Internationalizing Leiden: An Ethnography of
the Challenges Faced by International Students
Student: Enrico Pizzichini
Supervisor: Dr. Andrew Littlejohn
Universiteit Leiden
I would like to thank my supervisor and all the people who contributed to this
project and who have believed in me throughout this year.
A special mention goes to µικρή µου, who has made my life much more
Table of Contents
Introduction
... 1Presenting the Field and the Research Group... 6
Chapter One - Theoretical Framework, Methodology, Ethics of the Research ... 10
Problem Definition and Theoretical Foundation ... 10
Methodology ... 19
Ethics ... 27
Chapter Two - Housing ... 29
Private Housing Market and the University’s Housing Office ... 32
The Role of Dutch Student Associations in Housing and Interactions ... 38
The Role of the Institution ... 43
Conclusion ... 45
Chapter Three - Interactions, Issues of Identity, Culture, and Language ... 47
Interactions between Dutch and International Students ... 50
Dutch Student Association: The “Dutch Identity” and its Role ... 55
Lack of Inclusion: Leiden and The Netherlands ... 60
Conclusion ... 68
Chapter Four - The Organization of the University: Lacking “Knife and Fork” .... 71
Study Programmes: Organization of the Courses ... 72
Side Activities and Student Associations: Advertisement, Organization, Language .... 82
The Orientation Week Leiden (OWL) ... 89
Conclusion ... 93
Chapter Five - Internationalization: Strategies vis a vis Students’ Impressions of the Institution ... 95
Attracting Internationals: Strategies, Issues, and Expectations ... 99
Leiden University and Internationalization: The Impressions of the Protagonists .... 107
Conclusion ... 114
Conclusion ... 116
Executive Summary ... 121
1
Introduction
My interest in the life of university’s students comes from the experiences I have witnessed during my academic path. This interest developed even more when I became an international student at Leiden University. By knowing a myriad of students and exchanges, and by listening to their stories concerning accomplishments and failures, I wanted to understand what it really means to be an international student. What are the issues we daily face, and in what ways do we deal with such issues?
The fear of not finding accommodation, living in a new atmosphere and adapting to English, feeling excluded because of not knowing how the system works, keeping up with academic tasks, are all issues accompanying the students leaving their countries for a better education. Here, I came to know different backgrounds and cultures, and I could observe how international students replied differently to certain upheavals. Many times, I have witnessed friends crying for the lack of housing, high rents, or because they did not know where to turn when they needed logistical support concerning courses and academic requirements. Other times, I have listened to pupils lamenting outside the university library because of their academic tasks. Also, I met people who have been affected by how life is conducted here. These students suffered the differences between the Netherlands and their own countries, and especially the difficulties of accessing Dutch society and making Dutch friends.
Ultimately, by facing some of these issues myself while accomplishing the first master’s programme, I finally decided to investigate international students and how they live at Leiden. Thus, when I have decided to take another master’s programme in Anthropology, the experience acquired in the last years gave me a different perspective to assess the issues faced by new undergraduates and postgraduates.
2 However, I would have never expected that by delving into research, I would investigate the institution and its system of infrastructure. Indeed, as I will display throughout the thesis, the issues negotiated during academic careers recur and intertwine both outside and within the academic ambiance. In this case, what is the role of the institution? Here, my interest evolved, leading me to investigate across multiple domains making the university, and consequently affecting the lives of international students.
Concerning internationals, I cannot avoid considering the effects that globalization and transnational movements had on the Netherlands. Indeed, on January 2018, almost 23% of the Dutch population consisted of people with migration backgrounds, whereas in 2015 it was around 22%. The growth of population is thus mainly due to immigration, of which at least three-quarters results in international migration (CBS 2018: 3). Thus, the international population here is growing, but this is partly due to internationalization, a process aiming to design how countries should brand themselves to attract foreigners in various work sectors. This process has recently become an interest of municipalities, which every year register higher numbers of expats from all over the world. In this sense, the Netherlands are one of top countries in Europe that testify to the effects of internationalization.
Given my focus for infrastructure, I also consider how institutions of higher education are adhering to the internationalization of the education market. Indeed, universities around the world are changing their study programmes for the fruition of an international audience. Also, internationalization implies competition between the institutions, and thus more strategies to attract internationals and targeting their interests to develop multiple “niche” study programmes (Nathan 2005: 3). Therefore, the Netherlands have experienced a growth in the international student population. From 10,5% to 11,5% between 2018 and 2019 (NUFFIC 2019: 1). Among these foreign students, almost 86.000 are following a bachelor’s or master’s programme, and
3 despite most of these being European, the presence of non-EU pupils is growing exponentially (Ibid.).
In this context, Leiden University is working to attract more international pupils in the coming years. However, whereas internationalization brings revenues and international resonance to the university, it also brings challenges that might worsen the position of both autochthonous and foreign students. That is why we need to contextualize internationalization and assess the policies taken by the institution, through an ethnography of the international students.
By looking directly at the student’s experiences, I delve into the organizational problems of the university and display how the issues inherent to its infrastructure recur and intertwine outside of the academic sphere. My question, according to these interests, is:
“How do international students negotiate university life at Leiden University?”
“University life” concerns various nuances of the student experience, while it refers to several places where students act and interact with each other. It reflects both academic and social experiences, lived within and outside academia, from libraries to pubs, and that recur across the multiple domains composing the university, including its infrastructure. In this sense, university life can be considered an “assemblage” (DeLanda 2016: 1) of experiences, which all contribute to define the international students’ life at Leiden. Consequently, I will focus both on the student’s experiences and on the strategies exerted by the institution to attract them. What effects might these strategies have on the students? What could cause the issues I will display in this work? Could the internationalization lead to negative outputs if not implemented correctly? Will the student culture of Leiden clash against the myriad of cultural and linguistical
4 backgrounds attracted to the city? What will be the role of Dutch students if the university keeps attracting foreigners?
Ultimately, I argue that adhering to internationalization means to develop an academic ambiance that considers the experiences, backgrounds, but mostly, issues negotiated by the students. Among them, the housing market presents many obstacles both through private and institutional channels, to the point that internationals tend to blame the university for the impossibility to find accommodation. Secondly, the role of Dutch student associations will introduce issues with identity, culture, and language, which have been overlooked by the institution. These issues reinforce a divide between students leading to the exclusion of internationals from Dutch society. I will then delve into the organizational structure of the university, showing how issues with culture and language return across courses and side-activities, affecting the academic experience of international pupils. To conclude, I will display how the internationalization strategies of the university clash against other organizational issues and the preoccupations of both Dutch and international students.
