Introduction

Higher education (HE) is influenced by globalization in various ways, and efforts to internationalize this sector have been the focus of numerous policy initiatives, research studies, curricular and programmatic developments, and philosophical discussions. A particularly marked manifestation of this broad trend—both in practice and in scholarly literature—is the cross-border movement of students. On a worldwide basis, the number of students who study at higher education institutions (HEIs) outside their home countries is currently approaching three million and is projected to reach as many as eight million by 2025 (Guruz 2011). This chapter presents a new angle of analysis on the phenomenon of rapidly increasing student mobility by applying the lenses of “knowledge diplomacy” (Knight 2015) and “worldview diversity education” (Ilisko 2017; Mayhew et al. 2014). In particular, this chapter will discuss the potential and the responsibility of HE, through internationalization efforts, to promote understanding of differences in worldview and to temper the recent resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia we are witnessing across the globe.

In the discourse around the internationalization of HE, the concepts soft power and global market competitiveness have become predominant reasons for pursuing increased student mobility (Knight 2015), where “soft power” refers to the use of HE to promote a country’s agenda internationally “through attraction rather than coercion” (Nye 2004, p. x). However, alternative discourses are now re-emerging that analyze the potential for an internationalized HE sector (in general) and international student mobility (in particular) to serve as a form of knowledge diplomacy and to develop a new generation with broader, more inclusive worldviews (Knight 2015; Yonezawa et al. 2014). In other words, instead of examining the internationalization of HE for its self-serving potential (in terms of gaining global dominance), some scholars are choosing to consider how it can be used as a force for increased global harmony.

Furthermore, a parallel conversation among HE scholars and policy makers around the world discusses the need for education to serve as a tool to “enhance mutual understanding among different cultures and religions” (ASEAN Plus Three 2007, Section D, 5.2). As a response to the increasing displays of violent religious extremism and rising inter-religious tensions worldwide, many government bodies—and, subsequently, university faculty and administrators—have, in recent years, made more overt efforts to incorporate worldview diversity education as an essential component of their educational initiatives (Halsall and Roebben 2006). Within this discourse, exposure to, and education about, religious diversity and cultural diversity (also known, in combination, as worldview diversity) are deemed necessary for students not only to become more effective global citizens, but also more respectful and compassionate people that will help create sustainable peace globally (Ilisko 2017).

In combining these similar, yet to-this-point distinct, bodies of literature, this chapter seeks to accomplish a number of tasks. Specifically, it seeks to: (a) describe the intersections of HE internationalization, cross-border student mobility, knowledge diplomacy, and worldview diversity education; (b) theorize ways forward for HE globally that reflect the potential for knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education in an internationalized HE sector; and (c) suggest future areas of research and scholarship that can help to build more synergy between these two associated discourses and establish a stronger understanding of the way HE internationalization can be used as a means for promoting global peace. To be clear, both knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education are fairly new concepts within the field of international HE. This chapter, then, is an attempt to contribute to the development of these concepts and their application for the study and practice of higher education.

The Global Higher Education Market

In this era of globalization, we have seen the emergence of a global HE market, where students are moving at increasing rates across boarders in the pursuit of HE. To compete in this market, many universities are pursing partnerships with institutions in other countries, especially those within their geographic regions (e.g., North America, Europe, and Asia). Partnerships at the national level, both globally and regionally, are also increasing, as countries seek to facilitate the cross-border movement of students and researchers. An example of this can be found in Europe with the Bologna Declaration of 1999—a joint declaration signed by the 29 European ministers in charge of HE—which launched a series of reforms (called the Bologna Process) aimed at the harmonization of HE in Europe. In concrete terms, the Bologna Process has so far resulted in the Europe-wide adoption of a credit conversion system, a comparable degree system (a three-cycle structure composed of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate programs), and the Diploma Supplement (a document attached to HE diplomas to increase international transparency), among other ways in which educational structures across the countries involved have been tuned into each other (Yonezawa et al. 2014). Furthermore, a European framework of qualification has been developed to explicitly indicate the levels of knowledge, skills, and competences expected to acquire specific qualifications. As a result of the Bologna Process, Europe now has an official European Higher Education Area, 1 consisting of 48 countries, all of which are continuously and collaboratively working toward making their HE systems more compatible for the sake of easier student and researcher mobility.

