1. IAU Durban Conference, August 20-25, 2000
11th General Conference: Universities as Gateway to the Future
Plenary Panel I
Pramod Talgeri
Vice-Chancellor, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, India
Introduction
Yesterday's Keynote address on Changing Priorities - Constant Values was the oral conceptual
framework within which our working group on so-called Internationalization of Higher Education has
been conditioned by some of the points which were raised in the Keynote address of Changing
Priorities - Constant Values. There was a biass that a university must function in its traditional fashion
in that it teaches and researches in certain areas of knowledge. But, I think the discussion, which took
place in our Working Group, looks as if there is a farewell to the classical university. It has come
under the spell of the market-driven economy in the global sense. Here was one very important
conceptual distinction made by some of our colleagues between internationalization and globalization.
Whilst globalization tends to homogenize social, economic and cultural as well as academic processes
and marginalize some of the so-called peripheral cultural and other social processes,
internationalization, by contrast, looks for participatory interaction among equal partners. The words
«equal partners» is a text, which we have taken over from the Task Force of IAU, which made set
down one document on how the internationalization should look in the future. But, a so-called equal
partnership between the advanced countries and developing countries, does not always ensure the
equal treatment among the partners. Internationalization has been in vogue, has been in practice for
quite some time in terms of three things :
1. joint research projects ;
2. exchange of students and faculty ; and,
3. exchange of teaching materials.
This has been going on for quite some time. For that we do not require a specific agenda for
internationalization, because this has been happening among the various individual institutions,
irrespective or independent of any such world body like IAU. But, these efforts have a rather limited
impact. It benefits only the limited members who are actually interacting with each other. It has its
own bilateral nexus. But not multilaterality has not come into the picture, so one of the colleagues
mentioned that we require a kind of a networking among the institution partners, in hopes that it will
have a wider impact.
Internationalisation or Globalisation
Third point, and that was much debated, really brought out the issue of internationalization of higher
education in its core activities. If you really want to have an international dimension among colleagues
or among member institutions, it is necessary to change this present trend of different universities of a
particular country, going to some other countries and scouting for students. For example in India, for
almost every province and state, Australia, New Zealand, America, the British Council scout for
people. They organize the so-called "education fairs" and really try to buy students. This is certainly
not internationlization.
This is rather a kind of a huge perpetual Olympic contest as one of our Nigerian colleagues put it, with
the purpose being to recruit as many students as possible from different countries. It is rather a market-
driven internationalization. In contrast, one idea was discussed in our Working Group, the idea of a so-
called international common syllabus in specific subjects, like natural sciences and technical subjects,
for ensuring technical compatibility at the graduate level. It would ensure international mobility of
younger students and a real partnership among the equals. The students who would wish to go to any
university in the world, would already have fulfilled certain technical and scientific pre-requisites
which would allow them to go to any university and follow or continue their education.
Such a syllabus would ensure uniform standards and this will be a kind of a, not a strict curricula
structuring, but it will be this international syllabus, would serve as a larger normative framework and
a common denominator in scientific and technical subjects, which are not culture specific. This would

2. also check the indiscriminate brain drain from the developing countries to the other countries. And it
will also promote transparency in the academic processes.