Considering these involvements, I frame my study within the fields of globalization, transnationalism, and migration. Also, this study will be contextualized in the literature concerning education studies, ethnography targeting university’s students, ethnography of infrastructure, and internationalization, to contribute to the knowledge related to these themes.
When dealing with international students across the world, and consequently with immigrants, we need to consider the changes brought by globalization. To this end, Marcelo and Carola Suàrez-Oroco (2006) have claimed in their study about immigration in the US: “[g]lobalization is first and foremost about movement” (Ibid.: 94), and its paradoxical power lays in creating both despair and hope at the same time. But this hope, in the authors’ words, “is to be realized elsewhere, as migrants” (Ibid.: 95).
5 Thus, if globalization is about movement (Ibid.: 94), and it includes the transnational movement of students, the international student becomes, by definition, transnational. That is why I also focus on transnationalism as a framework for my research. By drawing on the AAA’s 1994 Survey of Departments, Kearney states that transnationalism is the term to use when referring to “migration of nationals across the borders of one or more nations” (Kearney 1995: 548). Furthermore, the term “transnational” sets the attention on cultural and political projects of the various nation-states, as a way to impose their hegemony against other peer-states (Ibid.). Thinking about hegemony and competition, these dynamics are repeated in the education market. In fact, considering the internationalization process, we see how competition between the institutions of higher education is growing, and how this competition is leading them to develop new policies to attract international students, who also compete for a better education and a place in the “global” society.
In this framework, focusing on transnationalism means to consider how the “deterritorialization” of the international student transforms their identities as soon as they enter a different country (Ibid.: 554). Namely, how they react to a different environment and different stimuli. How these identities change is an issue I intend to investigate throughout my research. Particularly, it is interesting to see how the professional and social lives of international students change as they move to a country, the Netherlands, which is renowned for its internationalism. Thus, I will consider their expectations before moving to the country to assess if a different environment has worsened their experiences.
To conclude, going back to globalization and its effects, Anna Tsing (2005), in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, argues that the advent of modern capitalism has led to disruptive techniques which “have segregated human and policed identities”, while alienating the individuals turning them into resources (Ibid.: 19). The impossibility to stick to the notions of progress following economic and ecological
6 ruination has thus created the effect of “precarity”. The latter makes us vulnerable to others and thus in need of help in a common struggle for survival (Ibid.: 29). That is why Tsing is interested in how people “contaminate” each other experiences in “precarious” situations. In their pursuit of social and academic achievements, international students often collaborate in a common struggle that is subjected to multiple upheavals. Moreover, whereas some of them come from privileged backgrounds allowing them to travel and study, others are less fortunate and may experience worse realities.
In this case, “international students” and their “university life” are the main point of departure to discover what types of issues need to be negotiated at Leiden University. However, by focusing on the institution’s infrastructure, I am also interested in what organizational barriers create the issues international students must negotiate.
Presenting the Field and the Research Group
When dealing with Leiden University, one finds a myriad of domains composing the various faculties and the parties making the institution. That is why I have focused on two aspects. The first one was the facilities of the institution, and for this reason, I have focused on facilities such as the University Library, the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and the Lipsius building. Here, I could grasp interesting aspects of international experiences within the academic sphere. Particularly, I had the possibility to build many meaningful relationships that have helped me uncovering the inner aspects of university life at Leiden.
The second aspect concerned the places outside, such as the university’s housing buildings, private houses, pubs, and in general places mostly frequented by international students. These places are related to the university, as I have testified that several issues affecting the students within, recur and intertwine also outside of it. Thus, I came to intend the university as an
7 “ecosystem” composed by multiple parties, and I understood that I had to investigate the linkages between these parties within and outside the university. Particularly, I rely on the “assemblage theory” to understand this ecosystem as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures” (DeLanda 2016: 1). In this context, the university ecosystem becomes a “symbiosis” of these entities, and one cannot consider them in isolation from these relations. For example, the housing domain displays cultural and linguistical issues that, in turn, are affected by the Dutch student association’s domain. That is why, whereas the university is my primary field, I still do not see it as bounded, rather interconnected with various other fields transcending its physical structures.
Of course, Leiden University includes the Den Haag Campus. In this case, I decided to side-line Den Haag for research purposes, as it would have been too dispersive to research in two different cities. However, I will discuss its role regarding the measures that internationalization entails, such as developing the number of courses during the years, mostly designed to increase their appeal and attract international students. In this context, another domain making the university’s ecosystem and thus the field, is tied to the measures taken to attract international students over the years.
Concerning the research group, investigating international students at Leiden has not been an easy task, despite my position as a postgraduate. Indeed, the student community here is huge, and it is developing every year more, leading to hard questions regarding who I was to include in my work. By “international”, I mean students who were not born and raised in the Netherlands. However, being a male student from a particular national background, Italy, has affected who I came into contact with. Particularly, this has led me to form relationships more easily with European students, and especially students from the Mediterranean. However, I have never excluded a student from my study due to nationality or culture, and I did not
side-8 line any meaningful experience coming from students outside the European Union. On the contrary, I could say that most of the fundamental findings gathered, especially concerning housing and university services, come from the community of non-EU pupils.
Concerning the “students”, I intend people enrolled for either a bachelor or master’s programme at Leiden University. This enrolment needed to represent the first experience abroad, to investigate the effects that a different environment has on academic and social lives. In this framework, I have privileged master’s students, as they all had different but tailored backgrounds to compare the Leiden’s experience with their previous ones. Despite this, I have made some exceptions with undergraduates at their first experience abroad. Indeed, they could enlighten me, especially through the completion of the survey, about the theme of interactions with Dutch students. Some of the bachelor’s students also had very interesting testimonies which I could not avoid including in this work. Consequently, I have privileged people between twenty and thirty years old.
