‘We all Rise and Fall Together’ – Notre Dame’s Michael Pippenger on Internationalisation

Can you tell us why it was important to develop an internationalisation strategy for the University of Notre Dame?

As university, we’re well known in the United States for providing a top notch educational experience for our students, for our research capabilities and the kind of teaching we provide undergraduates and graduate students. However, that reputation that’s rock solid in the U.S. is not known as well around the world.

As we aspire to be the world-class university that we know we can be, it’s really important that we have an internationalisation strategy that allows us to build that reputation abroad. Our aim is to have our faculties’ research showcased in new ways, and enable them to form new partnerships to produce new knowledge. It’s also an opportunity for our students to have new experiences and new networks, and it allows us to grow our alumni base and our strategic partnerships.

So, if we want to be a force for good in the world, which is part of our mission and values as a university, then we have to have a global strategy. If we don’t have that, we will remain doing the same things we’ve been doing, which have been excellent, but are more limited in scope. That’s not the kind of university we want to be. 

How has it shaped the future of the university and how would you describe its’ impact?

It has shaped the university in so many important ways. When we think about what internationalisation has already done – having more international students, having more international faculty in our community –  that makes us a more diverse place with greater talent. It also means a wider cross section of experiences that makes the classroom, makes the residence hall, makes every place where students and faculty gather, a richer place.

We know the benefits that come from being a diverse and international community. In terms of the quality of life and the quality of intellectual discourse, that international background has already shaped who we are as a university. We were founded by a French priest who was an immigrant himself to the Mid-West in the United States. We had students coming from Mexico in the later half of the 19th Century. Almost within the first couple of decades of being a university, we had our first international student. So we have this in our DNA, and we know that’s made us in a stronger place.

I think the other thing that has shaped how we’re moving forward now is our globalisation strategy. If you have a strategy, people can refer to it, and weigh options and decisions for the future based on that strategy. When we all have a shared set of common values and aspirations and goals as it relates to becoming more global, we’re able to decide things differently. We can also act differently, work together differently and bring more people into partnerships with colleagues around the world. That has also helped shape what the future of the work is turning out to be.

When did the internationalisation process of University of Notre Dame begin? 

We moved to this new phase in the process about 10 years ago when we made two really important strategic decisions. The first was to create the office that I lead – Notre Dame International. We created one office that was meant to be that central clearing house and thought partner for all of the other divisions within the university for what it means to become more global. Having a dedicated office that has that as its mandate, as its remit and as its obligation to the community I think was a turning point in this new phase of internationalisation that we’re on now. 

We also made the decision soon thereafter to create a new school of global affairs, which was another way for the university to say we have a strength in imagining what it means to work on everything from peace and conflict resolution to international development, to public health. So by having a university-wide office, Notre Dame International and then creating the first new school in over 100 years, The Keough School of Global Affairs, we showed to the world, and I think it’s important that you do show this kind of work to the world, that we were serious about being a global institution.

Tell us about the process and/or journey the university undertook to implement its strategy?

I’ve been in this position for five years. I’m the second person to hold the position, so when I came on board, we developed the global strategic plan for the university. We did that through engaging every possible partner on campus. We spoke with deans of different colleges and schools, we spoke with department chairs, we spoke with faculty members and faculty committees, we spoke with international students, we spoke with student affairs colleagues, we spoke with everyone we could to say; ‘What does it mean for you, where you sit with your work? What does it mean for Notre Dame to be the premier global Catholic University in the world? What does it mean to be an international institution? What can we, as an office, do to help facilitate your goals and dreams? Again, bringing them into the process, so that they have a stake in making us more international. All of that listening to and then working with our Office of Strategic Planning to create a four-point plan for the university.

They were, firstly, to strengthen our global gateways and centres – all of the research platforms and study abroad platforms we have all around the world;  that we be recognised as a leader in the field of global education and make sure that we’re all going out into the world and presenting what we do differently; supporting global faculty research and then finally, internationalising the campus at home. 

So, no matter who you are on campus, you should be able to plug into one of those four key areas and feel that you have a role to play and you’re obligated to play it. That process has been great. We’ve had to over-communicate everything, we’ve had to make sure the lines of communication remain open. We’ve also had to work on cultivating better relationships – both on campus and off  – to make all that happen. And that starts to become an iterative process, where people feel more and more comfortable doing that and understand that it’s expected, and that allows us to get to our goals. That’s what we’ve seen so that’s been really exciting and rewarding.

