Interview with Dr Nick Lewis, Auckland University, by the UNIKE Project.
Interview with Dr. Nick Lewis
I'm here today with Dr. Nick Lewis, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Auckland. I have the pleasure of inviting him to this interview because of his expertise in geography of education, particularly the higher education internationalization of higher education, and he has extensive experience in the Asia Pacific region.
Changes in Higher Education
What do you think the trends in higher education have changed over the past two decades? I suspect the major pressures brought to bear on higher education are those associated with globalizing pressures, those associated with new demands from governments from states as to what they want universities to do for them in their national development projects or in building knowledge economies. The increasing mobility of students and research agendas and research monies across the world.
Neoliberalism and Changes in Higher Education
I guess these changes are often simply reduced to questions of big bogey person in the room, neoliberalism. But I don't think you have to do that. We can find much more specific details about the changes. Do you think that the changes are similar in the developing world and the developing world? It's an interesting question. It's very difficult for us in the developed world, the global north, and its outposts in places like New Zealand and Australia to really understand what's going on in other parts of the world.
Differences in Higher Education
I don't think we have a very strong sense of those changes. I don't think we have a very strong sense of where they were before the changes started. So, it's very difficult to measure change if you don't know where things came from in the first instance. The literature's not great. My own experiences... I spent some time working with a group of academics from around the East Asian region in Singapore. For me, that was a real learning experience as I came to understand how universities are structured in that part of the world.
Fundamental Differences
Before I started that project, I had no sense of what a national university was in China or Singapore or Japan. So, are the experiences different? Yes, they must be because they all start from different places. There are the flows of funding are different, the legislative structures under which universities operate are different, the expectations of universities and what work they might do for the nation are different.
Policy Mobilities
Yet, at the same time, a range of policy mobilities, if you like, in terms of the but different ways that university should be managed and run, those sorts of ideas are spreading very rapidly from places in the developed world into African and East Asian South Asian universities very often not as a as a sort of top-down trickle into those places but they're very often into as as universities reach up to to grab things to reposition themselves in local politics reposition themselves in relation to global rankings of universities.
New Knowledge and Emerging Trends
So, you get a lot of yeah you get a lot of movement but there's a fundamental difference in terms of the work that universities are supposed to perform or expected in the way in which they perform it as well as how they organized. Most of the academic literature that we came across in graduate school of education most graduate school of education in Europe and perhaps in Asia as well most of us scholars talked about the negative output of these changes but I would think that you might have experienced some of the positive output of these changes.
Examples of Positive Change
Can you give an example in the Asia Pacific of anything that's positive? Yes, I think so. I think it's my belief yes all these changes are happening and by and large they are regressive and I said yesterday regressive and regrettable but if you are if you're subjected to those changes to wallow around in anxiety or or self-pity if you like it in the Universities which are on the basis of it or which are in in reality very privileged places very privileged places to work very privileged places to study to live an experience for us so for some time so if you start from a position that they are privileged start from a position that the universities are not simply being wiped out by changes and they're still having a significant amount of autonomy sit then provide a lot of academic freedom still no one tells me for example what to do.
New Zealand and Singapore
I think you can begin to see examples and in the New Zealand case for example I I talked about Enough I of tomorrow McDonough which is a center of research excellence in basically University of Auckland but in in New Zealand where they're doing really in interesting things funding new projects making new possibilities for young researchers connecting with a range of community actors developing very interesting Maori projects around things to do with the economy things to do with community.
Building Research Capability
I also cited another another example that I've been involved with which is the building research capability in the Social Sciences Network which in a sense is a consequence of the changes as governments ought to to think about how it could deal with some of the some of the barriers to fostering capability within the disciplines that have been put in place by the changes so how to deal with that they in they funded across across the university cross institutional cross generational cross disciplinary program of network building where the networks that got built where Maori research networks Pacifica research networks early career and new settler our kind of networks that begin to fill in some of the gaps and create some of the connections that have been ripped out of the universities because of the changes.
Singapore Experience
I'd like to ask you about your latest paper published last year about the mobility and desire international student in aspirational Singapore. Can you give me a little bit of background or the fighting in that papers? I talked to a wee bit about it. I should acknowledge in the first instance that I was Theodore from that paper and my colleagues were of indicee do and Francis Collins actually led led the work and let the writing of the paper.
