Internationalizing the Academy: Lessons of Leadership in Higher Education

Internationalizing the Academy is the first book to offer a detailed look at efforts to bring ambitious and expanding portfolios of international programs to US campuses. Gilbert W. Merkx and Riall W. Nolan, leading figures in the burgeoning international higher education sector, provide a thorough examination of how numerous “internationalizing” efforts are being implemented and promoted on a strikingly wide range of campuses.

At the heart of the volume are accounts by ten of the nation’s most experienced senior international officers that explore crucial aspects of their work: the strategic visions for international education that they helped develop on their own campuses; how they worked on behalf of those evolving visions with key stakeholders, including the administration and faculty; and the main lessons that they learned in the course of creating these programs.

The result is a singular—and uniquely useful—resource for leaders and policy makers in the higher education field that comes at a time when colleges and universities are urgently scaling up their international ventures. Internationalizing the Academy is an essential account of a dynamic, centrally important development on campuses throughout the United States.

Gilbert W. Merkx is Professor of the Practice of Sociology at Duke University, where he served as vice provost for International Affairs from 2001 to 2010. He received his BA from Harvard and MA and PhD from Yale.

Merkx was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela. He has been a Fulbright scholar in anthropology at the University of Huamanga in Perú and a visiting scholar at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires and at the Latin American Institute of the University of Stockholm. He has taught on the faculties of Yale University, Göteborg University (Sweden), and the University of New Mexico, where he was director of the Latin American and Iberian Institute from 1980 to 2001. At Duke University he has been director of the Center for International Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Center for Islamic Studies. He served as director of International and Area Studies from 2010 to 2015.

His research has focused on public policy formation, international education, and social networks. He has done field research in Peru, Argentina, Sweden, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay. His books include The Jewish Experience in Latin America (with Judith Elkin, Allen & Unwin, 1987), International Education in the New Global Era (with John Hawkins et al., International Studies and Overseas Programs, UCLA, 1997), and Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics (with Adrian Bejan, Springer, 2007).

Merkx served as editor of the Latin American Research Review from 1982 to 2002. He is also past president of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) and serves on its board and those of Venice International University and the Scholars at Risk Network.

Riall W. Nolan is professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, where, until 2009, he served as associate provost and dean of International Programs. Nolan earned his PhD in social anthropology from Sussex University in 1975.

At the start of his career, Nolan worked overseas for nearly twenty years in the field of international development, as a project designer, manager, and evaluator. He has lived and worked in Senegal, Tunisia, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. His work included grass-roots community projects with the Peace Corps, project design and management with USAID, and policy analysis with the World Bank. He has also participated in numerous consulting assignments for both bilateral agencies and NGOs.

Prior to coming to Purdue in 2003, Nolan managed international programs at the University of Pittsburgh, Golden Gate University, and the University of Cincinnati. He is the past chair of NAFSA’s task force on International Education Leadership and a past board member of both AIEA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. He presently serves on the national board of Engineers Without Borders and on the editorial board for the UK-based journal Anthropology in Action. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a Foreign Area fellow, and a Ford-Rockefeller fellow, and he has won teaching awards at both Pitt and Purdue. He writes, consults, and presents frequently on issues of international development, cross-cultural adaptation, and applied anthropology.