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Academics are now highly mobile. We are internationally-focused. Even if our research is highly localised, we are very mindful of the need to foster international conversations, networks and partnerships, and publications.
We swap notes about which software allows us to video conference without the picture freezing every few minutes, and how to best share files, images and co-authoring.
We are very familiar with high-speed trains, long-haul planes and the vicissitudes of lost luggage, skipped meals and cancelled flights. In this brave new scholarly world, the international academic has a particular position and currency.
I am one of those international academics. Mine is not a unique or singular story. I moved to the UK from Australia 11 years ago. At the time I didn't think too much about it. I was ready for a late-career academic adventure.
I had a partner prepared to move, a grown-up family and two young dogs who could be micro-chipped, packed up in vet-approved crates and flown away in air-conditioned comfort. A house was easily sold, possessions loaded into a tin container and moved from a dry South Australian desert on one side of the world to a Midlands drizzle on the other.
Academics have of course always moved around. My own undergraduate experience at Adelaide University was greatly enhanced by conversations with lecturers who had studied abroad. They brought a cosmopolitan consciousness to our liberal, but provincial, university. They were however a tiny minority in an overwhelmingly Antipodean institution.
International academics are no longer a tiny minority
These days, the international academic is much easier to find. We are no longer a tiny minority. At my current institution, the University of Nottingham, close to one in every five academic staff comes from somewhere other than the UK. And this is not an uncommon picture around the country.
Achieving this kind of staffing mix isn't accidental. Universities have decided that they want to operate in a global market for both students and staff . They deliberately place job advertisements in a range of overseas locations as well as making them available on the web.
Search committees and personal networks are encouraged to be active in spreading the word about vacancies and opportunities. But why, we might ask. What does the claim to search for the best in the world actually mean?
We enhance the student experience
We international academics bring a range of interesting benefits to our new British institutions.
A culturally and linguistically rich mix of academics enhances the experience of students. International academics share the need to make connections between what happens here and what happens elsewhere. We incorporate into our teaching our homegrown literatures, scholars, histories and ways of life. We provide experiences and narratives that might otherwise be harder to access and more remote and abstract.
International academics embody the idea that it's possible to be educated and scholarly no matter who you are and where you're from. We represent to students, and to the wider public, the international nature of our institutions in particular and of a globalised academy more generally. We are the quintessential mobile global knowledge workers professor Robert Reich wrote about. We are what we tell our students they can be – but only if they work hard!
We international academics bring competitive advantages to our new employers. Bids, citations and esteem are now the currency of higher education quality and international academics can count and be counted in these areas.
Our previously local knowledge and contacts can be very helpful to our new institutions; we may come from countries and/or institutions that are of strategic interest.
We can also offer high citations; we bring existing home readers, we write with our former colleagues and we add readers in our new country. We may also bring esteem to our new institutions because we are invited back home as international experts to keynote events and lead prestigious projects.
But all this here-ing and there-ing creates a somewhat ambiguous mandate for the international academic. On the one hand, we want to pursue research in our new location. The challenge of transferring our interests is one of the things that was most attractive about the move in the first place. On the other hand, there is also considerable mileage in keeping close contact with our former connections, research agendas and policies, events and scholarship in the places we have come from.
This kind of double-thinking and double-being is increasingly the lot of the international academic. We are neither simply expats nor migrated scholars, but must somehow metaphorically be astride two locations and contexts, always a little concerned about not falling too far to one side or the other. Some of us get tired of this and go home. Some of us stay and get acclimatised.
We relish the ready access to places and practices we previously only knew in books. Home and away becomes the only way to be.
Pat Thomson is professor of education at Nottingham University – follow her on Twitter @ThomsonPat.
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