The foundation — and what came after
For years, the international office was the place where internationalisation happened.
It managed mobility. It signed agreements. It hosted delegations. It reported numbers.
And it did this work with dedication — often with too few people and too many expectations.
That work mattered. It built the foundation.
But the foundation is no longer the whole building.
A conversation I still remember
I remember a conversation during a learning experience with a vice-president responsible for internationalisation at one of the world’s leading universities.
I no longer recall the university’s name or the person’s name. But I remember very clearly one idea she shared about the purpose of her role.
When the university’s president invited her to take on the position, she was surprised. She asked why he had chosen her.
His answer stayed with me.
He explained that the university needed someone who could connect the other vice-presidents — someone who would help them understand that international education was not an additional activity or the responsibility of one department, but something central to the university’s development.
The person in this role needed more than international expertise.
They needed the ability to communicate across institutional boundaries, build trust, bring different perspectives together, and help colleagues see how international connectedness could strengthen their own academic and strategic priorities.
The role was not simply to lead internationalisation. It was to help the university become capable of living it.
The deeper institutional question
I have returned to this idea many times throughout my own work in international higher education.
Because it points to a deeper institutional question.
What if the purpose of international leadership is not to make the international office more powerful, but to make internationalisation less dependent on the international office?
Today, internationalisation is already taking place across the university — in classrooms, research teams, student projects, digital collaboration, and partnerships that no longer wait for one office to initiate them.
The challenge is no longer simply to create international activity.
It is to help the whole institution recognise, connect and develop the international dimension of its academic life.
A different kind of leadership
This requires a different kind of leadership: less focused on ownership, more focused on enabling; less concerned with controlling activities, more concerned with creating the conditions in which meaningful collaboration can emerge.
And perhaps, in five years, the university may no longer need a vice-president whose primary task is to explain why internationalisation matters.
Not because the role will have failed or become irrelevant.
But because its purpose will have been fulfilled.
When international connectedness becomes part of how a university thinks, teaches, researches, collaborates and makes decisions, it no longer needs to be constantly introduced as a separate institutional priority.
The function may change because the institution itself has changed.
The future of international leadership
This is how I understand the future of the international office — or perhaps, more accurately, the future of international leadership within a university.
Not as the centre that owns internationalisation, but as a force that helps the university become a more connected, open and continuously learning ecosystem.
In a Living University, internationalisation is not something that happens in one office.
It is part of the university’s way of being.
Why this conversation stayed with me
Some professional conversations stay with us for years because they reveal something larger than the immediate subject.
This was one of those conversations for me.
And I believe that the next stage of international higher education will be shaped by people who are ready to think beyond organisational boundaries — and to explore what universities could become when international connectedness is no longer a function, but a shared institutional capacity.