Due to ease of access, I opted for students enrolled mostly at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, although I did not put aside meaningful experiences from other departments. This decision was taken in accordance with the concept of “convenience sampling”, which directed me towards the closest to-hand research group to contact (Saunders et al. 2012: 1), and to giving feedbacks to the Faculty which offered me the possibility to research.
Notwithstanding, as the research evolved along with the findings, I noticed that an opposite, or better “autochthonous”, point of view was needed to cross-reference the data and support my argumentation. Indeed, I could not support the findings based only on the perceptions of international students, who, at times, can be highly critical of the issues they face. Thus, I have decided to interview Dutch students, preferably members of student associations where they could have contacts with internationals. Moreover, some of the findings
9 were leading me towards the institution’s infrastructure. The result was a series of interviews with Dutch officials from the University’s Housing Office, who helped me understand recent involvements concerning the housing market at Leiden.
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Chapter One
-Theoretical Framework, Methodology, Ethics of the Research
Problem Definition and Theoretical Foundation
My interest in concepts such as international students and university life brings me to frame my research into the field of education studies and ethnography based on university/college students. Also, I consider ethnography of infrastructure as I delve into the organizational structure of the university. Moreover, by aiming to understand how the internationalization has been implemented and is influencing the lives of students at Leiden, I rely on several works considering such processes. Before delving into internationalization, I will discuss certain involvements tied to globalization and transnationalism.
Firstly, existing literature has examined how students experience college life in different ways, and I draw on certain works to find a gap that would allow me to bring new relevant data in the field of education studies. Moreover, with the advent of globalization and transnational movements, this field has gained importance and has led scholars to focus on real-life experiences concerning undergraduates all around the world. Thus, if anthropologists and ethnographers were focusing on the measures taken by the institutions, now there is a tendency to consider the students as the means through which to gain an inner understanding of university practices and policies (Pole and Morrison 2003).
Although infrastructure and policies remain fundamental, studies have started to exert the methods and the perspectives typical of ethnographic research, to explore a theme that before was difficult to identify. Indeed, people envisioned infrastructure as an invisible system of substrates, encountering difficulties when approaching it. Consequently, anthropologists began to consider it as “part of human organization, and as problematic as any other” (Star 1999: 380).
11 This can be studied through a combination of historical and literary analysis, tools such as participant observation, interviews, and system analysis (Ibid.: 382).
That is why I apply the same perspectives to the study of the university’s infrastructure. By considering it as an “assemblage” (Pendlebury 2012: 710) of multiple domains, I aim to discover the relationship across these domains through an ethnography of international student’s experiences. Indeed, I do not treat infrastructure as a circumscribed entity, rather as something that emerges from relations with a variety of objects and processes that go beyond the walls of the university. Only in this way it will be possible to unravel what structural issues affect university life at Leiden.
First, it is important to discuss existing literature on universities, and to what degree this has focused on student lives. Nespor (1994) has investigated the roles that non-human actors, such as curriculum charts and building spaces, play in the undergraduate knowledge construction. Howe & Strauss (2000) approached undergraduates from generational differences, demonstrating how every generation of students developed distinctively following their backgrounds and priorities. Wright (2005) analysed how processes of social transformation into English higher education can be explored together with policies through the use of anthropology. Also, Abdullah et al. (2013), by reviewing multiple articles on researchers targeting international students over the past thirty years, have demonstrated how the interest in students is related to their in-campus, academic and social experiences. Despite these studies
investigate inner aspects of the institutions through the perspectives of the pupils, they do not focus entirely on them, and they do not exert entirely the approaches of ethnographic research.
In this case, a particularly relevant ethnography is Moffatt’s (1989) on college life at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from 1977 to 1984. The author aimed to provide a vivid picture of American college life, understanding how students perceive what is happening around them. Focusing on the dormitory as the centre of students’ social lives, Moffatt analyses different
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patterns of friendships, love and sexual relationships that male students weave during their collegial life. What he finds is that college was not perceived as only a place where one grows intellectually and prepares for academic and career accomplishments. Rather, it was perceived by students as the most intense period of socialization where they could learn how to fit in the adult world. Moreover, the author touches on other topics such as student’s conceptions of race and attitudes toward intellectual development offered by the institution.
If Moffatt provided a vivid account of male college life, Cathy Small, writing under the pseudonym of Rebekah Nathan (2005), immersed herself in the first-year life of female students at what she calls “Any U”, a fictive institution that many reviewers connected to the Northern Arizona University, where Small was working as a professor. In My Freshman Year: What a
Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, the author aimed to understand how students
perceive the university and why they act in certain ways such as skipping lessons, sleeping in class or devoting little time to prepare their academic commitments.
After enrolling as a first-year undergraduate, she decided to live in students’ residences, participating in different activities organized by the university. In this way, Small finds that students are more likely to value the college experience per sè, rather than the contents of their courses. Particularly, students seem to have little inclination towards intellectual inquiry and self-scrutiny, because they are overwhelmed by daily life management. What is interesting about her study is that, by focusing on how students manage their college life and how they perceive the university, the author allows us to engage ethnography of education differently from previous studies. Indeed, she is more focused on what the institution is doing for its students through a portrait of their daily-life experiences.
Although these works represent a point of departure for my research, I investigate other implications to unravel how my work could add relevant knowledge to the current debate on education studies.
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Firstly, Small aims to display how contemporary American students understand education, and what they want from it, while negotiating their college life. Moreover, she is interested in what the college teaches to its students. Although these seem to be related to my concerns, I intend to unravel how international students perceive not only the policies of Leiden University, but also what Leiden University wants for them, throughout an ethnographic account of international students’ experiences within and outside the academic sphere. Whereas the author aims to understand what the college teaches, I am targeting what the university does to include international students into its structure. In addition, the studies cited here have not investigated the role of groups linked to the universities, such as fraternities and sororities. By considering interactions between Dutch and international students, I aim to investigate what is the role of Dutch student societies on university life at Leiden.
Secondly, although these works are conducted in an inspiring way for the approaches I will exert, they present some methodological caveats that might limit the utility and the application of their findings in different contexts. Indeed, both Moffatt and Small have focused on autochthonous students, privileging gender as a parameter for choosing their research groups. On the contrary, being interested in globalization and internationalization, I will focus on internationals.
