The internationalisation of higher education: some ethical implications

Abstract

All the papers included in this volume implicitly adopt an ethical stance towards the aspect of internationalisation that they investigate or discuss, but necessarily these stances only occasionally become explicit. In this paper, therefore, I look at the impact of internationalisation on universities and at their impact in turn on the international students and communities they interact with, and I consider what the ethical implications might be of the different internationalising strategies and actions that universities adopt. The ethical implications of the internationalisation of Higher Education (HE) are necessarily tied up with the ethical implications of HE more generally, such as are encoded in the IAU/Magna Charta Guidelines, but I attempt in this paper to draw out more specific ethical guidelines that might be incorporated into any HE institution's internationalisation strategy.