When UBC graduate student Rumana Manzur was attacked by her husband, several of the writers (Afshan Jafar, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and myself) at University of Venus blog on Inside Higher Ed felt compelled to write responses. These were combined into a collaborative post, which appeared on June 28, 2011.

The post was republished on the University Affairs website on June 29, 2011.

On July 13 2011, my section of the post appeared in the Guardian UK under the title, “HE internationalization: Why awareness of cultural conflict matters.”

I thought some of the comments on these posts were sadly predictable. For my part, I wanted to bring attention to the fact that internationalization of higher education is not a simple process in which people move around the planet, magically unhindered/unaffected by the constraints of things like gender, class, race, and cultural norms. These challenges can’t be reduced to a two-sided debate, and yet I find they’re often ignored altogether (or radically simplified) in accounts of international education.