And faculty members who feel that they play an important role in campus internationalization efforts are more apt to engage in overseas collaborations than those at institutions where such work is largely driven by administrators.
But the unpublished paper, which uses data collected in 2007 as part of the Changing Academic Profession survey of faculty members in 17 countries, also finds that professors in the United States lag behind their foreign peers in key measures of international engagement, like writing papers with overseas colleagues and undertaking work that is international in scope.
This research follows up on, but does not precisely duplicate, a 1992 study, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's International Faculty survey. Because the exact questions asked in each report differed, it not possible to make explicit comparisons between the two. For the 2007 survey, more than 5,000 faculty members at 80 four-year institutions in the United States received invitations to participate, and 20.7 percent responded.
The findings could prove to be a disappointment to college leaders. In recent years, there has been growing consensus that cultivating a faculty of internationalists is critical to fostering a more global campus. An American Council on Education survey, released last spring, found that an increasing number of institutions are setting aside funds for international travel and research, and some, like Rollins College, in Florida, are trying to get all professors to travel overseas (The Chronicle, May 30, 2008, and October 31, 2008).
"American academic leaders should be modestly depressed, since we preach globalization," said Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and co-author of a paper on the original Carnegie survey. "Yet the faculty doesn't fully get it."
By contrast, professors surveyed in countries like Australia and Mexico were more likely to say that they do international research and highlight global perspectives in the classroom.
Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor in Seton Hall's College of Education and Human Services, says the new data do point to some possible policy prescriptions. For one, the data suggest that faculty members who spent one or two years abroad after earning their undergraduate degree were twice as likely to work international issues into their teaching. Those with three or more years overseas are 2.6 times more likely to include global themes than professors who have spent little time abroad. Indeed, having faculty members go overseas as adults appears to be more critical to internationalization, said Mr. Finkelstein, than the hiring of foreign-born professors.
"It is clear that the surest road to internationalizing the U.S. faculty is to make sure that they receive some international experience," Mr. Finkelstein and his co-authors, Elaine Walker, an associate professor, and Rong Chen, an assistant professor, write.
The researchers also found that academics at institutions where efforts to establish international linkages are largely a faculty responsibility are three times more likely to undertake international research than their counterparts at colleges where such work is administratively driven.
"People are looking for the key to unlock this problem," Mr. Finkelstein said. The finding "is a biggie."
In addition, the authors looked at whether a younger generation of professors, those hired after 2000, would be more globally minded than their more senior colleagues. Mr. Finkelstein said he expected that would be the case because other changes in the profession, like an emphasis on striking a work-family balance, are more pronounced in younger faculty members.
But newer hires were just as likely as senior faculty members to publish in foreign journals and less prone to report that their work was international in scope or to collaborate with overseas colleagues.
That finding, however, may be a reflection of the fact that few colleges explicitly reward international work in tenure and promotion.
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