November 17, 2023

International Students’ Day is held annually on 17 November. According to QS World University Rankings 2023, 14 out of the top 50 universities are based in Asia. As internationalization becomes a crucial criterion of university rankings, Asian universities have mixed feelings about internationalization and interaction with the state.

‘Emotional Geographies of University Officialdom’ (in Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, 2020), by Associate Professor Ravinder Sidhu (University of Queensland), Associate Professor Ho Kong Chong (Yale-NUS Urban Studies and NUS Sociology and Anthropology), and Professor Brenda S.A. Yeoh (NUS Geography), examines the accounts of officials from various Asian universities in thinking, feeling, and enacting university policies. The authors assert that many university policies manifest the constellation of feelings stored in the university population.

Many universities perceive globalization with an emotion of anxiety and insecurity. Globalization is seen as a threat to the universities’ institutional standings, pushing the institutions to internationalise. In response, Japanese universities introduced a slew of policies to steer themselves towards global and world-class institutions. Similar emotions are felt at Seoul National University, where the university management constantly feels the tensions between addressing the educational needs of domestic society and the contemporary pull of getting a foothold in the world-class rankings. In China’s Renmin University, aspirations to become a globalising university are also seen as a defensive strategy for securing and retaining the university’s domestic standing and legitimacy.

However, there are also feelings of excitement and optimism. At the National University of Singapore, the authors state that the campus infrastructures help cook up an ambience of admiration, desire, hope, and optimism. NUS’s leadership also exhibits a persistent and driving emotion of excitement and optimism about the institution’s ambition to become a global university. NUS’s relationships with the state are felt to be positive, too. Similar emotions can also be felt at Seoul National University. Many university officials perceive the Asian Financial Crisis as offering opportunities to loosen the holds of the state and to reconfigure academic identity from that of a civil servant to a knowledge entrepreneur. The need to internationalise the school’s student population is rationalised as preparing its local students for global competition.

Lastly, there are also feelings of scepticism and shame. At NUS, there are concerns that the contributions of university staff on the ground are taken for granted unjustifiably. At Tokyo University and Osaka University, academics also express scepticism about the state’s bureaucracy on issues such as the selection process of post-graduate research students. Furthermore, while shame is a notoriously uncomfortable emotion, scholars at Tokyo University argue that shame and resentment can become productive forces by helping students develop a deep understanding of the unique and difficult history of Japan, as well as the mistakes the country has committed in the past.

Read the chapter here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_3