Confronting complicity and transforming complicity in EDI, IHE and international students: some scattered thoughts

In the spirit of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), this short commentary is meant to be diverse, equitable and inclusive in its constitutive components, whereby formal academic writing norms are combined with creative genres, including poetry and storytelling and with somewhat casual free-style writing. All these diverse genres receive their shares of equity and inclusion.This special issue (SI), led by Tsouroufli and Ferri, identifies, examines and offers much-needed nuances on a highly important, yet often overlooked, aspect of global higher education (HE), which is how, why, where, when, for whom and to what extent the promotion of the internationalization of higher education (IHE) coupled with the EDI agenda/endeavor has fallen short and failed to deliver its promises and many attached prospects for its stakeholders. Not only does this SI take a long overdue, critical and bold stance towards this highly promoted EDI agenda, but it also shows paradoxes and persistent limitations inherent in IHE and EDI in various HE contexts including Canada, the UK, Brazil and Eastern and Central European countries.With evidence collected from diverse sources and via a good range of methods, the SI speaks clear and loud at the EDI endeavor and those institutions and entities behind it, showing how the endeavor has ironically excluded certain groups that it has vowed to include and serve. These groups include immigrant academics (as in the case of Canadian HE), international students (as in the case of international students or students labeled international in the UK HE), women academics trying to build their careers in the current age of English-dominant academia (as in the case of female academics in Eastern and Central European HE systems) and female academics of color (as in the case of those working in Brazilian institutions).In this humble piece, I won’t do what a usual commentary or an afterword for an SI may do, i.e. going through every article, summarizing each of them and identifying several overarching themes, arguments and problems to comment on. Instead, I will share my scattered thoughts on the question of diversity with regard to IHE and international students, a topic I pick up from this SI and is also central to much of my own scholarship. I hope to offer insightful perspectives and reflections from other angles and points of reference.Based on what I can gather from this SI, dominant discourses associated with international students, particularly the deficit discourse, the cash cow discourse, the IHE and diversity discourse and the immigration shortcut discourse, have remained more or less unchanged over the past 30 years. I myself first started to interrogate this topic in the late 1990s and then deepened it and broadened it to cover many contexts and settings in the Asia–Pacific and the Gulf regions, including various English-speaking Western countries (for example, Chowdhury and Phan, 2014; Liu and Phan, 2021; Phan, 2001, 2009, 2017; Phan and Li, 2014; Phan et al., 2022).This period has seen a great deal of critical scholarship that questions and counters many problematic discourses and practices regarding IHE and international students and investigates the inter-connectedness of IHE, neoliberalism, (neo)colonialism, the market, intercultural issues and the advocacy for EDI or similar values along the lines of EDI, especially in English-speaking Western HE institutions (see, for example, Bamberger and Morris, 2023; Brunner, 2022; Caruana and Ploner, 2010; Eade and Peacock, 2009; Enslin and Hedge, 2008; Gomes, 2021; Grimshaw, 2007; Hou and Pojar, 2020; Leask, 2001; Lomer, 2018; Mittelmeier et al., 2023; Montgomery, 2010; Ploner and Nada, 2020; Ryan and Slethaug, 2010; Shimomura, 2023; Tran and Nguyen, 2023; Zhai and Prescod, 2024). In this picture, international students have been projected, for a variety of reasons and rationales, as being an important target group needing to be embraced by both IHE and various versions of the EDI endeavor. In other words, this international student box is a must-tick box for HE these days if IHE and EDI are what they are pursuing. However, how and to what extent that box is ticked depends hugely on contexts and individual programs, institutions and countries. Being ticked can mean many things, including being embraced in every possible sense, being a token for a diversity show, being a scapegoat for policy debates and political blaming and shaming, etc.Despite so much critical scholarship out there, and despite the energetic advocacy of EDI, both as part of and alongside IHE, for over 30 years, the same stories and the same discourses about international students keep sustaining themselves, as I can see from the concerns voiced in this current SI led by Ferri and Tsouroufli. Personally, as someone researching and writing on IHE and international students, I feel disappointed that 10 years have passed since the publication of my major book (Desiring TESOL and International Education: The Abuse and Exploitation of the Market, 2014, co-authored with Raqib Chowdhury), in which we identified, interrogated, analyzed, discussed and theorized various discourses, phenomena, approaches and conceptual models regarding international students, very little has changed in the ways international students have been defined, projected and talked about in global, national and institutional policies, curriculum, practice, conceptualizations and university governance, as can be seen in academic texts, academic talks, in casual conversations among academics, in meetings at universities and in the media and public discourses.Take, for example, numerous articles and commentaries published in 2023 and 2024 on major outlets [1] such as the Guardian, University World News, Times Higher Education and Conversations, have collectively entertained the die-hard projections and discourses of international students, including international students as the cash cow, the cause of housing and social harmony crises, the reason behind declining academic standards and integrity, the robber of slots in programs and universities supposedly reserved for local students and the savior of Western HE, as their money creates jobs and helps sustain research activities and institutional operation, among other narratives. Also, governments after governments (for instance, Canada, Australia, and the UK) have announced their stricter policies regarding international students, such as putting a cap on the number of