Internationalization is the anchoring buzzword of the neoliberal university in search of accelerated and ever-expanding forms of profiteering.
The neocolonial expansion of the neoliberal university is constituted in the ongoing search for new markets.
These new markets offer the revenue streams that hold up the contemporary neoliberal university.
Amidst the large-scale and widespread public defunding of public higher education, the turn to privatization of the university is upheld by international markets. Internationalization as a strategy for the education sector is the backbone that ensures the survival of the sector amidst the continuing assaults by cascading neoliberal reforms.
International students often pay two to seven times the fees paid by domestic students, ensuring the cash flow of the university.
Simultaneously, universities have turned to establish international campuses to build financial models of revenue generation. The model here is one of the universities, largely located in the West, bringing their education programs and brands to international spaces, generating new revenue streams.
Codified into rankings schemes, internationalization as a criterion for measurement further propels the aggressive quest for new markets. Metrics of internationalization, alongside the metrics of private-public partnerships, drive the further neo-liberalization of universities.
Elsewhere I have argued that the turn to internationalization of education in the neoliberal epoch reproduces the whiteness of education. It serves as a neocolonial tool, promising to lift the brown/black/coloured masses of the Global South with the gift of Western education. Much like the infrastructure of colonialism, underlying the internationalization is deep-seated racism of whiteness, crafted from the ideology of "Lifting the burden of the soul" and "giving the gift of Western enlightenment."
The architecture of colonialism underlying education communicative inverts the extractive logics of internationalization as expansion by framing it as bringing the gift of Western white education to international spaces.
Even as colonial discourse upholds its altruism, it erases the exploitative practices that shape it.
Consider for instance the fundamental absence of basic capacities of care and nurturing for international students when they are brought in. Consider similarly the communicative inversions that project prospects of mobility to international students, often erasing the actuality of struggles, precarity and uncertainty.
Consider similarly the infrastructure of whiteness on university campuses that approaches international students from racist narratives that undermine their cognitive and communicative capacities, and accuse them of theft.
The upholding of English as the basis of learning is deployed through stereotypes to label international students, often serving as the very site for the performance of racist behaviors. When pointed out the racist nature of such labeling, devoid of empiricism, whiteness turns to its defensive strategies, denying its racist behaviors.
Consider similarly the narratives of plagiarism that are often thrown around by white academics targeting international students, devoid of empiricism. Consider this in the backdrop of adequate infrastructures for pedagogy that offer guidance on the norms of plagiarism, themselves anchored in whiteness. The whiteness of the narratives of plagiarism fundamentally invert communicatively the theft of Indigenous and local knowledge from spaces of the global south that forms the basis of the enlightenment infrastructure of whiteness. The whiteness of the narratives of plagiarism fundamentally erases the historic and ongoing theft of Indigenous land, DNA, cultures, and knowledge across the global south that propels whiteness.
In the worse of the excesses of internationalization, international students find themselves hjving been trafficked, stuck in bonded situations without rights after having taken out debts to go abroad.
Internationalization, without the creation of adequate infrastructures of care and nurturing, is reflective of the cruelty of the neoliberal university.