I was disappointed that I had to cancel our division meeting last week. Thank you to all of you who reached out and voiced your concern for my well-being. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it may have appeared. I tested positive for COVID and was managing the worst of it the day before and day of our scheduled meeting. It just wasn’t going to be possible for me to be present, and rescheduling an in-person event for a group our size at this point in the year simply wasn’t feasible. I’m doing well now but saddened to have missed a chance to connect with you in person.
I want to take some time to cover a few things that I had hoped to go over last Wednesday. I know and have heard that there is a lot of uncertainty and many questions. While some of that I can allay and some I cannot, I do think communication, transparency, and clarity where we have it are essential.
State of International Affairs at KU
The division meeting was billed as a “State of International Affairs” event, and I will say that we remain incredibly strong, despite the impact of a confluence of external negative factors beyond our control. The loss of federal funding and contracts, nearly continuous challenges on the immigration front, economic uncertainty, global conflicts, population shifts, and growing challenges to the place and role of higher education in U.S. society have many of us on edge. We are incredibly skilled in what we do, however, and operating under ambiguity and in a context of scarce resources is nothing new to us.
I have linked to a document that reflects just a handful of your accomplishments in recent months to underscore my point. From an astonishing and continuing rebound in education abroad at KU, to transformative curriculum revisions for the AEC and the emergence of new short program models, your story is one of dedication, innovation, passion, and resilience.
>> Download the March 31 Division Report
I encourage you to look at the report and learn more about these accomplishments. I also encourage you to think beyond the numbers to the stories underlying them. Those stories, which we also collectively highlight in our regular newsletters, speak to the importance and impact of your work, which often goes underappreciated by those who don’t look closely enough. I’ll point to the work of ISS as an example.
One could just look at the 15% decline in our in-person international enrollments between last spring and today (see attachment) and think there isn’t much else to say. A percentage, however, doesn’t speak to how we are bucking national trends, which are seeing declines in excess of 25 to 30%. The magnitude of our decline, in context, is important as it underscores the impact of the work of our immigration advisors to keep students in status and the work of our student engagement team to foster a sense of belonging in our community. A percentage point doesn’t reflect the care and commitment you show every day, nor the difficult conditions you’ve worked through to keep supporting our international students and programs.
That is why I state with conviction, informed by your data, that the division of international affairs is strong. We are succeeding in spaces few others are. We are growing in areas that other institutions are closing down, and we have the support of KU’s highest levels of leadership at a time when so many of our colleagues across the country are experiencing cuts because their work is not deemed essential, as core to their institutions’ identities or worthy of investment and prioritization when times are tough and money is tight.
Each of you serves KU and our internationalized community beautifully and powerfully, and I deeply appreciate that work. It’s work that will carry us through to a new day for international higher education. I say this with conviction, and I am committed to advocating for your future because I believe in the work that you do.
Future Landscape
There is reason for hope when we look at the federal landscape for international education. In a bipartisan mini-bus bill passed by Congress this spring, over $80 million in funding was allocated in support of Title VI provisions and the Fulbright-Hays Act. Congress was also explicit in their bill that these funds could not be spent on other priority areas of the executive branch. The reason for that explicit reminder is not lost on us, having lost $2.3 million in awarded Title VI funds this academic year. Our funds, we were told, had already been redistributed to other areas of executive priority.
This new funding commitment means that both sides of the aisle remain supportive of our work to promote area studies knowledge and expertise. When this funding might materialize and what priorities will be articulated in the call for proposals is anyone’s guess, but it’s comforting to know that Title VI is part of a continuing conversation and remains among Congressional priorities.
In many ways, however, the question of Title VI is more about what we do and how we prioritize our time, rather than who does the work. You all know that we have had quite enough work to do, even without new funding from the U.S. Department of Education this year. It’s important to point out that nationally and locally, Title VI funding only represents about 10% of the cost of operating area studies centers and was never designed to pay to staff them. I emphasize this because I know that many of you are concerned, especially those of you who work within the centers, about the prospects of continued employment. The loss of Title VI funding—hopefully only temporary—does not significantly affect staff funding in our division. There are a few exceptions to this, but those positions have been taken on centrally by KUIA this year.
It is for this reason that, upon the discontinuation of Title VI funding in September, the leadership team of KUIA, including your directors, focused on situating your work and the value of that work within the context of KU’s institutional priorities and agenda as we advocate for continued base funding for our entire operation. While we have fully supported Title VI and are incredibly proud of our heritage, our vision and value is not limited to or by Title VI. It is essential that KU see the extraordinary worth of the work of our centers with great specificity, just as they see the value of immigration compliance, English proficiency development and readiness for college success, and high impact practices such as education abroad. That work underlies my budget request and justification for continued institutional funding for our internationalization efforts.