Singapore and International Students
The paper itself is fascinating because it emerged from that project I was telling you about a project called GU ism which was I can't remember what the acronym stands stood for but I'm sure University was in there and globalization was in there but it involved researchers from across the region and brought them together in Singapore Singapore lots of money so it's what lavishly funded I probably should say that the Singaporean government wouldn't maybe not like that too much but what a consequence of this is that we managed to actually probably create the the biggest data set on on changing experiences among students in particular that's been created around the internationalization of fund of education.
Singapore and Student Mobility
We talked to students we talked to university leaders we we did a questionnaire so we have a lot of kind of quantitative material to to draw upon and the some of the I guess what the paper did was was challenged challenged the presumption that all the decisions that are made around these processes of internationalization by by students challenged the presumption that though those emerge from rational choice decision-making processes and that those processes are how we might imagine them if we're not the student if we're the university or the researcher from the outside or maybe even the parent who's paying for them imagines that students are doing certain things because they they read the rationality offer of a predefined grid now what we were able to find of course is lots of different motivations but but but no discrete motivation no discrete independent motivations that sort of add up to something or influence it it's all a mix and it's about aspiration and and desire and students positioning themselves within their family within their national economy within the global economy and global labor markets a range of different aspirations at work that are very difficult to reduce to one on one kind of not one on one that's the wrong way of saying it that are difficult to reduce to single variables to explain things so they're always contingent and always dependent upon the individual the individual each of the individuals has a range of different effects that work on different socialization processes and so you have you have students who were happen to some of the students I talked to in Osaka who discovered comics they were there because they fell in love with Japanese comics at at an early stage others who had a desire to work in a foreign office others who just had a desire to know more about the region and okay if I make one more comment there one of the really interesting things that it taught me this project maybe less the paper itself but the project it's that in this part of the world we come to understand internationalization as a as an industry New Zealand government New Zealand universities seeking to fund their activities by selling education to international students and we come to see it all about that being all about English language acquisition but of course large numbers of students move not in order to study English in fact increasingly in order to study China Mandarin so they're moving from the US and moving around the East Asian region for that purpose all they may be moving to position themselves for jobs in in Japanese in Japanese global corporations and so on so it's a great deal of complexity and in a Singaporean case they they haven't charged their international students so it's about developing Singapore as opposed to you know making money to fund domestic education or for back up in international students lots of complexity and and desire is something that will endure and and Frances are interested in there's a something that's inside the body inside the mind inside a range of cues social cues and so on I know that you have experience teaching international student here in New Zealand and all supervise international students as well so what is your learning poi by working with international students from different cultural backgrounds who travel a long way here and how is it different from what you've seen in Singapore yeah that's an interesting question I the second part of the question would be more difficult to answer because I haven't spent time in Singaporean classrooms or with with so the work we did was very short-term kind of interviews are very difficult to get a handle on those kinds of things but I will will say some things about engaging with international students in in my own work work and it's it's always a great pleasure but a pleasure that comes with a number of challenges of course the challenge is we we often think about the challenges from a student's perspective there are also challenges from from the academics perspective working with with a student who's whose cultural background is different whose response to whose response in supervisory relationships for example is very different it that I mean it's it's wonderful but I always feel awkward for example that my international students give me gifts you know and am I supposed to reciprocate it I've actually never asked anyone within the university am I supposed to even accept those gifts and I do accept the gifts because it's a cultural practice in it it's fun and look there's something around the way that you know that our British Traditions I guess around the Academy and we're just doing it now at old government house having a beer with students after many of our students are non-drinkers from international students how do you replicate that moment of that really rich moment of social of engagement with a graduate student that occurs within a within a pub or a bar or something when you're after working you're relaxing and it's a moment a moment of rich learning that doesn't get replicated so easily when you're working with students who are who don't drink and so there are there are lots of lots of little things there and of course the the language issues of of writing and are always difficult it takes a lot longer to work with an international student often if their second language student your commitment as an academic has to be stronger just as the students commitment but I do i do marvel at the way that people can learn in a different languages you know I can barely string together 15 words in French or you know a few words in Māori but that's about it yeah but I really enjoy your your sharing of experience and I believe that once a student international student decided to go abroad to study is also very terrorist you know a lot take a lot of courage to travel but once a study in one place they probably become friends of the country for life and I think that the experience working with professors in another academic culture is probably along it's really precious for Experian for international students and thank you for being with us today thank you you're most welcome and you know anytime it's always a pleasure to to to work with students and to work was sort of such a talented group as the uniquor students thank you very much.