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What is the responsibility of Western universities to international students: Manaakitanga and the spirit of kindness

(Photo credit: Image taken from Manaakitanga – more than just hospitality - March 2021 - OnMAS)


Manaakitanga, a core Māori value, invites us to consider the ways in which respect, kindness, and collective responsibility shape how we interact with others. 

In the context of how universities engage with international students, manaakitanga invites us to consider carefully our commitments to offering security, safety, and kindness to the many international students that come to study with us.

As I have been observing with horror the mistreatment of international students in the US, the targeting of international students, the deployment of visa processes to silence and harass them, and the uses of techniques of migration-related violence to create a chilling climate, I am struck by how quickly universities in the US, many of them elite universities, have abandoned international students.

As an American Indian who has benefitted from the scholarships and support infrastructures for international students, I am struck by the number of Indian students who have been targeted. These students reflect some of the best elements of the Indian education system. They have, through their merit, secured pathways into US universities, with exceptional track records. 

They are in many ways the best of the best, demonstrating the sort of excellence that is a hallmark of the education system that developed in postcolonial India, with core centers of excellent pedagogy across the country. These centers of excellent pedagogy has produced some of the best minds across the Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Literature and the Arts.

That the students have participated in protests, expressing their dissent, witnessing an ongoing genocide, speaks to their excellence. It stands testimony to the academic brilliance of the students, taking the critical concepts they learn to engage society, with the hope of building a just society. 

Their courage seeks to intervene into the architectures of settler colonial and imperial violence, seeking to build registers of change.

The criminalization of international students and their right to dissent is a feature of the ascendance of white supremacy in the US. This white supremacy treats international students as expendable commodities. 

It seeks to extract from international students their labour as knowledge workers while placing on them disciplinary codes around speech and behavior. The white supremacist organizing of US fascism at this juncture desires the expendable bodies of international graduate students while discarding their excellence.

Manaakitanga and the spirit of kindness invites us to fundamentally decolonize how we approach international student recruitment and retention. 

The ethic of care suggested by manaakitanga calls for us to build international engagement programmes in universities that see the humanity of international students, uphold their dignity, and honour their free speech rights.

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