Internationalization: An Equity-Based Approach

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By Anthony L. Pinder

As international educators, we hold the same dreams of excellence for our students as our faculty and administrative colleagues on campus. We signed on to be a part of an institutional infrastructure that educates people who will shape how the world is seen and experienced. This past year, I have spent a great deal of time considering the people who are part of the higher education community, more specifically those at Emerson College. As I engage with our campus community, I am always reminded that, as an international educator, I play a critical role in the college’s charge to educate students whose perspectives and practical skills will shape the cultures we live in.

As international educators, now is the time for us to interrogate our field and ask ourselves what difference it makes to us to be a part of a higher education infrastructure that educates students in 2023 and beyond. With advancements in technology, students are making global connections—and receiving responses from around the world to their ideas—before they arrive on campus for new student orientation.

College for All?

The Obama administration ushered in an urgency for the United States to produce more college graduates, particularly those who are Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). “College for all” was an aspiration in the national interest at that time. However, recent U.S. policy and practice have tilted more toward “college for some.” Ensuring that BIPOC and other marginalized communities can realize their dreams of a college education seemingly no longer ranks high on the list of national interests. This summer the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled to overturn decades of precedent that affirmed the legality and value of race-conscious admissions practices. This decision also greatly impacts higher education institutions’ ability to exercise inclusive educational excellence. The June decision from SCOTUS and the growing movement at the state level to erode academic freedom and institutional autonomy have arrested higher education’s capacity to be the strong and contemporary institutions needed to deliver transformative educational experiences for our students today.

So, what is international education’s role within a higher education landscape that still struggles with unconscious or implicit bias? I am a firm believer that we are everywhere we have ever been, and we bring all that history into every professional position we will ever assume. As a Black male in the United States, leading institutional efforts in the restructuring of equity and internationalization is my renewed focus. As a senior international officer (SIO) who has served at two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), one open-access public institution, and my current private, predominately White institution, I have come to appreciate the need for the intentional alignment of internationalization and equity in my work.

Our Collective Responsibility

Historically, the field of international education has not been particularly cognizant of how equity, access, and social justice (EASJ) has been addressed in academia. [Emerson College has intentionally adopted the term EASJ to define our work in this space. However, other organizations may adopt any number of other terms, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).] However, now more than ever, international educators should reexamine the ways in which we can use our unique platform and agency on our campuses to guide institutional change and shape campus culture. As an SIO who also supervises a variety of equity initiatives within academic affairs as part of my portfolio, I leverage my roles and agency to help garner campus community support for organizational change related to EASJ.

More than a decade ago, internationalization and inclusive excellence were declared two of Emerson’s six institutional priorities. During the last 10 years, Emerson has achieved impressive success in intentionally moving away from random acts of internationalization happening haphazardly across the institution to a comprehensive strategic plan for internationalization. In 2014, that plan was developed and implemented through our participation in the Internationalization Laboratory, an initiative sponsored by the American Council on Education (ACE). These efforts resulted in Emerson receiving NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization in 2020.

Although internationalization and inclusive excellence were named among Emerson’s institutional strategic priorities, the two offices that provided strategic leadership in these areas previously had little to no interaction. The Office of Internationalization and Global Engagement and the Office of Inclusion and Diversity had separate strategic agendas that did not iterate their interconnectedness. However, in 2020, institutional leadership made a decisive move to begin breaking down this siloed approach and invest in creating greater synergies across these two areas.

That year, the reverberations of a triple global crisis (health pandemic, racial reckoning, and economic uncertainty) forced our society to be more mindful of the power of collective responsibility, the fragility of humanity, and the importance of interpersonal relationships. The extended isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the need for our work to evolve out of the traditionally siloed higher education framework into one that is built on hope and optimism toward greater collaboration. One way Emerson responded to these new realities was to create a team that consisted of both international educators and EASJ content experts under a newly formed Office of Internationalization and Equity (IE) to be overseen by me as the inaugural vice provost of internationalization and equity.

As part of Emerson’s administrative leadership, I support and model our institution’s renewed belief in cocreating a learning and working environment that is equity-centered, one where people can find genuine community, truly engage in personal and professional growth, and be their authentic selves. This is the vision at Emerson that I am working to achieve with our chief diversity officer (CDO). If we are to be successful in our efforts to create an institutional culture that is inspiring and more inclusive, equitable, and just, then we must start with the departments that we have the privilege of leading.

Structural and institutional barriers have historically prevented the development of bona fide cross-institutional relationships between equity and diversity professionals and international educators. These silos have often resulted in territorialism, in place of collectivity. When establishing our IE Office, I successfully advocated for three new equity-focused positions to support EASJ work within academic affairs in general and internationalization in particular. Intentionally creating a team composed of committed international educators and equity professionals immediately paved the way for us to treat internationalization and equity as complementary priorities, not competing ones.

Pursuing equity-centered internationalization meant it was also critical that our IE team be transparent and recognize the various inequities within internationalization. With great intentionality, our IE team is engaged in exploring our unrealized potential to view work in internationalization as one of many paths to creating an equitable environment at Emerson. This has meant examining things such as policies and practices that may be discriminatory and exclusionary in the education abroad space and addressing some of the baseline inequities that affect international students on our campus.

