As I began to listen more carefully to conversations about international education at RIT, I heard repeatedly that each of the global campuses had a different business model. Highlighted as a key, distinguishing feature of each campus, the business model speaks to the dynamic relationship between RIT and its global partners, each with its own historical, national, educational, political, and economic context.
Often, when talking about the business models, discussants would mention RIT's Global Delivery Corporation. The GDC is a non-profit corporation established to "minimize risk to RIT" (Haefner, 2011).
Evidence of the historical predominance of the business model can be seen in the recent change in the efforts of RIT to establish and maintain its international education opportunities. In a report prepared in the fall of 2009, titled "Internationalization @ RIT," David Wilson offered a critical assessment of RIT's international efforts. Based on interviews and his own assessment, the author found that "internationalization was not yet part of the fabric of the University" (p. 13).
The following spring of 2010, "in an effort to support the continued advancement of international education[,] the Provost established a cross-divisional intercollegiate International Education Working Group. Then, in the Fall of 2011, the College of Liberal Arts charged its own "International Education Committee" with "promoting international study and global awareness through a variety of educational experiences as they pertain to the College of Liberal Arts." And in the Spring of 2012, an "Associate Provost for International Education and Global Programs" was hired "to guide the strategic growth and direction of international education and outreach."
Communication across the different, interested divisions and units of the institute, as well as the academic programming, policy, and assessment of international education are essential. The international education activities on our campus are significantly changing. As the formation of these committees and positions attest, the infrastructures for international education at RIT are also changing. The recent efforts at RIT demonstrate that infrastructure must be created to better support the educational activities. Such infrastructure must be created in order to catch up with the infrastructure initially produced following the business model.
Here, as in my edited collection, Transnational Writing Program Administration (2015), I use the term "transnational" to describe the growing phenomenon that Grant McBurnie and Christopher Ziguras address in their book Transnational Education: Issues and trends in offshore higher education as "any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another" (p. 1). But unlike "global" or "international," I use the term "transnational" because it also invokes a more critical, analytical orientation like that described by Rebeca Dingo in her book, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, transnational feminism, and public policy. Dingo (2012) argued:
The term transnational, while defined in a number of ways, generally refers to how globalization has influenced the movement of people and the production of texts, culture, and knowledge across borders so that the strict distinctions among nations and national practices can become blurred. In the last ten years, disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences have recognized that increasing globalization and enduring neoliberal economics have changed our understandings of citizenship, place, and texts. Drawing heavily from the fields of political science, sociology, geography, and women's studies, the emergent interdisciplinary field of transnational studies has sought to uncover, analyze, and conceptualize similarities, differences and interactions among trans-societal and trans-organizational realities and dynamics across time and space (Levitt and Khagram, p. 10–11). (p. 8–9)
By considering the infrastructure of "transnational writing programs," my aim is to continue a critical conversation about the opportunities and implications for the learning, teaching and administration of writing across-borders.
The bitter battle in the state of Wisconsin over the right of public employees to unionize and bargain collectively is now shifted to the courts and yet, the massive efforts to recall elected officials failed. The argument made by the Republican Governor, based upon a kind of market logic, is that after years of recession and continued economic downturns, the salaries and benefits of public employees, which were the result of collective bargaining, were too costly for the state to continue paying. Still, while the public employee unions agreed to reductions of pay and benefits, the governor insisting on his legislation in the Republican controlled legislature, despite the efforts of the minority Democrats to thwart the passage of the law, as well as widespread public support. An example of market logic gone awry: even when the unions agreed to reductions of pay and benefits to help close the budget deficit, the governor signed the law to restrict collective bargaining.