Another issue that needs to be faced is the difference between the researcher and the subjects of research. In her book, Small cites different scholars who embarked in ethnographic studies about university students, even citing Moffatt’s work as a point of departure for her critique. Indeed, she is concerned that both Moffatt and other scholars conducted their studies being declared professors, creating sensible boundaries and limiting the possibilities of expression for the students (Nathan 2005: 4-6). That is why she has decided to go undercover and enrol as a student into the institution she was researching. Nevertheless, beyond declaring or not to be a professor, what concerns me here is age. Indeed, Small pretends to be a student,
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but her age-difference with young undergraduates, being almost 50 years old at the time of researching, constituted a huge obstacle to the access of ambiances and student’s lives. To support this point, the author states, in the opening paragraphs of the book, that “[m]y old age assigned me to a niche” (Ibid.: 14).
Thus, age-difference is something that affects how one can engage with people. However, being a student and a peer, I could contribute with an innovative joint in the field of education study. In this case, a research from the “bottom”, although creating its own ethical challenges, might at least inspire useful reflection points for future research, leading to an inner understanding of the student’s life and how it might be affected by the policies of the university. As I have already mentioned, my focus on international students and the university’s policies steers my work into a framework that concerns the process of internationalization of the institutions of higher education. Relevant here are questions concerning identity, culture, and language, and how these responded to the changes brought by globalization.
Firstly, globalization entails that differences between centres and peripheries fall when dealing with an age of “the local in the global” (Kearney 1995: 550). Economic, political, and social relations have been re-shaped to the extent that events occurring in contexts far away from ours still shape our realities, and vice versa (AAA 1994: 38:64). People around the globe became interconnected and came to know the possibilities offered by globalization. This has led to transnational movements and migration.
However, these movements imply that many people from different backgrounds meet for the first time. Migrants from across the world became part of the countries they moved to in search for work or better education. In this context, how do we understand culture, language, and identity in countries where transnational movements occur? How does the local culture respond to the upheavals of globalization? After all, globalization is “bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways” (Heller 2003: 473).
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Particularly since the late 1980s, these transformations have led to discussions concerning sociolinguistics, with anthropologists debating themes such as linguistic rights and citizenship (Paz 2019: 82). These debates shifted their attention on migrants, and how they can be “absorbed” into the societies they come to meet. Whereas the foreign presence brings advantages concerning manual and intellectual workforce, it also brings challenges that question the cultural identity of the countries it “enters”. In this context, several countries have exerted globalization to grow economically, but this has led to a pushback from people who do not praise for a penetration of different cultural and linguistical backgrounds.
Thus, whereas some countries praise for enrichment, others developed a “rhetoric of exclusion” (Stolcke 1995: 1) which reiterates the incompatibility of foreign cultures with the autochthonous ones, while falling in a new form of racism. Indeed, following World War II, several countries in Europe have developed a “cultural fundamentalism” which, despite rejecting a cultural hierarchy, still implies that every citizen protects his own culture while rejecting peaceful confrontation (Ibid.: 8). On the other hand, sometimes this “resilience” to the “different” is less overt, and it becomes so disguised into the society to create paradoxes.
This is the case in the Netherlands, where Wekker (2016) explains how the violent colonial past of the country has been overshadowed by the Nazi occupation, to the point that the study of race and culture has been widely demised because Dutch people still feel “innocent victims” of World War II (Wekker 2016: 24). This dichotomy leads Dutch people to assume some sort of “innocence” when it comes to discourses of races and culture, notwithstanding their responsibilities concerning deportation of Jews during the conflict (Ibid.: 18). “Innocence” thus reinforces racial superiority and privileges among Dutch citizens (Ibid.), while the imperial “cultural archive” influences their self-reflection (Ibid.: 20). The latter becomes a “white Dutch self-representation” that still follows the binary logic of “us” against “them”. The result is that although most of the Dutch population comes from migrant backgrounds, Dutch people do not
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want to be identified with migrants (Ibid.: 6). In this context, it would be interesting to see how internationals students are welcomed into Dutch society, and if they can be considered included.
Concerning internationalization, the study of this phenomenon in higher education has expanded especially over the decades since 1980, and it has been subjected to discussions to predict possible future transformations. Marginson and Rhoades (2002) assert that the term has become an axiomatic concept alongside the transformations that higher education institutions worldwide have undergone in the last years. However, this term has gained so much relevance that for some scholars it has lost its meaning.
Generally, scholars have referred to internationalization in higher education through the framework provided by Jane Knight (2004). The author considers the phenomenon as a process of integration of an international and intercultural dimension for the purpose, functions, and delivery of higher education (Ibid.: 26). Indeed, in most countries, as de Wit (2002) and Hudzik (2011) have noticed, Directors of multiple institutions have started to internationalize the universities for economic, political and socio-cultural reasons, while governments are more involved in providing resources for this process.
Given its broad feature, other scholars have instead focused on the main topics characterizing the research on internationalization. For example, Kehm and Teichler (2007) analysed how several studies have centred their attention on topics such as the mobility of both students and staff, mutual influences of different educations systems on each other, strategies for internationalizing, transfer of knowledge, cooperation and competition, national and subnational policies concerning the international feature of higher education. Also, Yemini and Sagie (2016) have given an overview of the various research developments happening between 1980 and 2014 in this field. Particularly, through a quantitative analysis of several works, they have provided data that show the evolution of research on internationalization.
17 Table 1 Common issues covered by internationalization in higher education publications in four different time
periods.
Yemini, M. & Sagie, N. (2016), “Research on Internationalisation in Higher Education – Exploratory Analysis”, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, Vol. 20, Nos. 2–3, p. 95.
Although the rise of attention in subjects such as student mobility and multicultural issues, this study, together with other works of the same genre, treats internationalization as an object to be measured. Specifically, they imply a coding system aimed to target specific trends to quantify them. Moreover, these works always focus on the institutions of higher education, analysing its policies and strategies, without targeting the main character involved in this process: the students. Thus, I draw on these works to analyse the process of internationalization at Leiden University, but rather than measuring its effects, I primarily aim to understand and interpret them through an ethnographic portrait of the international student’s experiences. Indeed, I intend to emphasize how these individuals interpret their social world, based on a qualitative framework that sees social reality as constantly changing property of individual’s creation (Bryman 2012: 36). Furthermore, whereas multiple studies are tackling what internationalization should promote and what its future may be, I aim to understand how the phenomenon is currently shaping both the institution’s strategies and the students’ lives.
