Internationalization and the Cosmopolitical University

Abstract

This article discusses some of the issues that surround the internationalization of higher education as a way to open discussion about the construction of an alternative cosmopolitical vision of the university, necessary if the university is to fulfill any historic tasks concerning the creation of globally aware citizens. The authors indicate that economic and technological globalization has resulted not only in the growth of international education, but also in the increasing significance of transnational spaces. In this environment, the internationalization of higher education refers to strategies to attract students and also to specific patterns of movement. The authors maintain that the neoliberal metanarrative informing strategies of internationalization not only ignores the complexity of those patterns of interaction, connectedness and movement, but also implies modes of insertion of higher education into transnational spaces, as receptors or senders of certain flows. The way in which students' movements are managed by university institutions and systems leads the authors to reflect about the cosmopolitical project of the university implicit in those strategies. The article presents different concepts of cosmopolitanism linked to projects of political integration in transnational spaces influencing university institutions and brings forward the argument that cosmopolitical neo-liberalism looks at the cultivation of students as consumers, ignoring the potential social and cultural disjunctures in current globalization projects. Moreover, it maintains that this neo-liberal project essentially ignores the potential contributions of university institutions to the creation of public transnational spaces. Finally, against this, the article presents a vision of a cosmopolitical project of the university as an alternative to the one implicit in neo-liberal internationalization strategies.