What would you see as the main challenges that Notre Dame has come up against in this journey?

There are many, of course. I think one is when you have the foresight and the vision to create an office like Notre Dame International, one easy default for the rest of the community is to say, ‘Oh, they do international and we do our own work. We just keep to what we do’. And so we’ve had to work very hard and we’ve made great strides, but it’s a challenge that we fight against every day to say –  international work is everyone’s responsibility – just like a student’s well-being is everyone’s responsibility. Yes, as an international office, we have a certain level of expertise to be able to facilitate and advance our global aspirations, but we need our colleagues in the Division of Finance to be thinking how they have to do some of their work differently when we are talking about global finance. Or when we’re talking to our admissions colleagues, we have to realise that getting an international student from the country of their home can sometimes be very different than recruiting a student from right down right down the road.

That is a really important part of the work, sharing that and educating everyone, making sure that everyone understands that we all have a role to play in internationalising university. We all rise or fall together –  it’s just that simple.

I think the other challenge is that internationalisation is neither easy, nor cheap. We all know that it costs more to operate internationally to have a global scheme – whether it’s to recruit graduate students, or to fund and underwrite research somewhere. That’s an investment of time, resources and talent and sometimes, the global scope and the global cost and the global apparatus of different laws in different countries and different expectations can be overwhelming. It can make people feel that they want to retreat into a defensive shell. But we work really hard to say, yes, it’s different working abroad and it may cost more or we may need to invest for now, but the returns on that new research project or that new global gateway for our students to study at and faculty to research at will pay off over time. That’s part of the challenge as well.

How would you describe internationalisation in terms of the student experience? 

We have an obligation to make sure that our students are prepared for the global challenges that they’re going to face as professionals and as members of the communities that they inhabit.

To that end, we have to be able to provide them with a rich variety of international experiences. So for some students, that will look like traditional study abroad. For others, it will be doing global research in a laboratory, or a research group at an international university that’s a partner of ours. For others, it will be doing an internship with a multinational company somewhere. For others, it will be doing service learning; perhaps some sort of independent project through their own co curricular club. We have an obligation to create pathways and to provide preparation so that students can take advantage of all of those kinds of experiences to become better global citizens, to understand how to live with ambiguity, to understand how to work cross-culturally and communicate cross-culturally and to know how to integrate that into their life, whether it’s their professional life, their personal life or their academic life. 

We also have an obligation to make our campus more international. If we send everyone out, but we’re not bringing anyone in, we will have failed. We need people who speak different languages on campus and we need to hear those languages. We need to see people who look different from us and come from different backgrounds. We have to be able to bring the international to our campus and to the community, the state, the region that we’re in. Because that again benefits all of us; it’s just as important to us and this is why it’s one of the four planks of our strategic plan as it stands now.

We have to internationalise our campus. That means more international students at the undergraduate level, more international students at the graduate level and providing those students with opportunities to feel integrated into the community. We want them to call this place home, and at the same time, they’re making Notre Dame a richer place. That’s another really important part of the student experience.

In your opinion, is there a conflict between internationalisation of the university on the one hand and its’ quest for distinctiveness on the other?

I like to believe you can have your cake and eat it too. I think that becoming more international doesn’t make us less of who we are, it doesn’t make us a lesser Notre Dame or it doesn’t make us like everyone else. I think what becoming a more global university does for us is that it makes us have experiences and it creates opportunities so that we have a better sense of who we are and what makes us distinctive, because we’ve learned from people that are different than us and institutional partners that are different than us. So, I feel that it actually makes us a more sophisticated and complicated and nuanced place, rather than making us somehow just like everyone else.

What advice would you offer NUI Galway as we embark on our journey?

I think that you need to be willing to experiment with lots of different things. Becoming a more international university means that you have to risk things in different ways. You might be asking yourself and your colleagues to do work in a different way, you might be trying to cultivate a new international partner that you haven’t cultivated before. Maybe it’s in a part of the world that you’re not used to doing business in.

You have to ask yourself and your colleagues on campus to do and imagine their work in a different way and you should have fun with that. It’s really a chance to experiment. It’s a chance to explore. Not everything you do is going to work, not everything we’ve tried in terms of our global strategy has paid off, and we’ve learned from those mistakes and moved on. But I think you have to approach it like you would travel; it’s something that is meant to open your mind up and open your world up to new horizons, and to just have fun with it.