However, internationalization has not always been intended as a positive process. Several authors have questioned its utility and the possibly erroneous ways in which governments and
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institutions interpret its meaning. Particularly, Brandenburg and de Witt (2011) have raised doubts concerning the necessity to engage with internationalization for successful higher education institutions. The authors attribute several negative implications to the process, which in their opinion is attached to globalization and mostly to neoliberalism within the socio-economic discourse. Indeed, they claim that financial factors have gained more importance in the organization of internationalization, supplanting other rationales (Ibid.: 15-17). In this case, the influence of capitalism on modern institutions has raised the level and the intensity of competition, pushing governments and universities to adopt measures that, despite their intent, may create negative dynamics within the education system.
Within these, the critique that gained more relevance, and that is also argued by Choi (2010) and Le Ha (2013), is the danger of expanding the hegemony of English, neglecting the use of local languages. Indeed, autochthonous students may perceive the institution as distant from their preferences. Offering an education in English might limit the academic experiences of students who want to obtain a degree in their local language. Moreover, this might reiterate the anxieties over migration and how to handle people from different cultural and linguistical backgrounds. This may traduce in a sort of aversion for the international student, who may experience both discrimination and consequent scarce inclusion. Given the relevance that this process is gaining at Leiden University, I aim to understand these dynamics through an ethnography that might make the institution aware of how language impacts the inner aspects of the international student’s life.
Finally, as Yemini and Sagie (2016) suggest, critiques have contested the “universities cynical use of internationali[z]ation activities to advance their placement […] within university ranking systems” (Ibid.: 91). Thus, it seems that economic and political considerations introduced by the internationalization have overtaken academic and social rationales (Ibid.).
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This dynamic can be found in Nathan’s (2005) ethnographic book, although she mentions it without any intent to criticize it. Rather, she simply states that “[p]rofessors across the country increasingly hear university administrators who speak like corporate managers, who believe that they are competing in an educational marketplace for student-consumers” (Ibid.: 2-3). Institutions aim to draw more applicants while competing against other institutions through a “mechanization” of the courses.
Thus, the process of internationalization may be questioned in this way, as a process which is primarily intended for the inclusion of international students, but that at the same time may be slowed down or hindered by the need to compete in an environment that has become a business. Moreover, whereas internationalization is supposed to bring relevance and revenues to the institutions, it also brings challenges that must be addressed when multiple cultures and backgrounds are attracted to a certain ambiance. That is why I have framed my research in the context of internationalization studies, because I aim to discover what the university could improve in case its policies harmed international students. However, I insist that this should be done by relying on data concerning real-life experiences, as this may represent an innovation in this field, and it may bring relevant knowledge to how institutions approach internationalization.
Methodology
Throughout fieldwork, my interest in the international “university life” has shaped the research strategies I have exerted. In accordance with the principles of grounded theory, which sees theory created out of methodological gathering and data analysis (Martin et al. 1986: 141), I have constantly modified my methods based on the evolution of research. Despite my focus primarily on the university’s infrastructure, I have maintained a willingness to see things
20 through the eyes of my research group: the community of international students. In this context, epistemologically, my study is oriented towards interpretivism, which requires me to grasp “the subjective meaning of social action” (Bryman 2012: 30). Also, considering the ontological orientation of my work, I refer to constructionism, as the phenomena and categories contained in this thesis are revised and “constructed” by the social actors (Ibid.: 33-34). Thus, my aim is to gain meaningful insights that could enlighten the university on how to better the students’ condition, both within and outside academia.
That is why my work finds itself into the framework of mixed research methods. By exerting grounded theory as an “approach to the generations of theory out of data” (Bryman 2012: 387), I could rely both on quantitative and qualitative methods. The latter have been useful to emphasize mostly the students, and how they get together while struggling for social and academic survival. Despite this, I was not bounded rigidly to qualitative methods and I did not decide to stick to one specific procedure (Emerson et al. 2011: 173). Indeed, my interest in the process of internationalization at Leiden has shifted my efforts from daily experiences to infrastructure, leading me to inquire about the institution’s policies and their effect on the international students. In this framework, I have relied on quantitative methods, to analyse certain patterns and reinforce the findings arising out of the data. Seeing the same patterns traduced in quantitative and qualitative data has validated even more my findings.
Still, this “freedom” has tested my ability as a researcher and has exposed me to some methodological caveats. Among them, I had difficulties not to give biases during interviews or informal chats outside the university. Negotiating both my positions as a student and a researcher has not been easy. Being impartial when already knowing some of the limitations inner to the institutions has often put me to test. Whenever I was interacting with my research group, I have tried not to lead the “flow” into specific topics that might have affected the whole “tone” of the conversations. Rather, I have tried to understand how the content of certain
21 statements could have been an indicator of the issues I was researching, and only when the latter were coming out of an informant opinion, I would deepen them with him/her.
Furthermore, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods has proved challenging as well. Given that quantitative approaches rely heavily on a theory that must be “measured” using specific research instruments (Bryman 2012: 160-161), I had to think about what of these instruments to use, and how to use them in combination with observations and interviews. How could I combine measurements, being the most important tool for the quantitative researcher (Ibid.: 175), with impressions and words? Also, what approach should have defined my research? Eventually, relying on grounded theory led me to exert an inductive approach, that will bring me to define a “theory”, or better, a response, to my research question and my most important preoccupations. This “theory” then, is the result of collection and analysis of data (Ibid.: 387), gained in the last three months of fieldwork.
In terms of order, I have started with qualitative research, exerting semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Once I started to recognize patterns, I included quantitative methods through a survey that I have submitted to a sample of 50 international students from all over the world, to see if those patterns held up among a wider research group. Ultimately, once I was finished with data gathering, I started analysing those patterns to build a theory and find a reply to my research question. Furthermore, the inclusion of Dutch personalities was a necessity to have an “autochthonous” point of view. Besides, I have collected studies tackling international students and inclusion, that were suggested to me from a Dutch entrepreneur met at one Municipality’s symposium, and that helped me giving a better-tailored background to my research.
