REFLECTIONS FOR THE DEPLOYMENT OF FACULTY EXCHANGE PROGRAMS
Faculty Exchange Framework
About
Faculty members constantly look for new perspectives by travelling to far away lands in hopes of meeting other scholars. If international engagement in higher education has a beginning, perhaps it is the first travelling thinkers who ventured into new lands to test or expand their theories. Despite the high number of faculty members travelling abroad today, little attention is given to this form of mobility as a tool to pursue international institutional engagement.
While active and highly committed faculty members attempt to officialize their initiatives once back home, they navigate a number of administrative, legal, academic and institutional culture barriers, which hinder their capacity to get their ideas off the ground. It is often faculty members who via their international linkages contribute the most to their institution’s international profile.
Reimagine Faculty Mobility
There are many instances when individual international collaborations (between two professors from different universities) can grow into institutional international initiatives. Such larger commitments allow the dissemination of knowledge, practices and approaches bringing new opportunities as institutions themselves invest in these initiatives.
Universities or colleges can opt to centralize the services and funding that facilitate these international institutional collaborations bringing under one roof that administrative responsibility. This approach will offer faculty members the opportunity to more freely focus on building linkages and promoting those connections with potential for institutional support. Some small international collaborations are as important as large-scale institutional initiatives, but they require different support.
It is often assumed that all faculty members understand the institutional international engagement vision, its focus, limitations and environmental context. But the need to maintain an adequate level of awareness never stops and not doing enough to offer institutional support evenly and across the home institution might create disparities. This will inevitably make some departments better able to leverage international opportunities while leaving others with limited impact for international engagement. This can happen more frequently when international senior officers leave faculty members outside of the institutional discussions for the pursuit and development of international collaborations. Those faculty members who travel abroad represent a great opportunity to better prepare the institution for inclusive impact regarding its international engagement goals.
Developing or enhancing an existing faculty mobility program can start with understanding where faculty members go to, what they do, and what they accomplish abroad. Often this information isn’t explored as a whole, rather as anecdotal information shared occasionally and without the proper analysis for creating new partnership opportunities. Building this collective memory will allow international senior officers to create the parameters for better supporting the development of international institutional initiatives led by faculty members.