While Europe is typically seen as the pioneering region with regard to this type of initiative, other regions of the world are also pursuing international collaboration with similar goals in mind. The Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), together with China, Korea, and Japan (collectively known as ASEAN Plus Three), for instance, has seen growing inter-university alliances and the development of an official inter-governmental body to support students wishing to study abroad within the region. In addition to exchange programs based on academic exchange agreements between individual universities, the ministers of education in ASEAN Plus Three formally established a working group in 2012 to formulate guidelines for the promotion of quality-assured student exchange within the region. 2 Since 2000, the number of students studying abroad within ASEAN Plus Three has been rapidly increasing, whereas the number of students from these countries studying in English-speaking countries (which was previously the preference) has leveled off (Kitamura 2014). The working group, then, helps to accommodate this trend and also to facilitate continued acceleration in this direction.

Other manifestations of the global HE market include the emergence of international branch campuses, designed to give students an international experience without having to leave their home country, or without having to travel as far. Examples include the Malaysia campus of Australia’s Monash University, the Rwanda campus of the USA’s Carnegie Mellon University, and the United Arab Emirates campus of the UK’s University of Exeter. Even further, some institutions are teaming up to start joint degree programs—such as the joint master’s degree in transcultural counseling offered by the University of Maryland (USA) and the University of Malta—or open joint campuses—such as Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college in Singapore resulting from a collaboration between Yale University (USA) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Such initiatives have rendered the opportunity to, and options for, study abroad more accessible to those students who may hesitate to leave their countries or regions to study for financial or sociocultural reasons.

These initiatives, while cooperative and collaborative in some respects, are also keenly competitive in that they seek to provide a highly desired good (an international HE experience) in a way that is most attractive and easily accessible to potential students. Furthermore, as funding structures and programmatic demands in HE shift—such as the cases of the USA, UK, and Australia (among others) where administrators and staff are asked to do more with less—many institutions are increasing their efforts to recruit international students as a means of competing for the income generated by tuition and fees (Guruz 2011). Indeed, globalization has, in many ways, come hand-in-hand with a rise in the influence of market forces on the direction of the agenda in the HE sector.

Of course, there are numerous manifestations or indicators of internationalization in HE, including internationalizing curriculum or the development of international ranking systems. However, the topic of student mobility dominates the scholarly discourse on HE internationalization and also represents the vast majority of publicly available data meant to demonstrate and measure internationalization in HE (Williams et al. 2017). In other words, student mobility has become a primary issue through which educators, researchers, and policy makers seek to understand and analyze the existence, impact, and potential of an internationalized HE sector. To this point, however, student mobility has largely been thought of in terms of its potential to contribute to attaining soft power in the knowledge economy, as the following section describes.

Soft Power and the Knowledge Economy

Within the context of globalization (generally) and a global HE market (specifically), many governments are racing against one another to increase their academic activities, research, and development in order to gain supremacy in the creation, acquisition, and transmission of knowledge. In many cases, this is because they understand scientific research and intellectual output as important pillars of their foreign policy. As Nye (2004, 2008, 2011) explains, an essential factor in a country’s pursuit of political and economic supremacy is its success in the international competition for knowledge production, a concept he calls soft power. Different from hard power (the use of coercion or payment to obtain a desired outcome), soft power relies on the use of attraction, or “the ability to influence the preferences of others” (Nye 2008, p. 95). Soft power is utilized by exporting cultures, ideas, and values in ways that “make others want what you want” (Nye 2008, p. 94), including influencing what students learn, experience, and are exposed to through various educational spaces and initiatives. In this way, students who leave home to pursue HE are often understood as facilitators of cultural export. Thus, as the number of students who do this accelerates and gains more attention, these individuals play increasingly important roles as cultural diplomats in the race to shape the production of knowledge and values worldwide. Indeed, the concept has been adopted with great enthusiasm in the realm of HE globally, both as a justification for continued internationalization and as an argument for increased government investment in HE (Akyea 2016).

