BH: Institutions contract with ACE to have a guided consultation for 20 months, in which we take them through an internationalisation review so that they know what their assets are. We have pieces where they define their aspirations and then we try to put together all of this in a strategic plan.

It’s a cohort model so there are usually about 10-12 institutions in a cohort. They meet in Washington three different times at the beginning of the process when they’re forming their work group, in the middle when they’re starting off the internationalisation review and at the end when they’re trying to pull everything together in either a report, or sometimes they actually get to a strategic plan. It just depends what the senior leadership wants.

“Now, it’s not just the number of international students you draw on; it has to do with how does it affect your curriculum?”

At the end I bring in a team of two other professionals from institutions that they admire and think they could learn from and we comment on their steps going forward and give them advice about things they might want to think about doing before they take the big leap.

The PIE: The big leap meaning implementation of a complete internationalisation strategy?

BH: Whatever their individual recommendations are. So it’s pretty collaborative but it’s very good. If they have gone through the review and they have a peer review report, five to seven years later I can bring in another team in order to see if they have actually made any progress. And if the leadership has stayed stable, they invariably do. If there’s been leadership change, it’s iffy – there has to be some kind of continuity.

But it’s a way of rekindling the momentum, giving credit where credit is due and since the field keeps changing, the emphasis on things keeps changing. What does that mean in terms of the direction they want to go? So they can tweak their goals too.

The PIE: Do you only work with American universities?

BH: The lab has been really interesting because even though it is primarily American, we have also worked with a Mexican institution. I’ve worked with an institution in Lebanon – even though I was not allowed to travel there – they could get money from the US Agency for International Development. So they came here, and then we did it long distance. And this year we have in the cohort a university with 23 branches in Colombia.

The PIE: Are there any countries or even institutions that you think are really doing internationalisation well?

BH: Well, a lot of countries are making gestures in that direction. Now, it’s not just the number of international students you draw on; it has to do with: how does it affect your curriculum? How does it affect all of the policies you have? What structure do you have? Is there visible articulation of this commitment at the senior leadership level? And then, what are you creating partnerships for? It used to be people only thought about study abroad and the number of international students – that’s only one of six dimensions that we work with, partly because not everybody is going to study abroad.

“As a research institution, of course you’re looking at worldwide rankings”

The Japanese government, for example, selected twenty universities to become global universities and so they had a symposium where they brought in somebody who deals with European universities more broadly and me to talk about how we conceptualised internationalisation on our own campuses.

Sometimes that’s helpful to do – to see why other people are thinking more differently about it. And it’s partly because of rankings. If you want to be a global institution and your president or your ministry is very interested in rankings then it’s the research focus, but it’s not totally comprehensive internationalisation.

The PIE: Do you have an opinion on rankings?

BH: They exist and people pay attention to them. The nature of the business has changed – we used to just think about the rankings in US News and World Report and as a president, you have to pay attention to that because your board is paying attention to it. As a research institution, of course you’re looking at worldwide rankings. That may not have been the case 50 years ago, but it is now.

The PIE: How does comprehensive internationalisation move beyond just international student mobility?

BH: You have the biggest impact if you affect your curriculum. Having agreed upon global learning outcomes is the first step and then making sure that all of your units are using the same thing. We’re doing some work now in the co-curriculum. There are 168 hours in the week and most students are in class 15 hours – can they be learning in those other 155 hours?

We used to think that study abroad was ‘send them abroad, let them have an immersion experience, they’re going to necessarily learn something’ but we never asked them. Twenty years ago we asked about their housing accommodations, things to do with tourism, not with learning. Institutions are now moving to get learning outcomes across everything they do.

The PIE: What do people most struggle with in measuring outcomes?

BH: I think 10 years ago they would have been struggling to get learning outcomes that were global, and then how do you measure them. There are tools now that help you see what you are succeeding with – so keep doing that – and what you are not succeeding with, do some change. I don’t believe in quantitative assessments as much as I do qualitative.

“Institutions are now moving to get learning outcomes across everything they do”

For example, there’s a big difference if you’ve globalised the majors and if you’re just requiring one international course as part of general education. They have a very different impact. I’ll take whatever the institution is starting with, as long as it keeps wanting to make sure they are moving into internationalising the majors. Every program can be thought of in terms of its global positioning and getting people to understand that is the hard part.

The PIE: How long have you been working in the field of international education?

BH: More or less since 2001. It started with my working with the American Association of Colleges and Universities on a definition of liberal education for the 21st century. I was in charge of the global piece and convened a group of 18 or 20 institutions that had been selected as being very good in terms of teaching level, education and having high-impact practices. We were trying to name the high-impact practices, and study abroad was certainly one of them. Then the other piece I was doing was convening a think tank about what should the globally prepared student do.

Then [former vice president for international initiatives] Madeleine Green hired me back at ACE because she had just started this new Internationalization Lab, so I came in halfway through the first cohort in 2003 and then have been pretty much running it since then.

The PIE: Looking back over your tenure with ACE, what stands out for you?

BH: The people that I get to work with! It’s very interesting. The associations can feel very removed from campus, but because I’ve had a career as a faculty member then I had a career as an administrator, I can see places where what we might conceptualise in an organisation doesn’t actually suit the way life is on campus. And so that’s one of the contributions I’ve been able to make is grounding our work in the way institutions actually behave.

The PIE: Tell me what role you think ethics should play in internationalisation.

BH: Ethics should be grounded in respect for the other – whoever that other is. It could be the other who comes to your institution and the one you send out. How do you want people to behave as representatives of your institution? For example, it would not be ethical for a religiously based institution to bring in international students with the thought of proselytising them. I mean, that one’s pretty easy.

On the larger scale, when you go to have a partnership with a university in another country, don’t just go to tell them what to do. Have some mutual benefit. What can you be learning from them that’s going to help your institution? I suppose the real trick is: Are we doing American imperialism when we’re working in Colombia or Lebanon? Well, a lot of countries think about the US and the UK as having very, very strong higher education systems. So in some cases they want to emulate us, but it plays out differently given the cultures of different places.

“The work is essential more now than ever before, and if it’s made more difficult by certain changes, keep at it”

The PIE: Is an international education still something for the elites of the world?

BH: No, but institutions are struggling to figure out how to do it. Some of the very small institutions are trying with programs where every student has to have a 10-day program abroad. That’s fine. It’s not a deep experience necessarily, but it can be a start. I think being internationalised is part of lifelong learning.

The PIE: How do you see the work of internationalisation fitting into the current political climate in the US?

BH: I’ve been thinking about this an awful lot. I may say some things in private that I don’t say in public, but whenever a group feels besieged, it’s useful. I have recently been in London and went to the Imperial War museum and bought the magnet for the kitchen that says ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

The work is essential more now than ever before, and if it’s made more difficult or if it’s constrained by certain changes that happen, keep at it and keep doing the things you can do. Have those organisations that are politically driven carry the banner for you. I know the ACE has had a letter signed by associations that responded to the executive order about the travel ban and they did another one for institutions to sign too. So keep yourself politically active.