FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEPLOYMENT OF VISITING SCHOLAR PROGRAMS
Visiting Scholar Program
About
Hosting international scholars for research, teaching, or other purposes is a powerful and cost effective mechanism to inject new ideas and innovation into any higher education institution. While such requests to bring academic visitors to campus come from home professors interested in expanding their research or academic capabilities through collaborations, such international scholars are rarely treated as a distinct university community and often their contributions remain localized in their respective host departments.
Understanding and leveraging their collective contributions to their host institution can greatly contribute to improving an institution's internal capability to engage internationally. International scholars bring new perspectives and are highly motivated to make the most of their short stays. Often, lack of funding is considered by leaders as the main impediment for bringing scholars from abroad, but in cases when funding isn't an issue, the question is how to attract them and create the conditions so they make the most of their collective presence on campus.
By deploying a framework for the creation or improvement of a visiting scholar program, universities can leverage their existing roles as hubs of research and innovation.
More than any other stakeholder, university champions (a term that refers to faculty members with a great capacity to create strong international collaborations) are crucial for attracting international scholars to campus. Often their eagerness to bring peers to their home universities is confronted with fragmented procedures causing a need for a streamline process to officialize the temporary appointment of international peers as official members of the host institution.
Any serious attempt to re-energize an existing visiting scholar program would require suggestions from home faculty members.
The Role of University Champions
In the face of limited resources, host universities need to contend with the demand for international graduate students (as visiting scholars) which are important contributors of emerging or expanding research projects, or bringing highly established international scholars who themselves might have access to well-funded research projects.
While both group positively contribute to the overall campus research culture, institutions interested in deploying international visiting programs from a centralized perspective need to balance their research needs with their capacity to host visiting scholars:
How quick do they expect visiting scholars to have tangible impact on their campus?
How much resources (from existing sources or new ones) should be devoted to one group over the other?
What combination of aspiring and established scholar are ideal at a particular time?
What type of institutional partnerships are best created by a particular group, and how the host institution can facilitate new partnerships?
What is the capacity of the host institution to host international scholars?
Highly Productive Scholars vs Promising Graduate Students