At the individual level, studying abroad is typically marketed to students as an opportunity for them to boost their chances of getting a job, a higher salary, or acceptance to graduate school. 3 Since studying abroad increases intercultural communication skills—a valuable attribute in an increasingly globalized and ever-changing economy—a student’s experience studying abroad does have the very real potential to make them more highly competitive in the job market (Williams 2005). Furthermore, as it positions these individuals ahead of their counterparts who do not study abroad, it can even lead to a greater likelihood of them assuming higher-level positions in political, economic, cultural, and other fields in the future. This represents yet another way that students who study abroad are valuable agents of soft power in the knowledge economy. When countries recruit international students to study at their institutions, not only are they gaining the financial resources that come with international tuition and fee rates, they are also given the opportunity to influence the opinions, perspectives, and desires of those students who, upon return to their home country, can further influence others (Nye 2008).

Thus, as students who study abroad—both students who leave a country to study elsewhere and students from around the world who come to study in that country—have the potential to be helpful to a country’s international agenda, the actors of HE all over the world are thinking strategically about how their human and intellectual resources can be put to optimal use; in other words, how their participation in the global HE market can most optimally impact their power and position on the world stage (Yonezawa et al. 2014). By facilitating the increase of students who study abroad, and also recruiting larger numbers of international students to study in their countries, governments can strengthen their role in the global market in the pursuit of soft power—and many of them are doing just that. It is precisely this reasoning that has dominated the discourse about the phenomenon of student mobility, one that prioritizes self-serving interests of a government or individual students in the context of a soft power competition in the global knowledge economy (Knight 2014b).

Alternatives to the Power Paradigm

Nye (2008) suggests that those who “deny the importance of soft power are like people who do not understand the power of seduction” (p. 96). It is not our intention to refute the importance or reality of soft power in the global HE market, or in international politics generally. Rather, we want to present an alternative means of analyzing the phenomenon of student mobility in an internationalized HE sector in order to expand the conversation about its potential impacts on our students, our societies, and the world as a whole. There are two concepts we think are particularly promising in their ability to frame this discourse in a way that sheds new light on the pursuit of increased student mobility: knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education .

Knowledge Diplomacy

The concept of knowledge diplomacy has been discussed since the 1980s, mainly by specialists in international political science and international relations (such as Ryan 1988). However, most of these discussions have focused primarily on international negotiations and competition related to intellectual property rights (patent rights, copyrights, and trademark rights). It is only recently that knowledge diplomacy has come to be examined in a manner reflecting the broad sense of the word knowledge , making the concept one that can be understood as an alternative to the power paradigm.

Knight (2015), explains that “The role of international higher education in international relations has traditionally been seen through the lens of cultural diplomacy” (p. 1), whereby student and faculty exchange led to cross-cultural learning of language, arts, sport, food, and literature, among other things typically understood as “cultural.” However, as globalization and market forces pose stronger and stronger influences on the HE sector, and as international HE takes on new dimensions (such as branch and joint campuses, collaborative policy declarations, regional and global expert networks), the discourse around international HE has shifted to a power paradigm. Now, administrators and policy makers are “increasingly concerned with justifying international HE’s contribution to the economic development” and future political power of a country (Knight 2015, p. 2)—as described by Nye’s (2004, 2008, 2011) soft power framework. Despite this shift in thinking, student mobility remains the primary focus of analysis and investigation when it comes to measuring and understanding international HE. Knight (2014a, b, 2015) argues, as do we, that a broader and less self-serving approach to thinking about international HE is needed, one that can be described by the concept of knowledge diplomacy.

Unlike knowledge diplomacy in the way that Ryan (1988) and other scholars of international political science use the term, and unlike “cultural diplomacy” which is usually understood as encompassing only traditional elements of culture (such as language, music, or architecture), the way we present knowledge diplomacy here describes a holistic sharing of knowledge in all fields, including science, technology, math, public health, and other fields not typically included in the descriptor “culture.” It also describes an approach to international education that pursues more than just student mobility initiatives; one that includes collaboration across communities, various cultural/ethnic/tribal identity groups, institutions, and governments (among other stakeholders) to create research centers, global information sharing networks, and other forms of innovative knowledge creation. If we consider the type of problems we face as a global community (rising levels of xenophobic nationalism and violent extremism, various forms of environmental degradation, ongoing slavery and gender-based violence, to name a few), we know that our best chance for solving these problems is to put our heads together; to find mutually beneficial forms of collaboration and innovation, that lead to mutually beneficial outcomes.