Unfortunately, with the advent of COVID-19, my research has been subjected to multiple limitations. Among them, I was in contact with the university’s Student Council for interviews concerning different themes, and I was waiting for a collaboration with Itiwana, the student’s
22 anthropological association at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. In this case, with the university closing for several months, I had to renounce to these fruitful possibilities. Also, I was planning to contact members of Dutch fraternities and sororities, but the social distancing imposed by the diseases have prevented me from obtaining their contacts.
Notwithstanding the recent upheavals, the methods exerted for this work allowed me to deeply understand how the university life here at Leiden is shaped, and sometimes affected, by the institution policies. In the past three months, I have investigated how international students, but also Dutch ones, interpret and build their reality out of their experiences (Cramer 2016: 20-21). Experiences that are primarily shaped by the ambiance that Leiden University has built over the last decade to keep up with the process of internationalization.
The first research method I have exerted was participant observation. This data collection strategy has allowed me to enter my research group, by getting closer to the students through mostly informal conversations. This has made them prone to communicate with me and eager to accept my presence to observe and record their daily interactions and experiences (Bernard 2006: 342). Especially in the first week into fieldwork, participant observation helped me with gathering the first qualitative data, as I was often out with the research group trying to grasp aspects of their university life. In this case, participant observation has become a “craft” on which I invested my time because I wanted to master it and develop my experience as a researcher (Ibid.: 344).
Moreover, the observation was eased by my position as a Resident Assistant for one of the university’s buildings in the city. Indeed, throughout fieldwork, I have used this position to get in contact with international students outside the academic sphere. In this context, having the duty to organize social events for this building’s community has helped me getting an inner understanding of issues common to the student category. Also, nights out proved useful because the research group was performing in a relaxed ambiance and I could observe its behaviour
23 without being perceived as an outsider. Drinking a beer together, smoking a cigarette outside, going out in groups, are all situations in which I gathered data that I could cross-reference with field notes, or jottings, I was taking throughout the first month of fieldwork.
In the end, participant observation has allowed me to understand what topics should have been deepened when I was preparing myself for face-to-face interviews. Listening to international students lamenting about their peers, the weather, or other people still searching for accommodation in January, made me unravel issues within both master’s and bachelor’s students. Some of them were often coming to the Library to organize social events, or to discuss scarce willingness to study when trying to find a place to live.
Speaking of field notes, these have been exerted in combination with participant observation because I wanted to rely on a stable set of data and avoid the “frailties of human memory” (Bryman 2012: 447). Jottings have been useful both at the beginning of the research when I was writing down every single event I witnessed, and towards the end, when I have attended a symposium on internationalization organized by the Municipality of Leiden. Jottings helped me to fix in my mind what topics were fundamental and what steps I should have taken to develop my work. Oppositely, this method has constantly tested my interactional skills. Indeed, I have experienced difficulties in writing down field notes in front of the research group. That has happened especially during social events or nights out, where I was fearing that, if I were to take notes, I would have alienated my informants making them self-conscious of being studied (Emerson et al. 2011: 38).
Overall, these methods have proved useful. On the other hand, observing implies to find the right place at the right time. This has led me to hang out in many different locations, and sometimes I had the impression that I could have spent that time doing something more useful than just waiting on a bench or outside the Library cafè.
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The above-discussed methods have been important to understand how to approach the object of study. Notwithstanding, the most useful research method is surely semi-structured interviews. Not only has this allowed me to gain inner knowledge of every informant I contacted, but it has also solved some of the problems related to participant observation, such as risking to becoming an intruder into the student’s private lives (Bryman 2012: 496).
Using qualitative interviews made me not bound rigidly to a specific topic or set of questions. Thus, I could develop my interests as in the framework of grounded theory, and I could emphasize generality when formulating the first research ideas and questions for my interviewee (Ibid.: 470). The flexibility which characterizes the method makes it more similar to a friendly, and informal, chat, where I could give hints and introduce new elements to obtain relevant data (Spradley 1979: 58). In the end, privileging qualitative interviews has meant to privilege the student’s point of view, and it meant that I could contact back my informants whenever I needed, to see if they changed their minds about certain topics or if they had other meaningful information (Ibid.). Concerning the contents of the testimonies, it is worth to mention that all the informants in this thesis have been subjected to the use of pseudonyms to protect their identity.
In this context, I have developed an interview guide which has been subjected to multiple modifications to satisfy my needs. If it was not for its evolution, probably I would have not been able to gather the relevant data I show in this thesis. For example, my interest in infrastructure would have not been deepened if I would have kept the same questions, as in the beginning I was too focalized on the student’s private lives within and outside the academia. On the contrary, some questions concerning housing and interactions proved to be the most useful and leading questions in the guide. Thus, once I finished the first round of interviews, I could finally outline what “roads” I should have taken to understand how internationals
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negotiate their university life. Also, to remember as many data as possible, I decided to record every interview, after receiving consent from the informants.
Being a “permanent archive of primary information that can be passed on to other researchers” (Bernard 2006: 227), recorded interviews are useful to capture every aspect of the conversation. Moreover, continuing to record after the interview provided me with important insights concerning the topics previously discussed (Wolcott 1995: 114). On the contrary, relying too much on this method has led me, sometimes, to lack a proper understanding of the contents of the conversations. To balance this, I tried with taking notes during the interviews to better the questions’ content (Bernard 2006: 232), but I shortly realized that for me it was even more distracting than before.
To conclude, semi-structured interviews have been the most useful tool exerted for research purposes. However, for every conversation I had to be cautious because being too straight could have traduced the interview into a formal interrogation. As Spradley (1979: 58) argues, I needed to negotiate my position and to “shift back” to an informal chat, reinforcing the relationship with every informant and gaining his / her trust (Bryman 2012: 494). Moreover, by negotiating my position between student and researcher, I had problems with interviewing while not falling into assumptions common to the student category.
The last method exerted was quantitative. It involved a survey with a sample of fifty students, gathered during the second and third months of fieldwork. To obtain this number, I have distributed the survey through a link in different students building’ chats me and other RAs handle. Moreover, I have proposed it every time I was conducting wellness checks inside my building. The survey contains thirty questions, most of them closed, but it also contains open spaces where to leave comments and suggestions. The survey has been particularly useful to observe if the patterns arising were held up as well as from semi-structured interviews and
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participant observation. In this case, its results confirmed what I have witnessed throughout the other research methods.
