International Higher Education: An Important Tradition and a New Beginning

This number of International Higher Education marks our hundred-and-twentieth issue over 30 continuous years of publication. It might be the oldest publication which focuses on international issues in higher education in the world. I have been its editor over the past 30 years, with Hans de Wit joining me as coeditor for the last 10 years. In the first issue, I wrote: “International Higher Education will feature a rich mixture of material of interest to higher education professionals. Analysis of broader issues of higher education worldwide will also be featured.” IHE also committed to “a particular concern for universities in the Third World, institutions often left out of the international mainstream and yet of critical importance in the struggle for development,” while also stressing “the involvement of higher education in the global struggle for social justice, and for the integrity of the academic enterprise.” We have kept to these core missions during three decades of ongoing dramatic changes in the landscape of global higher education—notably dramatic massification, the emergence of the global knowledge economy, the flowering of internationalization, and, recently, significant geopolitical tensions.

This publication has seen a revolution in publishing—and a vast expansion of information sources and research on higher education to match massification, globalization, open science, and a technological revolution. In its early years, IHE was published on paper and mailed free to several thousand readers worldwide. Later, we disseminated our publication on the web, and now we use a range of social media outlets. At one time, IHE was perhaps the only source for analysis of global issues. Now there are numerous outlets—although IHE remains perhaps the only independent, nonprofit, open access source of analysis.

We have kept true to these goals in the context of unprecedented change in higher education and in the “knowledge industry.” IHE has seen the emergence of the internet and of distance education—we were an early adopter of a website, established in 1997. We have always been an open access publication, available to all without cost, at a time when even the term “open access” was not in common usage. We have also been concerned with making IHE available worldwide through editions in Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Russian. We have affiliated editions in Arabic and Chinese as well. We appreciate the collaboration of our translation partners for making our translated editions possible. IHE also has valuable collaborating publications. We have a longstanding collaboration with University World News, with which we share content. IHE is distributed to all of the members of the International Association of Universities, members of the Association of Indian Universities, the Association of African Universities, and to program participants of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

How have we financially supported the publication of IHE? Mainly through the support of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College—IHE has been and continues to be a core function of CIHE—and thanks to the hard work of CIHE staff and students. We benefited from 15 years of generous support from the Ford Foundation as well. Since 2020, our publisher has been DUZ Verlags- und Medienhaus in Berlin, Germany. DUZ has permitted us to remain open access in a period of great stress in the publishing industry over the last 20 issues.

Our thirtieth year brings some changes to International Higher Education. We have decided to bring publication of IHE back “in house,” as was the case for most of our history, thus ending the fruitful arrangement with DUZ, although we will continue to collaborate with our DUZ colleagues. Our new platform, developed by Knowledge Futures—founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab—provides a community-driven, open-source, full-stack knowledge infrastructure that aligns with our 30-year commitment to open access.

There will also be a change in editorial staffing. After 30 years of editorship I move to the role of “founding editor,” and Chris Glass and Hans de Wit will be the new editors. As founding editor I will continue to be actively involved in its policy and publication together with my colleagues and with support from CIHE leadership, Gerardo Blanco and Rebecca Schendel, staff member Salina Kopellas, and graduate assistants. IHE has been made possible and will continue to be so thanks to the active engagement of the international higher education community, which contributes enthusiastically to its publication and makes it the leading publication in the field.