Importantly, approaching our thinking about international HE from a knowledge diplomacy framework also necessitates that we recognize, and work to prevent or rectify, power imbalances that exist in the knowledge economy (generally) and international HE partnerships (specifically). To be sure, when HE and knowledge production are seen through the lens of soft power, imbalances in outcomes and benefits (favoring more powerful regions, countries, institutions, and/or people) result. To start from the framework of knowledge diplomacy can help shed light on potential imbalances and prepare us to develop truly collaborative initiatives, policies, and research projects, where benefits and solutions are shared fairly among all participants, especially those most in need.

To offer an example of what this might look like, we would like to describe the Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS). 4 Since 2008, SATREPS has been facilitating collaboration between Japanese researchers and researchers from developing countries around the world to address concerns related to environmental sustainability, natural disasters, or public health. Funded by the Japanese government, its aims are to connect Japanese researchers with those working on similar issues around the world, to give both Japanese researchers and those in partner countries experience working with people from a different culture and context, and to provide Japanese researchers with more exposure to how their phenomena of interest manifest on-the-ground elsewhere in the world. To this point, SATREPS has funded over 130 projects in 50 countries including: (1) the development of an improved metal mining system in Serbia that is more friendly to the environment and to the health of the region’s residents, (2) marine research in Palau aimed at creating an international standard that guides economic development so as not to damage coral reefs and other island ecosystems, and (3) a community-based initiative in Cameroon that promotes cassava farming as both an economically sustainable livelihood for locals and a more environmentally sustainable alternative to current deforestation practices in the area. We do not mean to suggest that SATREPS is in some way flawless or a gold standard by which to judge all other international collaborations. Indeed, there are at least some self-interests at play here, since Japanese researchers do benefit from these experiences. However, that the funding goes toward projects that create real-life solutions to real-life problems plaguing communities in other countries, and that local researchers necessarily work as equal members of the research team, demonstrates the mutuality of benefits enjoyed by all parties through this program. In that way, SATREPS provides an example of the kind of HE internationalization initiative that embraces a knowledge diplomacy approach: It facilitates collaboration in knowledge development across borders, cultures, and regions; it addresses issues and problems that have global implications; it disseminates research outcomes to communities and people beyond HEIs alone; and it provides opportunities for researchers and students in HE to interact with and learn from people from other backgrounds and worldviews.

Worldview Diversity Education

The term “worldview diversity education” is also somewhat new in the area of international HE, but likewise serves as a promising framework to think differently about the role and potential of a globalized HE sector. Some use the terms interfaith, intercultural, or inter-religious education (Engebretson et al. 2010; Wimberley 2003) to describe this notion, that education needs to be purposeful and proactive about exposing students to different ways of thinking, knowing, and believing in order to create acceptance and harmony across these lines of difference. Others call it peace education to highlight the peace-seeking goal of these educational initiatives (Yablon 2007). Still others choose to use “education for global citizenship” as the label for the type of education that promotes awareness and appreciation of cultural and religious diversity, as a means of preparing students to be thoughtful and effective members of an interconnected global society (Schattle 2008). We prefer “worldview diversity education” since it encompasses all of these ideas: that cultural and religious differences should be shared, discussed, embraced, and valued; that our cultural and religious socialization shapes our worldviews in ways that we may not even realize or understand, but that learning about others can help facilitate critical self-reflection; and that developing an appreciation for worldview diversity can help make us more peace-seeking, culturally sensitive, and globally minded individuals. Moreover, it recognizes that all people can and should learn from purposeful interaction with those from other worldviews, not just those from specific religious backgrounds or those who choose to affiliate themselves with a religious group (in other words, “non-religious” people also benefit from examining the way religious socialization has shaped their and others’ worldviews).

To this point, “worldview diversity education” has been primarily used in the context of US HE in discourse around building students’ religious literacy as a response to increasing religious diversity and tension throughout the country (Mayhew et al. 2014). However, it has begun to make its way into literature elsewhere in the world as well (Ilisko 2017; Miedema and Bertram-Troost 2015), since it serves as a helpful concept for encouraging increasingly “secular” people and societies to join conversations about the need to proactively teach about cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, the growth in religious diversity and tension the USA is currently experiencing is also a global phenomenon, and many governments and educators are thinking carefully about how to address this in a way that can lead to greater peace and harmony—both in their own societies and around the world. In other words, beyond the desire to gain power in the knowledge economy, there is a growing recognition in the international HE community that combatting religious extremism and xenophobic nationalism worldwide will require intentional efforts to build mutual understanding of different perspectives, cultures, beliefs, traditions, and worldviews. In many cases, this is an explicit desired outcome of a country’s or region’s pursuit of increased student mobility in HE (ASEAN Plus Three 2007; Wimberley 2003).

