Mission Compromised?: Academic Identity Work and Recent Nativist Resistance to Foreign Students

In some polities, higher education institutions have come under sustained criticism for the expansion of foreign student enrolments and programmatic offerings aimed at them. Allegations often follow familiar populist tropes, suggesting privileged university leaderships have abrogated responsibility for the domestic educational mission of their institutions. Impugned motives include revenue maximisation by favouring affluent international students over local enrolments and learning outcomes, leaders’ managerial cachet, and/or an ideological predisposition to liberal cosmopolitanism. Imbued with a strongly ‘nativist’ sentiment, they can find resonance well beyond the usual reach of right-wing populisms. With higher education being a key route to economic, social and cultural status (Baker, 2014), admissions and funding are ripe for contention; as a growing comparative literature on the politics of higher education systems reveals (eg. Garritzman, 2016). It is often asserted too that many in the academic profession share such concerns but are unable to speak up in an era of ostensible managerialism and funding and employment precarity. As we debate the direction of the academic profession at the transnational and national levels, it is timely to reflect on the interrelationship between academics’ evolving professional identities, and the place of international students in national higher education systems. How invested, identity-wise and/or pragmatically, in educating foreign students alongside locals, has the professoriate become in particular contexts? While the research training central to the academic career path typically instills a strongly internationalist orientation to academic research identity, the teaching and service dimensions of many academics’ careers are closely linked to place. The ‘nested identities’ academics develop are situated in particular institutional and national contexts, and a large proportion of the academic profession still pursue careers in their home countries, or in linguistic and culturally proximate nations. Academics’ support for the ‘internationalisation’ of the student cohort, or for English-based programs outside the Anglo-sphere, is not a given; and they may identify strongly instead with a domestic educational mission, at the undergraduate level in particular. Nonetheless, resourcing, compliance and reputational imperatives may also lead academics to be reconciled pragmatically to an expansion of foreign student enrolments. How individual academics self-narrate the pedagogical, interpersonal and empathetic implications of a more diverse student cohort, ongoing ‘identity work’,may directly the learning experience of foreign students. Instrumental university approaches to recruiting international students (cf. those driven by ‘idealism’ or ‘educationalism’, Shier, 2004) that do not in turn resource, incentivise, and recognise academics who embrace a more expansive professional self-identity risk alienating academic staff who bring strong strong intrinsic motivation to internationalisation (eg. see Clarke & Yang, 2021 re Ireland). Yet, where nativist critiques of universities resonate with publics and political actors, once-subordinated contention amongst academic staff about the scale and character of international student cohorts may be re-animated. Academe is not immune to the self-licensing ‘its not my job’ meme. The paper first concisely surveys recent nativist critiques of HEIs, then reviews extant literature on academic and institutional identity shifts with HEI internationalisation, and then reports on Australian and Japanese case studies.