’s book, Australia’s New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border, might be taken aback by her opening lines: "Those who are expecting this study to be about the feelings of international students I am afraid are to be disappointed; no personal feelings are gathered, interpreted and delivered accordingly as the 'truth' of the experience of being an international student" (p. 1). This is not to say that Indelicato is uninterested in emotions, however, nor unconcerned with international student experiences. Her genealogical account of shifts in Australia’s inter- national education policies and discourses is intended to denaturalize those popular frames of reference through which international students’ experiences and emotions are most commonly narrated as truth. Through her close readings of knowledge produced about international student emotions in government and scholarly literatures, and of affective responses to international students among the Australian public, Indelicato convincingly argues that the students are framed in ways that seek the maintenance of Australia’s moral and political authority over time and across shifting economic and geopolitical contexts. Importantly, Indelicato addresses not only blatantly racist representations of international students, but also representations intended to garner sympathy for the students. In doing so, she engages a well-established anti-/postcolonial feminist tradition of identifying the colonial undertones that often characterize well-meaning accounts of the other.

It feels like we can't go a week, a day, five minutes without more bad news. Even those who are trying to pay attention to it all are overwhelmed by the number and magnitude of threats, and it is difficult if not impossible to sift through the constant flow of horrifying new developments and also do the important work of linking them to long-standing patterns. It therefore seems unfair to utilize the shaming trope "why aren't more people paying attention to [x] issue", or to frame our lack of attention to a particular issue as a moral failure. While we do need to think carefully about how all of these violences are interconnected, each of us cannot all focus on everything all the time. We need to discern where we are needed, and where we can usefully intervene. With all of this in mind, as someone who studies the foundations and political economy of higher education, I would like to invite a conversation among scholars and practitioners about a recent report regarding Harvard's endowment that in my mind is worthy of our attention, and which might point us to a different understanding of contemporary crises than the ones we are often given. In particular, we might come to understand that these crises are not exceptional developments, but rather the most recent symptoms of a white supremacist capitalist country whose hegemony is growing thin and whose desperate defenders are lashing out in response. That is, these crises might show us the true face of a country that was built on slavery and settler colonialism, and continues to be sustained through dispossession.

The "decolonization of higher education" is by now a phrase that many of us have heard, at least in passing. The concept is both very old, and long overdue, being the latest iteration of a whole history of critiques and social movements that have intended to name and transform the enduring colonial white supremacy that characterizes U.S. colleges and universities. But these conversations have arrived quite late to higher education as a field. At ASHE this year, I believe for the first time ever, the (printed) conference program included a formal acknowledgement of (some of) the Indigenous peoples of Texas; ACPA has included a more extensive ​ acknowledgement on their conference site, and now has a "Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization" (and accompanying syllabus​). As interest in decolonization slowly grows, though still at the margins of the field, I suggest that non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners need to enter into these conversations with intellectual humility, a commitment to address how comprehensively colonization shapes our institutions and our collective "field-imaginary" , and a deep recognition that decolonization is not a single event or prescribed blueprint but a complex and contested process of unlearning and undoing centuries of colonial ideas, desires, and infrastructures, and of (re)learning how to be together in the world differently. We must, in other words, commit to grappling with the unsettling and disorienting fact that to truly decolonize our institutions would require ​the end of higher education as we know it​.

The Standing Rock Sioux’s ongoing efforts to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through their lands have brought national attention to an issue that many would prefer to ignore: the past and present of U.S. settler colonization. Although colonial logics remain largely unexamined in the study of higher education, there is not one contemporary campus issue that isn’t significantly shaped by it: sexual assault; persistently Eurocentric curricula; institutional symbols; enrolment and graduation rates of Indigenous students; the normative white male-ness that orients many theories of student development; the de facto closure of the American Indian studies program at UIUC and the chronic underfunding of other Indigenous studies programs and of tribal colleges and universities; and, of course, the land itself upon which all of our institutions sit. According to Rowe and Tuck (2016), “Settler colonialism is about the pursuit of land, not just labor or resources. Settler colonialism is a persistent societal structure, not just an historical event or origin story for a nation-state. Settler colonialism has meant genocide of Indigenous peoples, the reconfiguring of Indigenous land into settler property. In the United States and other slave estates, it has also meant the theft of people from their homelands (in Africa) to become property of settlers to labor on stolen land.” In this sense, settler colonization, alongside slavery and its afterlife, is not ancillary to but rather constitutive of the ongoing material structure and ordering logics of both the U.S. nation- state and global capitalism. Institutions of U.S. higher education have also been implicated in these harmful systems since their very beginnings. As Wilder (2013) describes in Ebony and Ivy, “American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery. The European invasion of the Americas and the modern slave trade pulled peoples throughout the Atlantic world into each others’ lives, and colleges were among the colonial institutions that braided their histories and rendered their fates dependent and antagonistic” (p. 11). Yet, overall the field of higher education has yet to have a sustained conversation about the centrality of colonialism in the foundations of our scholarship and practice. In her book, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Jodi Byrd (2011) asks, “How might the terms of current academic and political debates change if the responsibilities of that very real lived condition of colonialism were prioritized as a condition of possibility?” (p. xx). I suggest that it is time for those of us in the field of higher education to ask ourselves this question, and the many that follow from it.

The Critical Internationalization Studies Network (https://criticalinternationalization.net) brings together scholars, practitioners, educators, students, and community organizations interested in reimagining dominant patterns of relationship, representation, and resource distribution in the internationalization of education. Beyond fostering engagements between diverse critical perspectives, we seek to facilitate collaboration, the sharing of information about events and opportunities, and the exchange of knowledge and pedagogical resources. While the emphasis of the network is on higher education contexts, there are many resonances with K-12 and informal education contexts as well.