One thing that research on worldview diversity education shows, related to HE internationalization, is that increased student mobility alone is not going to help us achieve this goal. Simply placing diverse students in the same space (for instance, a university campus, a classroom, or a dormitory) is not sufficient to achieve intercultural understanding or appreciation, and may even have the opposite effect (Brown 2009; Leask 2009; Yeakley 2011). Reduction of conflict, tension, prejudice, or ignorance between those with different worldviews requires carefully structured and facilitated interaction (Pettigrew 1998; Sorensen et al. 2009). So, adopting a framework of worldview diversity for our HE internationalization efforts necessarily means that we have to be more purposeful and proactive in coordinating opportunities for students who study abroad to engage both with each other (that is, international students from other countries) and local students from their host country. Moreover, these interactions need to include overt conversations about their cultural, religious, and worldview differences. Bringing diverse students together for an event that does not overtly address their differences may lead some students to develop a sense of commonality with others, but, it can also lead to continued ignorance and misunderstanding or, worse, a decreased sense of trust or interest in learning about others—especially for those students from marginalized groups (Edwards 2016). To encourage more positive outcomes and a more genuine understanding of worldview differences, programming and pedagogy need to be more explicit about their intent.

An example of this type of programming can be found at a number of universities in the USA, operating from the critical social justice model of Intergroup Dialogue (Zúñiga et al. 2007). While the model applies primarily to courses and student programs aiming to teach about differences in race and gender, some institutions also use it to facilitate courses about differences in worldview stemming from religious identity, national origin, or immigration status. The University of Michigan, for instance, offers a course specifically designed to bring together students who are US citizens with international students to discuss their unique experiences and worldviews as members of those groups. 5 Their model requires that students are recruited and screened in order to ensure well-balanced diversity among participants. It also requires that, through the course, students examine differences, power dynamics, and marginalized perspectives as they pertain to the topic of the course, as a means of forcing the dialogue beyond a superficial exchange of stories and pleasantries. Several other US institutions offer courses using this model to facilitate structured interaction between students from different national, religious, and cultural backgrounds (the University of Maryland, New York University, and the University of Washington to name a few), and the list is growing as the model gains attention. Indeed, there are still improvements that could be made to the Intergroup Dialogue model, and sometimes these classes do not always go exactly as planned (Edwards 2016). Nevertheless, research has shown that participation in these courses leads to an increased awareness of other worldviews and ability to see other perspectives, improved intergroup relationships and mutual understanding, and a stronger desire and ability to promote worldview diversity awareness to others in their lives (Gurin-Sands et al. 2012). As such, there are important lessons that the international HE community can learn from this approach in attempting to bridge differences in worldview and build global harmony.

Theorizing Ways Forward for Practice, Policy, and Research in International Higher Education

As frameworks for thinking about the potential and the responsibility of HE in a globalized world, knowledge diplomacy stresses that knowledge production should be collaborative and communally beneficial, and worldview diversity education highlights the need for religious and cultural differences to be overtly addressed in order for authentic intergroup understanding to occur. Both of them also encourage attention to power dynamics that impact personal, institutional, systemic, and international relationships and the programs, policies, or other educational initiatives that result from those relationships. When taken together, we can understand that theorizing ways forward for international HE necessitates recognition that: (1) Many of the most dire problems we face are not constrained by political borders, and thus, solutions to these problems should be sought out through international collaboration; (2) thinking of international HE as a tool for political supremacy within a global knowledge economy restricts our ability to engage in knowledge production or share valuable information with the genuine intention of solving global crises; (3) positive intercultural and inter-religious interactions and communication skills can strengthen our capacity for collaborative knowledge production; (4) understanding and appreciating worldview diversity is difficult to do without explicitly examining religious and cultural differences or intentionally confronting hegemony and marginalization along these lines; and (5) incorporating worldview diversity education in our HE internationalization efforts, while also developing internationalization policies and programs that advance knowledge diplomacy, can help train new generations of government, private sector, and civil society leaders to be more solution-oriented, globally minded, peace-seeking, culturally sensitive, and concerned about the well-being of others.