international students allowed to arrive each year, making it difficult or even impossible for international students to bring their families and reducing the length of post-graduation visa for international students, etc.Where may have things gone wrong? I do not have answers for this question right in this section, but if readers follow me to the end of this commentary, there may be some answers.One compelling rationale for IHE is the celebration of diversity in terms of the multicultural, multiracial, multilingual and multiethnic aspects of the student body. However, this taken-for-granted diversity has been challenged to a great extent when many decisions related to IHE are often made in the light of the neoliberal mentality and certain business models, as consistently demonstrated in much existing scholarship (Bamberger and Morris, 2023; Chowdhury and Phan, 2014; Mittelmeier et al., 2023; Sidhu, 2006; and as also pointed out in this SI). One consequence of this reality has been institutions’ over-reliance on international students who can afford to pay for their education. Such students, instead of being appreciated and thanked for, have been at the receiving end of many negative stereotypes and misinformed generalizations, especially when they come in large numbers to many universities in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.Notably, since 2012, the very student population that has constantly been under the spotlight is Chinese international students. All the discourses and projections mentioned above regarding the representation of international students apply to Chinese international students. In addition, with the increasing number of international students from China in English-speaking Western institutions, a new discourse has emerged through the high volume of media coverage emphasizing the over-enrollment of Chinese international students, particularly since 2012.2012–2014 witnessed Chinese international students becoming the target of negative projection from numerous media outlets across the English-speaking world (for example, see the articles published in Seattle Globalist, the State News, PBS, Monitor.icef, Dailyorange, The Guardian and Chronicle in 2012 and 2014) [2]. These media articles generated a high volume of comments from all pockets of the general public, from academics to local students, from international students to those who worked as tutors in programs with many international students, from local shopkeepers to landlords renting to international students and so on (unfortunately many of these comments are no longer available for access today). I have used these articles as materials for discussion activities with students and for reading sessions on IHE and IHE for several years, and I kept hard copies of the articles as well as the attached comments sections.The articles and the comments largely portrayed Chinese students as being “appalling” and “rich” but with “limited English” who were paying to buy Western degrees. Coupled with this discourse was the public’s critique of Western HE for having gone completely commercialized and for having enabled the “stupid rich Chinese” to come in high numbers and dominate in many important courses. Other concerns raised in these media articles and their associated comments included the decreasing presence of domestic students in postgraduate courses as well as the absence of local students in strategic and vital programs heavily subsidized by taxpayers such as engineering and new technologies across universities in North America, the UK and Australia. Warnings about potential national security risks related to Chinese spies disguising as Chinese international students and warnings about the growing dependency of Western countries and their HE operations on Chinese money and Chinese incompetent students were prevalent in the media those days.The COVID-19 pandemic gave Chinese international students an extremely hard time, and I do not have to repeat this, given the fresh memories of the event.The Chinese international student concern has never gone away from the general media and academic media outlets [3], in which Chinese international students are constantly in the public eye and under rather negative public scrutiny. The public, the HE sector and many politicians have expressed deep worries and concerns about Chinese international students dominating almost entirely many classrooms in Western universities, including from top-notch ones such as those in the Russell Group in the UK and in the Group of Eight in Australia to lower-tiered institutions. Several articles even reported Chinese language (Mandarin) being used almost exclusively in a business course offered by The University of Melbourne, leaving the one and only local Australian student feeling excluded, awkward and unable to participate in a supposedly English-medium home academic environment [4]. At the same time, also evident from these coverages, whenever there is a story or a report on academics being let go by their universities or about Western universities having to close programs and make redundant many positions, all eyes are on international (Chinese) students, hoping for them to come and pay again so jobs can be saved, programs can be rescued and universities can function and maintain their business and stay competitive locally and globally. How ironic is this whole thing!This intensifying phenomenon of the over-enrollment of Chinese international students in many English-speaking Western universities has transformed (and could transform further if continued) the landscape of HE and shaken the rather stable romantic rationale for internationalization, whereby it is supposed to expose students and staff to diversity of all forms and to enjoy interacting with “international” individuals. Isn’t it way overdue to reconceptualize diversity in education and IHE as well as its associated pedagogies? It is high time that we revisit what we mean by diversity and what version of diversity we are promoting in HE.In the next section, I, hence, would like to pinpoint several pressing questions and issues for concrete actions regarding teaching, learning and pedagogy, given this increasingly important phenomenon in HE that many of us are experiencing in the classroom.While there seems to be no end to the many controversies and varying debates underlying the media coverage of Chinese international students, several important questions have remained absent from the IHE and EDI agendas that I am aware of. Let’s face it: if it was true that the reality does not reflect the projected and desirable