The centers perform a common constellation of core functions in concert with partners across KUIA and the university that support KU’s research, teaching, and service mission. They are, in effect, comprehensive regional internationalization hubs that bring together, focus, further and apply KU’s unique international expertise, meeting critical needs of both internal and external constituencies.
These areas include:
- Promoting regional scholarship and creating space for regional knowledge and awareness.
- Building strong, strategic relationships with people and institutions in your regions and across the world, including faculty, student, and staff mobility.
- Ensuring linguistic and cultural knowledge informs practice—recognizing that effective collaboration comes from trust, empathy, and sustained experience, not just translation.
- Connecting students and scholars to our community by promoting your regions and bringing their voices into prominence across the institution.
- Collecting and using data on our engagement and its impact so we can better tell our stories and demonstrate the value of international education.
While I know you all do much more than this, these five themes represent irreplaceable contributions that justify continued institutional support for our work and our people. I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made so far. Although I won’t have final budget numbers for next year for several more weeks, I feel very good about how we are organizing ourselves, the strong value proposition we have built together, and the positive impression we’ve made on university leadership through our many successes.
This is a time for KU to shine and continue to invest in international education because each of those investments stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of other institutions. In the longer term, recognizing it is easier to maintain capacity than it is to regain what you have given away, what we do now has the power not only to keep KU at the top in terms of institutional capacity in the area of internationalization, but to establish us as one of only a handful of research institutions that have prioritized that capacity when times got tough. Your work and impact make it easy for KU to make that affirmative decision and to continue to invest in us. When I have final word on our budget for next fiscal year, I will share that with you immediately as I am fully aware of the fact that this is first and foremost on your minds. For now, however, please know that I am very optimistic.
Organizational Changes
Organizationally, we have a lot going on as we work to make our case and build a relevant and sustainable future together. We have been updating curricula to ensure strong alignment with the rest of KU and to minimize logistical access barriers for our students. We have been preparing for regulatory changes that will dramatically impact how our international students navigate their degree and post-degree programs with us. We have partnered with new organizations to develop tailored programming that helps keep U.S. borders open. We have collaborated with World Cup planning committees to ensure we are prepared for the deluge of international activity that we are about to experience across the region.
Internally, we have also been looking at structures, position descriptions, your talents and interests as members of our team, our divisional alignment and support structures, and how we can use data to monitor and improve our work and best tell our stories to ensure continued support for our work. To that end, we have also been building new data tracking systems based on previous federal reporting obligations, to create consistency and clarity on the one hand, and to ensure we have the information we need to advocate for our efforts and pursue new opportunities at a moment’s notice.
This is all part of adapting to our environment, but it’s also part of coming together as a single division. Change is stressful, to be sure. But each of these efforts is designed to help us build a strong future together. Having a central database that allows us to collect data across our ten units on programming and events, for example, is incredibly important to telling the story of a busy division that is reaching a lot of people through its complex and diverse programming. We punch well above our weight, and these data demonstrate that in important ways. Our story is not that we have had Title VI funding taken from us, but that we have continued on in earnest and have made every cent of institutional investment matter – and as we did so, we increased KU’s global footprint manifold.
There are many projects like this – all coming together to help us demonstrate our capacity and impact in ways that KU has never seen. We have, by way of another example, identified metrics for each of the 17 types of international partnership activity that KU engages in and we are finalizing a database for all of that data to reside in. Alongside this, we developed a survey and engaged every partnership agreement champion on campus to see what they are doing and how we can be supportive of their efforts. This will become an annual process of data collection and should not only enable us to be more supportive of the work of our colleagues in international education across campus and the university, but should make us more informed and competitive when we leverage data in the pursuit of competitive external funding. Effort now, when we don’t have fully active Title VI funding in hand, will make things easier, more efficient, and more effective when new opportunities do come to the fore.
As I close, I want to thank you again for all that you do for KU and the world and share a bit of the rationale for my optimism and hope for the future. We live in uncertain times, and I know that things will continue to shift continuously for the foreseeable future. As we can see from the expanding conflict in the Middle East, we ignore our international knowledge, expertise and connections at our peril. It’s our job, mine in particular, to ensure we are there when we are called upon, just as it’s our job to ensure the next generation of “callers” has received an extraordinary international education right here at KU.
Good luck as the semester draws to a close. If any of you wish, I would be delighted to set up a time to connect in person and answer any questions that you might have, serve as a sounding board for your ideas, and/or to become more informed about your work and impact.
Rock Chalk!
Charles A. S. Bankart