What might an international HE agenda look like if the frameworks of knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education were more widely adopted? What kinds of research do we need to pursue in order to make this vision more possible? Of course, answering these questions requires multiple layers of consideration, ranging from practice to policy to research. To that end, we offer some recommendations for how international HE, as a field, can move forward when it comes to pedagogy and student programming at the classroom and institutional level, policy initiatives at institutional and national levels, and research and scholarly discourse for both educators and policy makers.

Regarding student mobility, and the curricular and programmatic initiatives surrounding international students on college campuses, the knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education frameworks highlight the need to put more effort into cultivating the sharing of knowledge and worldviews between diverse students. Beyond facilitating increased numbers of students who leave their home countries for HE, we need to pay more attention to the experiences those students (and their local peers) are having throughout the course of their studies—experiences both in and out of the classroom. More specifically, we need to be more overt about identifying and addressing any negative experiences students are having. For instance, we know that, in many cases, international students find it difficult to build relationships with local students, which can lead them to feel negatively about their HE experience, their host country, and the local people or culture (Brown 2009). We also know that religious and cultural differences can exacerbate feelings of separateness or exclusion international students experience in a new country (Zhang and Brunton 2007). So, when designing curriculum, pedagogy, research opportunities, support programs, meal services, entertainment, and any other student-related initiatives, purposefully incorporating opportunities to critically analyze the diversity of knowledge and worldviews present among the group can help address the “elephant in the room” (so to speak) and make all students feel acknowledged and appreciated. In addition to entire courses dedicated to intergroup dialogue (as described previously), faculty in all subject areas should give students the opportunity to discuss how their unique cultures and perspectives relate to interpretation and experience of the course’s content, assignments, and activities. Moreover, all university staff that have contact with students (faculty, advisors, support personnel) should be proactive in recognizing when there are instances of isolation or self-segregation among culturally, nationally, or religiously diverse students, and facilitate means through which those barriers can be overcome.

Of course, the details of these actions will/should vary according to the specific contexts in which they occur. To assist with our learning about what kinds of approaches work (or do not), in what ways, and for what type of students or institutions, we need additional research about strategies that are already in place. Indeed, there is some existing literature reporting on such initiatives (Campbell 2012; Leask 2009), but many more examples are needed, both positive and negative, and in a wider range of contexts, in order to further enrich our discourse about how to best enable knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education to occur in HE around the world. Moreover, asking faculty and staff to take this kind of action necessarily means that they should be offered training and guidance in how to do so. Developing this kind of skill in all university personnel can help promote the sharing of knowledge and worldviews in more fields, which is valuable for building the capacity of these students to co-produce knowledge with diverse peers through research and development later on in their studies and careers. Additional research on faculty and staff training strategies is also needed; again, in a broad range of cultural, economic, and institutional contexts.

On a larger scale, when it comes to policies related to institutional partnerships, national initiatives, or regional networks in international HE, the frameworks of knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education help us see that political power and revenue income should not be our priority. Instead, we should be thinking about how we can solve the crises we collectively face by creating opportunities to learn from each other and produce new knowledge together. To start, perhaps this means that we need to start relying on different indicators to track our progress and/or success in international HE. Simply tracking the number of students who study abroad, for instance, or an institution’s position on international rankings, does not tell us how much we are actually doing to reduce intercultural conflict or increase our knowledge sharing potential. Documenting internationalization of HE in terms of students’ increased intercultural competencies or globally minded critical thinking skills are much more appropriate determinants of how internationalized our HE has become. Likewise, keeping track of how often our collaborative research initiatives produce outcomes that all participants feel they have benefited from, or the extent to which international partnerships produce greater understanding of respective parties’ cultures and conditions would also give us a better sense of the success of HE internationalization from the knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity paradigms. Creating, and consistently recording, different indicators of internationalization in HE may eventually help provide the kind of data that many administrators, policy makers, and funders want to see when making decisions about the design and implementation of international programs and partnerships.

