Currently, 3.3 million students study outside of their own country, which represents a 65% increase since 2000 (Bhandari & Blumenthal, 2011, p. 1). Such student migration brings with it significant revenue for the institutions providing instruction to students, and for the communities to which students migrate and spend their money on housing, food, etc. Accordingly, education is now considered one of the 12 service sectors as articulated by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) managed by the World Trade Organization; "positive proof that importing and exporting of education programs and services is a potentially lucrative trade area especially for the commercial companies (OECD 2004a)" (Knight, 2011, p. 32).
As a further indicator of this growing trend, The New York Times, on February 10, 2008, presented a series entitled Global Classrooms in "U.S. Universities Rush to Set Up Outposts Abroad" (Lewin). Fourteen higher education institutions were mentioned as having established or begun talks to establish international branch campuses. The next day a second article, "In Oil-Rich Mideast, Shades of the Ivy League," profiled "Education City" in Doha, Qatar (Lewin, 11 Feb. 2008). Both articles reported on opportunities and challenges to the expansion of U.S.-style education abroad, particularly in the Middle East region. RIT was one of the schools with international branch campuses identified in the Global Classrooms series of articles.
The range of activities comprising international partnerships is expanding and becoming more complicated. Professor of Foreign Studies Robin Sakamoto and Professor of Educational Leadership David Chapman (2011) discussed those activities as including not just instructional-oriented programs (i.e., the exchange of students and faculty), but also non-instructional partnerships, which include "[the] creation of branch campuses, joint research and technology initiatives, collaboration in strengthening institutional management, testing, faculty development efforts, collaboration in quality assurance, and sharing of technology" (p. 4). While instructional-oriented activities like study abroad certainly entail significant infrastructure in terms of establishing relationships between institutions and the logistics of safe travel, many of the structures and policies in place at the main institution are sufficient to allow for student and faculty mobility to other campuses for a short period of time. For example, numerous U.S.-based academic programs require—if not simply allow—students to study abroad, and student financial aid can be used to cover the cost of the study abroad.
Non-instructional programs, on the other hand, are often not, or not entirely, tuition based, so they have less stable sources of funding. According to Sakamoto and Chapman (2011), they are also more likely to be "opportunistic, built around a specific activity" (p. 6). Stated another way, the authors wrote, "while instructional programs tend to originate as institutional initiatives, non-instructional programs are more likely to originate through activities of individual faculty members" (p. 6). With regard to infrastructure, the direct implication is that instructional programs may have the benefit of more long-standing infrastructures, while non-instructional programs, like branch campuses, might survive on the charisma of individuals who cobble together available resources to support activities required by the program and sponsorship of interested benefactors.
In the case of "cross-border programs," Sakamoto and Chapman (2011) explained that while all participants in the partnership see some benefits from the relationship, the different standpoints or positions inhabited by the participants can also reveal different motivations:
When considering the particular utilization and development of infrastructure, it is important to consider the motivations for the creation of these kinds of activities. Trends identified by Sakamoto and Chapman (2011) included generating income, which is often the most common motivation for such partnerships, but also included "promoting brand recognition, increasing market share, and national strategic interests" (p. 6).
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.