By Maria Elena Indelicato
Australia has been at the forefront of international education. It is at her shores that internationalisation as a fully-fledged policy was first introduced in the global reality of higher education in 1992. Significantly, the then Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Kim Beazley, launched the policy to counter the overseas criticism that Australia’s approach to international education ‘was too narrowly commercial.’ The birth of internationalisation is in fact tied to the commercialisation of higher education in the late 1980s, when Australian universities and colleges were allowed to provide full-cost courses designed for international students. Since then, academic and grey policy-oriented studies which try to determine international students’ market choices and needs have proliferated, leaving very little room to discuss issues surrounding the presence of international students in Australia otherwise. Discourses of economic necessity have thus overdetermined the ways in which we think of, talk about and, ultimately, relate to international students at academic and policy levels.
The conflation of international education with the commercialisation of higher education is nowhere more evident than in the news media reporting on international students. I am here referring to the very well known ‘cash cows’ trope, which was recently recycled by – with no new spin – ABC News’ latest investigation on the status of the ‘third biggest export industry’ of the country. Like all the other articles on the same topic, this one too links the economic exploitation of international students to the financial over-reliance of Australian universities on the income that the former generates as well as the alleged deterioration of academic standards and values in the country.
In the last two decades, media reports on international students have been in fact fixated over two interrelated phenomena: soft marking and plagiarism on the one hand; and censorship on the other hand. In the first instance, Australian universities’ financial dependence on the so-called ‘international student dollar’ has been linked to diminished academic standards via the iterative characterisation of international students as ‘poor’ English speakers, who lack basic academic skills and are, moreover, willing to do everything it takes to pass instead of ‘learning for learning’s sake.’ International students from many counties have taken the brunt of such characterisation, including Indian students, who have been publicly accused of using the overseas student programme as ‘back door entry’ to the country.
In the second instance, Australian universities’ reliance on international students has been instead associated with the influence that China allegedly exerts on Australia politics via big donations. Through this association, international students from China have been conferred with the power to resist criticism of their home country, thus forcing Australian lecturers into self-censorship. Resonating with the rhetoric of ‘Asian invasion,’ big numbers figure prominently on both sides of the equation: the fees paid by hundreds of thousand students on the one hand go hand in hand with the millions of dollars that Australian businessmen of Chinese descent have donated to Australian politicians.
Image source: https://www.thoughtco.com/the-boxer-rebellion-in-editorial-cartoons-195619
As Anita Devos has demonstrated, the media’s rendition of international students as the embodiment of the commercialisation of higher education has conveniently constructed for Australian academics a ‘victim’ position, which concomitantly has characterised international students of Asian descent as the ‘other’, ‘corrupting’ Australian academic integrity; or, as another anonymous academic writer has pointed out, ‘the (pure), (white), (liberal), (cultured) university – once a centre for academic excellence, for passionate and varied scholarship, for dedicated students and generous teachers – is penetrated by the outsider-within: the international student.’ This analysis represents the most critical engagement with the media representations of international students, as other scholars have opted to rebut the iterative accusations that international students threaten academic standard and freedom with empirical evidence. Important as this critique is, it runs the risk of reinstating the monetisation of higher education as a major heuristic to question media representations of international students rather than unravelling the histories of racialisation which lurk behind them.
The characterisation of international students as pedagogical subjects prone to plagiarise and be hostile to free speech is in fact, at the very least, as old as the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), where Hegel positioned China at an evolutionarily lower place in world history than West Europe. Projecting religion as a heuristic to classify political orders of government onto China, Hegel described its form of government as ‘theocratic despotism,’ since, in his view, the Emperor was both ‘the Supreme Head of the State’ and ‘the Chief of its religion.’ Mobilising the principle of filial piety – which he saw as the main principle structuring all social relations in China – Hegel further argued that, the family unit could not but project its patriarchal unity onto the emperor, preventing, as a result, the separation between family, civic society and state. In this regard, China was, according to him, a good illustration of a governing order which produces collective-oriented members rather than independent-thinking individuals who master their own environment.
The racial categorisation of China as despotic and Chinese as lacking independent personalities persisted over time and through the formation of the disciplinary fields of Comparative Philology, Comparative Religion and Oriental Studies. It also survived through the emergence of a post-colonial order of modern nation-states, which included the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1946. It is in fact at the onset of the Cold War that, through the work of Boasian anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, the U.S.’ Anti-communist agenda translated into a series of studies which approached the Nationalist/Communist ideological as well as other historical divisions of China as irrelevant to the purpose of determining its ‘national character.’
Such an approach did reinstate, instead of disputing, the racist thinking underpinning the colonial epistemic rendition of the world into the liberal West and the authoritarian East. The end of WWII also bore witness to the birth of international study schemes such as the Australian Colombo Plan (1951), which, like other study programmes of the time, was purposely designed to counter the threat of Communist expansion in the Asia-Pacific by technological knowledge transfer and cultural exchange.
The history briefly recounted here highlights the importance of race to critically engage with media representations of international students in Australia, the ‘cash cows’ trope in primis. This engagement is necessary to move beyond monetisation as the major heuristic to understand the state of permanent crisis characterising international education in the country. It is moreover crucial to disrupt the discursive rendition of international students as pedagogical subjects lacking critical minds as well as independent personalities. However, international students have rarely been approached as the subjects proper of Australia’s history of colonial and race relations. As I have argued elsewhere, such reluctance is embedded in the field of international education studies itself, whose reliance on Cold War informed epistemological categories of culture and cultural differences have effectively erased race and racism as viable heuristics to understand the failure of Australian universities’ to include students whose knowledge tradition is not Western.
Acknowledgments
This article is drawn from the monograph Australia’s New Migrants and research work on the colonial and Cold War legacy of international education I am currently undertaking with Sinophobia expert Ivana Pražić.
Feature Image source (Colombo Plan Students): https://dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/international-relations/60-years-australia-in-malaysia/chapter3-education-exchanges-and-dialogue.html
Maria Elena Indelicato received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. She is the author of Australia’s New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border and editor of the ACRAWSA blog
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