Ideally, this kind of data would help us to better understand the ways our systems, partnerships, and policies do or do not contribute to knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education. With that information, we may be able to advance national or regional guidelines regarding student and researcher mobility that are more likely to produce individuals with improved intercultural communication skills and greater compassion for others. Or, we could draw on the data to more effectively design joint campuses or degree programs so as to encourage fair and just distribution of opportunities and benefits across all communities involved. Perhaps we would even have stronger arguments for why increased funding or staffing is needed for the various offices and departments responsible for coordinating internationalization efforts. All of these would go a long way to humanize international education; to help us think more about the human potential and effects of our initiatives, rather than simply about money and power.

Indeed, much of these ideas rely heavily on a nation’s ability to develop and fund the kind of research and programming needed for a true humanization of international HE. Wealthy and developed countries must ask themselves: Who is responsible for and who benefits from improving HE in this way? Ultimately, since HE is one of the primary means of training a society’s future leaders, the benefit has the potential to be shared among the populous, and thus, it seems quite natural that a substantial portion of the financial burden would be expected from the public sector (Maruyama 2007). However, when it comes to poor and developing countries, many of whom may be in the early stages of developing their HE systems, different considerations often need to be made. Of particular interest in this discussion may be the way that aid is provided in the realm of HE in developing countries through international alliances and cooperation. Assistance of this sort (consisting of tax revenues in developed countries) has typically come either in the form of funding for joint research projects/institutes or as funding for various development initiatives (Kaneko et al. 2002). In many cases, the former has actually been extremely problematic, since individuals who are rather well off in their domestic context usually end up reaping the benefits, leaving out the truly socially and economically vulnerable. Development assistance, on the other hand, has historically consisted of outsiders from foreign researchers/universities dictating what and how to develop, without adequate consideration of local knowledge or perspectives. An alternative option, one that aligns with the knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity frameworks, lies somewhere in the middle: aid in the form of funding for research that specifically targets development projects where local and foreign researchers work together as equal partners. To be sure, this model has begun to make its way into the international HE sector, exemplified by the SATREPS program described previously. It is our hope that this model of intellectual development cooperation becomes more widely utilized, and that research into the advantages and challenges of working with this model is further pursued.

Conclusion

The globalization of HE is a phenomenon that is well underway and unlikely to reverse. As our knowledge-based societies expand beyond their national borders, students travel in search of alternative educational opportunities. In response, universities offer various programs, trying to attract as many students as possible. Governments also devise policy measures that support universities and individual students from the standpoint of building national power or for the purpose of realizing a culturally enriched society. In this process, as symbolized by the concept of knowledge diplomacy, the principle of competition is at work between countries that want to develop or attract quality human resources. At the same time, globalization has catapulted religious and cultural intolerance, xenophobic nationalism, and violent acts of extremism to global scales. This has caused governments to turn to HE for assistance in their efforts to reverse these dangerous trends. In these ways, the international HE sector is implicated in many of the most fundamental changes in the international socio-economic environment.

Phenomena such as the globalization of universities and the gathering of students from various religious and cultural backgrounds present an opportunity to cultivate future actors of knowledge diplomacy and worldview diversity education. However, little demonstrative research has been conducted from these perspectives. It is essential that researchers and practitioners interested in the globalization of HE continue to further examine these trends, and develop our knowledge base around how to pursue programs and policies that align with these frameworks. If international HE can develop students’ capacities to value one another’s perspectives, it is well positioned to contribute positively to the movements countering a wide range of global crises, not the least of which is the growing misunderstanding and intolerance between people who hold differing worldviews. Conversely, if we continue to understand international HE as simply a tool in the global power game, we are hindering our potential as a human race to create a sustainable future for the next generations.

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ehea.info/ (retrieved May 15, 2018).

  2. 2.

    http://www.mext.go.jo/b_menu/houdou/25/10/1340245.htm (in Japanese) (retrieved May 15, 2018).

  3. 3.

    https://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/benefits (retrieved May 15, 2018).

  4. 4.

    https://www.jst.go.jp/global/english/about.html (retrieved May 15, 2018).

  5. 5.

    https://igr.umich.edu/article/intergroup-dialogues (retrieved May 15, 2018).