Strategic Connections

As Emerson’s inaugural vice provost for internationalization and equity, I constantly challenge myself and our IE team to locate equity within our work and for equity to frame the way in which we work. This is an urgent imperative. As a multicampus institution with academic centers in Boston, Los Angeles, Well (the Netherlands), and Paris, our IE team is focused on transforming EASJ work in more than 25 faculty-led education abroad programs, as well as our academic centers abroad.

For example, IE provides training opportunities in EASJ pedagogical strategies to faculty who lead education abroad programs, thereby cultivating attention to equity-centered internationalization through incorporating diversity principles in the curriculum. As international educators, all of us must accept our collective responsibility for transforming educational institutions into places that not only celebrate institutions’ heritages but also allow everyone to thrive and be inspired.

Another critical step at Emerson was the national search and subsequent appointment in 2022 of the college’s second vice president for equity and social justice and CDO, Shaya Gregory Poku. Upon her arrival, the name, mission, and vision of the Social Justice Center was updated and changed to the Social Justice Collaborative (SJC). Under the auspices of a new EASJ strategic plan for the college, “A Culture That Inspires” (2023–27), the collaboration and thought partnership between international educators and a wider cast of EASJ stakeholders across campus are prominently featured as a shared vision.

Additionally, as an institution, we have sought to react to a national political climate where EASJ in higher education is being demonized and dismantled in some parts of the country. In June, for example, Emerson’s Board of Trustees adopted a new diversity statement as part of the board’s acknowledgement of EASJ as a central tenet of the college’s educational mission and institutional values. The statement signals our renewed focus in this area. One thing that equity, in particular, suggests is a higher education institution in which the institutional policies and intentional fair treatment of all members result in equal opportunities and outcomes for the entire community.

Lessons Learned

There are a few lessons learned from Emerson College’s equity-based approach to internationalization that are worthy to note:

• Leadership: As SIOs and campus leaders, support and model your institution’s goal of cocreating equity-centered campus environments. Such modeling and facilitation should start in the departments that you lead.
• Collaboration: Create intentional thought partnerships among a wide variety of campus stakeholders committed to advancing EASJ values in international education specifically and throughout the institution in general. Facilitate joint staff meetings between international education professionals and EASJ or DEI colleagues to underscore the points of intersection and alignment of their work.
• Community Building: Establish faculty learning communities that center internationalization and EASJ- or DEI-based approaches to curricula, instruction, professional development, mentorship, community-minded pedagogy, accessible learning environments, etc.
• Amplification: Enhance and promote existing internationalization and EASJ or DEI efforts to close equity gaps for students, faculty, and staff, including conducting a review of academic assessment measures and supporting further cross-departmental collaborations.

Noted Benefits

As vice provost for internationalization and equity, it was immediately apparent that I needed to charge my team to consider the following question: Because we have proven that we can be successful in our work reaching across oceans, what will reaching across the office or campus to break the siloed structure of our work look like? Supervising this process, it was incumbent upon me to use my agency as an academic leader to create multiple and consistent opportunities for our newly assembled IE team to continuously (re)imagine and plan for approaches that more cohesively situated equity within international education and vice versa. Our IE team’s work has already begun to bear a number of positive results:

• Student Recruitment: After a successful recruitment campaign, 61 percent of the Fall ’23 class at Emerson’s Netherlands campus are BIPOC students.
• Curating Significant Learning Experiences in Education Abroad: Summer ’23 saw the launch of a new multimedia storytelling program in Ghana and the post-COVID-19 launch of our James Baldwin Writers’ Colony in the Netherlands. Both programs were developed with BIPOC students in mind, which resulted in the participation of Emerson BIPOC students and students from seven HBCUs and community colleges.
• Resource Development: IE partnered with the Office of Institutional Advancement to establish three new current use funds to support international students, education abroad assistance, and internationalization and equity programming.
• Student Leadership Development: Emerson and IE established the Dean’s Fellows for Racial Equity and Leadership Development program to provide talented BIPOC student-fellows with scholarships, leadership development training, and opportunities to participate in EASJ campuswide initiatives. Fellows will also be able to take advantage of a myriad of education abroad and domestic “away” program opportunities.
• Curriculum Development and Design: IE provided program development and fiscal support for a new major in health and social change in the School of Communication and also revamped the international student first-year writing experience: Building Community and Confidence Through Pedagogy and Cross-Campus Connectivity.

Conclusion

This type of work, among other IE initiatives, has resulted in a good majority of our campus community normalizing the idea that international education and the base curriculum for all students should be equity based. In addition, the collaboration and thought partnership between Emerson’s IE and SJC departments has never been stronger. Since April, we have convened three collegewide EASJ Summits in which campus stakeholders have engaged in discussions that reflect on our collective EASJ progress and future direction. In addition, the complete teams of IE and SJC hold routine joint meetings to review and share information about our respective work, as well as develop ways to collaborate.

As we struggle to heal from the triple crisis that began in 2020, the field of international education has discovered and implemented a variety of collaborative strategies for attending to the evolving needs of its students, faculty, and staff. To succeed in this work, international education professionals need to become true silo breakers, leveraging institutional support from senior administrators and academic leadership to cohesively situate equity within international education at the campus level and vice versa.

Anthony Pinder, EdD, is the inaugural vice provost for internationalization and equity at Emerson College. He is the coeditor of Reimagining Internationalization and International Initiatives at HBCUs. Emerson was recognized in 2020 with NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization in recognition of its international education programs.