A piece I wrote about international students at American universities has been published at the Huffington Post. It’s worth saying that I wrote this piece before both this story in the New York Times and the horribly bigoted Pete Hoekstra Super Bowl ad came out. Were I to write the piece now, it would likely be quite a bit more intemperate. Look, I will cop to being a 100% biased figure here. I work at a school with a huge international population. I am carrying a secondary area in English as a Second Language. I work every day as both a teacher and as a researcher towards developing better teaching practices for students who are not native English speakers.

But even the most sober and neutral observer would have to admit that the facts simply are not in Hoekstra’s favor. As the Times piece makes clear, international students more than pay for themselves by paying higher tuition, which often directly subsidizes domestic student scholarships. These higher rates are often in turn offset by foreign governments who subsidize students who get their educations in America. If a foreign country wants to pay to send their students to our universities, giving us the benefit of tuition dollars and brilliant students, and them the benefit of citizens trained at the best universities in the world, I can’t imagine what rational person would object. But then, Hoekstra and people like him– people who think it is appropriate to represent a vast group of diverse students with a crude stereotype– are not rational.

There are indeed careful decisions to be made when it comes to the population of public universities. Part of the basic idea of public universities is to serve the local population, and in fact many universities, such as Morrill Act land grant colleges, were founded under that directive. But our campuses are big, our populations are large, and students both international and domestic benefit from our shared pedagogical space. As I argue in the piece, no education could be complete in today’s world without attention paid to being a citizen of a globalized world. Please check it out.

Update: Just FYI, the links I included in the piece appear to have been lost. Several of them provided evidence for my claims. Feel free to email or comment if you want citations.