diversity promoted by IHE and EDI, then what?First, “What has been done to ensure that Chinese international students are given optimal curricular and pedagogical consideration as well as classroom experience when they are the majority in many classrooms?”When an increasing number of courses, programs and majors are enrolled in, mainly by students from China, according to all the figures and reports referred to in the links provided in the footnote, these settings have largely become “less diverse” and “rather homogenous,” at least from the outset, with many classes having up to nearly 100% of Chinese students from mainland China. In this emerging “by default” environment, teaching to and learning with a seemingly homogeneous group coming from China becomes the norm and demands serious attention from multiple stakeholders and requires adjustments and rethinking from policy to curriculum and classroom practice, pedagogy and research.At the end of the day, diversity must cater to the majority population, making up a seeming homogeneity within diversity as well. This ought to be the spirit and principle of EDI and IHE.Then, the next interrelated questions are:While those interested in these questions may initiate some way to explore them, or to look elsewhere for an answer, there are some rather “old” but very fresh resources that I would like to recommend: the Eade and Peacock (2009) study and the Caruana and Ploner (2010) report on internationalization, diversity and equality.I am not sure if these materials have made their way to many stakeholders in HE in the UK, Australia and beyond. In the same vein, I am not sure if many scholars and those working at universities have paid sufficient attention to and take seriously the many thoughtful points, analyses and recommendations specified in these two documents. These highly important, thoroughly written, clearly communicated and insightful references are still extremely relevant in today’s conversations of IHE and EDI in global HE.I personally find these resources valuable and have used them in my teaching as examples to lay out many critical issues with regards to various stakeholders in IHE, to put in context why internationalization, diversity and equality are closely intertwined and to engage students in all these aspects and invite them to think and relate to policy, pedagogy, research, classroom practice and social engagement.And now, in the last section below, one important thing I would like to do is to invite readers to engage seriously and sincerely with our own complicity where it may exist regarding international students.The Begging Poem was written out of a conversation (following many other conversations) I had with my colleague (Dat Bao) on international students in Australia when both of us were teaching there. We were working at one of the most internationalized and internationalizing universities domestically and perhaps globally. The university always championed itself for having attracted the largest number of international students for many years. Since the late 1990s, Australia has been aggressive and fast-rising as a leader driving the commercialization of HE through internationalization, heavily relying on international students for national and institutional revenues.Dat Bao and I often interacted with international students, and we knew of many unpleasant experiences that they underwent. They often shared with us that they were not well regarded and were often projected as a group that came in large numbers and paid big and fat money. From our numerous interactions with international students for many years, we learnt that many of them were aware of endless conversations about their tuitions being used to substitute and sustain universities’ research activities and teaching staff’s salaries and to cover universities’ high operational costs. Moreover, many of them had expressed concerns about the rather disappointing quality of their courses and programs (for instance, see Chowdhury and Phan, 2014).The Begging Poem came naturally to us, as we both felt sympathetic with the international student cohorts we knew then. Perhaps, as those advocating for better equity, diversity and inclusion in HE, isn’t it long overdue that each of us reflect on our complicity in sustaining double standards in this HE enterprise? On the one hand, we (or many of us) benefit from having international students on campuses, and we also depend on international students to fulfill our needs and professional enrichment. But, isn’t it also true that, on the other hand, we knowingly or unknowingly contribute rather generously to keeping alive many of the stereotypes about international students (by, for example, complaining about having to teach international students with low English proficiencies or having to pass international students under universities’ pressures so that they will keep coming, or not knowing what to do or losing interest with seemingly homogenous classrooms of international students coming from one country, etc.)?Confronting these double standards requires actions, and we can always start from our own classrooms where we at least have more control over how we teach, how we interact and engage students, what materials to use, how assessment can be done, how to facilitate their learning, how to help and where to seek support if students have linguistic difficulties or experience difficulties in academic and cross-cultural adjustments, etc. I say all these not from a bubble or an echo chamber, but from my own experience teaching and working with students from many different countries for about 25 years. Changes can always start from the bottom up, and it’s our own classrooms that can make a difference.And perhaps, we may also want to ask how complicity might be turned to teaching and learning opportunities for both lecturers and students.At this point, I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to Oduwaye et al. of articles published in of and over years on international students. that the for international students UK, Australia, and the most articles about international it is more that also no or in the of international students in I how many of us in HE can afford to take in what we do when the same problematic discourses and about international students keep after the same by international students also unchanged after the end of this commentary, I hope my scattered thoughts make some and that the EDI spirit has been in the way the commentary is with diverse genres, equitable genres and inclusive genres all in

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