The primary idea was to create a double version of the survey, one for international students, one for Dutch ones, to offer a stronger background for the findings. However, putting this into practice has been more difficult than expected and the circulation of the Dutch version has not been sufficient to validate its result. This represents a clear limitation to my study, but I argue that the “international” survey can still be considered evidence that the patterns I have observed are not due to random chance.
Once data was collected, I decided to code part of it, especially the interviews, to break them down into components and find patterns more easily. Also, this method has been combined with constant comparison to compare the patterns and unravel categories that could be theoretically elaborated (Bryman 2012: 568). Furthermore, taking inspiration from Cramer (2016), I have analysed carefully the contents of the transcriptions to find pieces of evidence, ideas, and perspectives, used by the informants to elaborate on how their reality is shaped by the policies of the university.
Memos have been used as well. In this case, memos and impressions written inside the transcriptions have fixed my ideas and my interpretation of the facts, allowing me not to lose track of the other topics researched (Bryman 2012.: 573). Memos imply that I have gone through my data multiple times, and particularly, they imply that I have analysed multiple portions of written text. That is why I have taken advantage of narrative and performance analysis to further discover regularities between the various testimonies (Bernard 2006: 475). Particularly, I have analysed the testimonies of the students to interpret the meaning of their experiences, focusing on different elements such as how they have structured their stories, what functions their story served, and how they performed these stories during formal and informal conversations (Allen 2017: 1).
27 Ethics
I have considered more than one code of ethics to be sure that my research would have not endangered anybody. Firstly, taking inspiration from the AAA Code of Ethics (2012), I have always tried to be respectful of the community of students. Thus, I have tried not to give biases to the research group and be completely honest about the nature and the aim of my research. Moreover, I have always asked the informants for their consent to record data out of conversations and field notes.
Being ethical means also to make the research accessible. Indeed, I have shared with the informants the main findings to see if they agreed or disagreed with me. In this case, having their support represents the best asset for me, considering both my position as a researcher and as a student, a peer. In this case, getting their respect and not privileging any nationality or gender has surely made the community of students more prone to share every aspect of their student life with me.
The other guideline I have used during fieldwork is the Ethical Guidelines for Good
Research Practice (2011) by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the
Commonwealth. Here I have found insights that eased my pursuit of fair research. Among them, I have tried to minimise disturbances to the informants and their environments, leaving them the choice to schedule an interview at their preferred hour or place. Still, my research methods have been intrusive because they have often revealed private aspects of university life. Especially regarding critiques to the institution, I have decided to anonymise carefully the data and not to reveal the identity of the informants. Indeed, whereas the survey is already anonymous, I have decided to use a pseudonym for the interviews and to gather the various patterns under different themes which in turn constitutes the various chapters of this thesis. Thus, rights to confidentiality have always been outlined before starting an interview, because
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I was aware that being students might have exposed the informants to possible identification by the professors.
In conclusion, at the beginning of the research, I was worried about how to act in case I was dealing with personal issues or mental breakdowns. However, by switching my attention to infrastructure, every respondent was eager to discuss this topic with me. Also, I have gathered positive feedbacks concerning the semi-structured interviews, as I was asking the research group about hints to improve my strategies. At the end of the project, I did not subject myself to the ethics of exiting the community, because for its entire duration I have never felt extraneous to the events witnessed and the students did not perceive me as an outsider.
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Chapter Two - Housing
“I cannot even begin to explain the number of issues I had to face to find a house here”. With this statement, a twenty-three years old master’s student replies to my question. Since I came to Leiden, I have met students desperate to find accommodation. I, myself, have experienced the distress of finding a place to stay. Indeed, after receiving my IELTS’ results a few days before the start of the programme, I came to the city and started looking for a place. Only then, I understood that I should have checked many months in advance of my arrival.
In the end, I was lucky because I managed to find a provisional accommodation for the first semester. However, throughout the first weeks of classes, I still knew people searching for a place to stay. This problem affected them to the point that it would overshadow their studies, as everyday they were visiting new apartments. Thus, starting this research, I was sure that I would have received the student’s gripes on the matter. However, I had no idea that this theme would have gained so much traction.
One explanation for this is that Leiden is widely expanding and attracting ex-pats. From 2009 to 2017, the number of non-Dutch residents has risen from 1700 to 3400 people circa, and this only in the Leiden Area. Particularly, the percentage of non-Dutch residents registered at Leiden Municipality has raised from 8% to 11%, without considering people living in the city from one to three years before moving back to their countries or another place1. The result has
been an increase both in the migrant workforce and the knowledge workforce, with significant growth in the number of international students. From 2014 to 2019, the international community has raised from 8% to 19%2.
1 These data have been gathered at the symposium on internationalization organized by Gemeente Leiden
Stadskantoor on March 2020, the 2nd.
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Furthermore, Leiden finds itself in the Randstad zone, which represents one of the major urban complexes of Europe, besides being the administrative, economic, and cultural pivot of the country. The pursuit of space is a widely spread issue and it does not concern only students. Also, not all the areas that might be suitable can satisfy the criteria of the institution. The latter searches for places connected with basic services to provide the students with enough options. However, in a city that is trying to expand itself to react to these numbers, why it is so challenging for international students to find accommodation? Also, if Leiden University is trying to develop its international appeal, why did most of my respondents insist on the distress and the difficulties tied to find a place? What if the university keeps attracting international students without accounting for this situation? And most importantly, how it will be possible to ease the interaction between Dutch and foreign students if they compete for space?
Ultimately, by delving into this theme, I have diverted my interests towards the infrastructure of the university. The latter is an ecosystem composed of many other domains that intertwine and affect each other, together with transcending the physical structures of the institution. The university here is formed by “assembling” and relating diverse entities. Thus, the institution becomes an assemblage, which is “a non-essentialist, non-totalizing social entity, constructed through specific historical processes and heterogeneous parts” (Pendlebury 2012: 710). Consequently, I do not consider the “artificial” boundaries drawn around the institution, as it comprises several networks, or domains, that extend beyond its physical structure to intertwine with other aspects of the society.
