The different regions of the world we inhabit have become demonstrably more connected over time. More recently, these connections have been aided by technologies like air travel, which permits the transportation of people and goods, and computer networks, which permit the flow of information and ideas. They have also been aided by the more deliberate efforts of political and economic actors, such as universities, trying to access specific markets previously outside of their purview. These efforts can be described as internationalization. HEIs in the United States (and elsewhere) have been engaged in internationalization for decades. Perhaps most saliently, their internationalization has brought about the presence of many
“international”—originating outside of the US—faculty (Kim, Twombly, & Wolf-Wendel, 2012) and students (Institute of International Education, 2015).
The prevalence of international teaching assistants is suggested by the demographics of doctoral recipients from US HEIs, as shown in the National Science Foundation’s (2014) Survey of Earned Doctorates. According to the NSF’s data, temporary visa holders accounted for approximately 31.8% of all awarded doctorates in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available. This percentage varied greatly by field. It was quite a bit higher within most of the STEM fields. For example, in Engineering, temporary visa holders accounted for about 51.6% of all doctoral recipients. In other fields, it was substantially lower; for example, in Education, only about 10% of all doctoral recipients were temporary visa holders. To my knowledge, no data is available on precisely how many of these doctoral recipients served as teaching assistants nor how many of them would be regarded as nonnative speakers of English (or speakers of stigmatized Englishes). However, given the prevalence of teaching assistantships as a form of support for graduate studies as well as graduate programs’ desire to give their graduates
experience in the classroom, it is likely that many of these doctoral recipients did serve as teaching assistants at some point during their graduate education. Furthermore, the top four national origins (China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan; Canada was fifth) accounted for about 58.8% of temporary visa holders who earned doctorates at US HEIs in 2014, which suggests that the majority of these temporary visa holders are nonnative English speakers or speakers of Englishes that are stigmatized in the United States (e.g., Indian English).
US HEIs’ recruitment of international faculty and students (ITAs are arguably both) has numerous possible motivations, which I divide into two categories. The first are factors related to potential (short term) economic gain or advantage. Although HEIs often seek to recruit
international students as a way of generating revenue, since ITAs’ assistantships usually cover their tuition costs, this may not be the most relevant incentive for understanding the economic incentives that drive HEIs’ recruitment of ITAs. However, considering the use of assistantships as a recruitment tool helps to explain why US HEIs may employ large numbers of ITAs.
Teaching (and other) assistantships serve a number of functions for HEIs. Graduate assistants provide labor in the form of teaching classes, grading papers, leading recitation or lab sections, and other duties. HEIs also use these assistantships to their advantage in the
competition to attract and recruit new graduate students. As Stephan, Scellato, and Franzoni (2015) note, US HEIs’ ability to provide the tuition waivers and stipends that come along with assistantships is an important influence on where prospective international graduate students choose to earn their degrees. As they point out, such incentives are likely more powerful for attracting international students (from certain, usually less wealthy, backgrounds) than US students into graduate programs, since the typical stipends associated with assistantships are substantially lower than average starting salaries in the US for individuals with Bachelor’s
degrees. This appears to be one of the driving forces behind the large numbers of international graduate students enrolled in US graduate programs in fields related to the natural sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Ginther, 2003; King, 1998). The wages offered to teaching assistants then prove to be a fairly inadequate way of attracting US students into the candidate pool, but they do serve as an incentive for students from other countries to apply to programs in the US, suggesting that HEIs and ITAs have the potential for mutual economic benefit from the arrangement.
However, there are other possible motivations behind US HEIs’ recruitment of
international faculty and students, and more specifically ITAs. Among these are factors related to the internationalization of the curriculum or, as Leask (2009, p. 209) describes it “the
incorporation of an international and intercultural dimension into the content of the curriculum as well as the teaching and learning process”, and institutions routinely position themselves as engaged in the internationalization of their curriculum (Dippold, 2015). However, Dippold argues that most of the focus in internationalization of the curriculum has been on the inclusion of materials and content from other national contexts into existing programs. She points out that there are potentially important, but as of yet unrealized, benefits of educational initiatives that attempt to engage students in meaningful interaction with others who have backgrounds different from their own. Viewed in this manner, international students and faculty, of which ITAs are a part, become an important asset in creating opportunities for students, especially those students who have not had much exposure to people from different backgrounds, to develop competence in interacting with and understanding others. Indeed, HEIs around the world, including in the US, now routinely express commitments to developing students’ competences related to working
with others in a globalizing world (Dippold, 2015; Jenkins, 2014), and the ITA-taught classroom is potentially an arena where such competencies could be developed and practiced.
It is within this context of globalization and HEIs’ attempts to respond to it that ‘the ITA problem’ has arisen as an issue that policymakers, researchers, and educators have grappled with. Confronted with instructors whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds differ from their own, US students have complained that, among other things, they have difficulties understanding their ITAs and other international instructors (Alberts, Hazen, & Theobald, 2013; Bailey, 1984a; Berdie, Anderson, Wenberg, & Price, 1976; Damron, 2003; Fitch & Morgan, 2003; Fox & Gay, 1994; Halleck & Moder, 1995; Plakans, 1997; Subtirelu, 2015; Villarreal, 2013).
Students’ complaints have not fallen on deaf ears. In the 1980s and 1990s, they were heard by state legislators and other policy makers, who took it upon themselves to address the problem through state-level policy creation in twenty states (C. F. Thomas & Monoson, 1993). Other states contemplated similar state policies, and other university systems took the initiative to address the complaints of their own accord (King, 1998). King points to student and parent complaints about ITAs’ language and their dissemination in public media as the impetus for these policy efforts, and Ginther (2003) suggests that administrators have been further motivated by the desire to avoid litigation arising from students’ complaints. Bailey (1984a) notes that, since universities orient to students as consumers, students have a powerful voice in institutional decision-making with respect to ‘the ITA problem’. The resulting policies usually mandated that HEIs assess the English proficiency of prospective ITAs (and in some cases, other international instructors) and remediate those whose language is found lacking. HEIs’ and state governments’ policy responses then suggest a clear tendency toward privileging the perspectives of students who issued complaints (Ginther, 2003), allowing the need to quell their dissatisfaction to prevail
over other possible motivations for internationalization, like the fostering of skills for communicating across linguistic difference among all parties.