Is Western higher education’s soft power weakening?

Today, a growing number of top Chinese officials trace their academic lineage to Western institutions; yet, anti-Western sentiment in China appears stronger now than it has been in decades.

Western politicians hoping that the experience of a higher education in their nations’ universities might “endear future Chinese leaders to liberal values” seem likely to be disappointed. This offers sobering lessons for Western countries, which have hosted millions of Chinese students over the past four decades as their universities “raked in cash”, a recent article in The Economist observed.

Universities in the West will need to be alive to the rise of this argument: as West-China tensions heighten, the case is already being made from some quarters that educating Chinese students is a waste of time for Western nations, in political terms – meaning, supposedly, that the only beneficiaries are the bank balances of universities.

Are universities in the UK and other Western nations falling short on promoting soft power? And should spreading liberal values even be an aim of higher education?

A glance at a list of world leaders who studied in the UK confirms that it’s possible to come away from a Western university with highly illiberal values. Viktor Orbán received a scholarship from the Soros Foundation to study political science at Pembroke College, Oxford, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad studied ophthalmology in London.

Sylvie Lomer, a lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, whose research focuses on policies on international students in the UK, said the benefits of studying abroad could not always be quantified.

“Soft power isn’t a neat black box where we put students into HE and then observe soft power as an output – it’s nebulous, cyclical, mutually reinforcing,” she argued.

Although it’s true that institutions have graduated alumni who “don’t exactly reflect well on the UK”, they come with counterexamples, according to Dr Lomer. Britain was the centre of colonial power, but many of those who led anti-colonial and independence struggles gained their education in Britain, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the former Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta.

“Even at its arguably most imperial, British education served to facilitate critique and analysis – even if that wasn’t the intent,” Dr Lomer said.

Although some current soft power models assume that students from abroad come to destinations including the UK on scholarships, that’s not the case for the majority of overseas learners today, many of whom pay significantly higher fees than their domestic counterparts, observed Dr Lomer. “Why should students feel grateful or connected to a country that has merely provided a service for which they have paid amply, especially if their experience hasn’t been entirely positive?”

In such a marketised model, it was “difficult to see” why students would develop a sense of loyalty beyond “brand loyalty” to their institution, she said.

Dr Lomer said she was wary of the idea that Western institutions should seek to imprint so-called Western values on their graduates: “If we are indeed a liberalising force…we have to be a space in which multiple values are placed in conversation. If we were…transmitting a singular set of values, we wouldn’t be liberal or liberalising; we would be indoctrinating.”

Tania Rhodes-Taylor, chief executive of the higher education consultancy Otus Advisory, agreed.

“Soft power was never about inculcating liberal values; it’s about understanding and influencing rather than coercion,” she said.

Focusing on the overseas alumni of Western institutions who had gone on to become dictators or promote policies hostile to the West missed the mark, Ms Rhodes-Taylor added. Amid the hundreds of thousands of people who had attended Western universities and gone on to work in fields including business and research, fostering international ties, senior figures in anti-Western or illiberal regimes were the exception rather than the rule, she argued.

Instead, soft power was about “knowing how to work with different people, how to engage, compromise and adjust to make something happen with someone from somewhere else”, she said.

Still, Ms Rhodes-Taylor said, universities could not simply admit international students and call it a day. It was up to institutions – especially those with large numbers of overseas learners – to adjust their pedagogy in such a way as to ensure these students were included and interested, she said.

Higher education had an “enormous opportunity” for diplomacy with the right pieces in place, said Angela Lehmann, head of research at the consultancy the Lygon Group.

But without proper support for international students, study abroad and degrees overseas could potentially backfire, she warned.

“With poor social and educational experiences we risk not only losing this opportunity, but also widening the gap between different systems,” she said.

“If students experience living in a different society with values and histories that are different from their own, but experience discrimination, racism and a lack of support, this will lead them to be even more committed to their ‘home’ system.”

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com