In this chapter, I will display how the housing market, as part of the university’s ecosystem, is strictly connected to other domains affecting the lives of international students. By discovering the housing theme, I could develop my research, exerting different formal and informal conversations with university officials and student associations. Housing represents the starting point of my research, and especially, it represents the turning point in the whole
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process when I decided to deal with the institution’s policies. Moreover, this topic allows me to show how students tend to blame the university, despite there are various reasons for the housing crisis.
Sometimes, the connections with the university are quite overt. For example, I discovered that much housing is owned by Dutch student associations in the city. This has led me to consider the role of identity, culture, and language among the reasons why it is difficult for internationals to arrange accommodation. Plenty of times, while I was searching for a place, I came across multiple posts on social networks stating: “No internationals”. Why this? Was this even legal? All those posts were published by Dutch students. How was possible that such discretion was present within a community of peers, such as the student one?
In this framework, I could not avoid considering the role of the Dutch student associations. In the beginning, I was surprised to know about their existence, given that they are absent in my country. However, I came to understand, through formal and informal testimonies, how much they shape the student life here, and the possibilities for interactions within the student community.
Only knowing how the role of student associations, among many other factors, shapes the housing market in the city, can we get a deeper understanding of the troubles and distress enlightened by the data gathered. In this chapter, I will provide an overview of how housing works and the difficulties of finding accommodation, together with introducing the role of Dutch student associations, linguistic and cultural barriers in affecting the pursuit of a place to live. These will introduce, in the next chapter, issues of interactions and inclusion between Dutch and international students at Leiden University.
32 Private Housing Market and the University’s Housing Office
Throughout fieldwork, I have gathered data concerning housing and the struggles faced by international students. Since the first days, I have exerted mostly participant observation and semi-structured interviews. However, the survey’s results further confirm what the informants told me during formal and informal conversations. 60% of my respondents stated that they encountered difficulties in finding accommodation.
Among these, there are issues with finding a Dutch guarantor who can guarantee the economic situation of the tenant. Such a person is often asked for by private landlords all around the city. Moreover, students lamented about the lack of options across the various housing sites, most of which offer expensive solutions inconvenient for internationals, especially if their only source of revenue is their parents. Also, non-EU students griped about the impossibility to arrange a viewing, a step that is often required to get accommodation, when they live thousands of km far from the Netherlands.
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Among people searching privately, Kara, a master’s student enrolled at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, has outlined how much she struggled to find a place. She emphasized the necessity to settle during the first semester, and how it was still difficult to find second accommodation after six months at Leiden. Furthermore, she lamented about her first landlord.
K: I came here, and I found quite easily the house […] but it was really, really, difficult, actually. The biggest trouble was after that because it was not very convenient for me and I had to change very quickly, and I have been searching for a place for 3 months, but I couldn't find anything although I have already lived here in the city. I did a lot of viewings […].
She proceeded, saying:
K: I mean, if you ask my friends about how I was stressed back then for this issue they would tell you that I went quite crazy with that, but, after December I managed to find this place […] but it was very stressing and we had a bit of an adventure […]. But, the previous owner, the landlord, at my previous place was very bad because he came to live with us without any notice. That was very, very, bad. So, I really needed to leave.
Similar problems have been outlined by Erina, twenty-six years old, also enrolled at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences for a master’s degree.
E: It was really hard because I didn't pay the university to find me accommodation, so I was really struggling to find a place, and this was very distressing for a long time. […] But yeah, I know people that are struggling a lot, they have serious issues with accommodation but still, they [the university] are accepting a lot of people. I know it's about the money but still, do something. If
34 you want to have these people you need to provide places that people can go and stay. And obviously, we are paying, we are not asking for favours.
In this interview, the informant questioned for the first time the role of the institution, by stressing on the lack of places and the university’s growing appeal for international students. A pattern that has been reiterated multiple times throughout fieldwork.
Problems with the distress caused by searching for a place while studying, made students deeply concerned about their academic performance. Moreover, internationals must constantly handle themselves in a sea of scammers among all the housing sites. For example, Carolina, another Social Sciences student attending a master, had to go through different issues such as the high rent and deposit costs, among the one cited above.
C: […] So, it was not so hard to find a place but it was very hard in the beginning to give the deposit because it was three rents beforehand, and the monthly rent is still difficult for me because now I have less money from my [parent] and because I know that, of course, I can find a job here, but I think that if I find a job here then the study part will be more underdeveloped. […] And in the beginning, I had only a bad experience because when I started to search home alone, without help, I had a spam. I mean, I sent it [message] to a woman, because I saw in the Facebook housing of Leiden that it was a house which was very cheap and it was like 300 euros and all the other houses that I saw were around 600 or 700.
[…]
So, it was very cheap and I sent a message and she sent me “Yeah, I can send you the contract”, and when I asked her to send it to our family lawyer because I needed to see someone that I really trust, she never replied to me again.
E: She was a scammer. C: Yeah.
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Carolina stressed how much it was difficult for her to handle both her academic career and the possibility to work. Often, high prices force the students to find a job, but this can result in overshadowing the studies, which might be extended for more than one academic year. This issue concerns most of the low-income international students in the city. Moreover, these students risk being preyed on by scammers due to their need for cheap accommodation. Some people encountered so many difficulties that they were constrained to live in a tent until November. When I first heard this, it seemed like an exaggeration, but I could testify it myself when I saw a post on Facebook, where this student was asking for a place to live.
However, one of the most interesting patterns is the distress with the university Housing Office. Particularly, my impression is that students, and in this case, especially non-EU ones, end up perceiving the university as not interested in handling a widespread issue. These students are even questioning the role of the institution and its “accommodating” feature, outlining that many people still come to Leiden, but they are often left alone to find accommodation. Consequently, they feel abandoned by the university, and they expect more concerning its logistical support when providing information about housing. For example, some students emphasised that, despite applying in February, they discovered only a couple of months before the start of the courses that they could not be selected for accommodation.
Thus, if searching privately implies a bigger effort and less support, this does not mean that applying through official channels always results in success. Although the university manages to accommodate hundreds of students, the testimonies mentioned here outline what is missing to offer a more inclusive service. Moreover, most of the data comes from non-EU students, who seem to suffer more for the issues inherent to housing. Among them, Manjula, enrolled at Social and Behavioural Sciences for a master’s degree, offered probably one of the most relevant testimonies concerning the disappointment which develops towards the institution when dealing with housing.
