John Hudzik: Recognizing the “Future Giants” of Internationalization

In May, NAFSA announced a new prize to honor leadership in internationalization. The John and Anne Hudzik Prize will be awarded to individuals who have made sustained contributions to internationalization in areas including scholarship, administrative leadership, community engagement, and education.

Hudzik has been a distinguished champion for internationalization and an authority on its planning and execution for decades. He was the Michigan State University (MSU) dean and vice president of international programs from 1995 to 2010 and as acting university provost in 2005. Hudzik served as NAFSA president from 2008-2010, as a NAFSA Senior Fellow in 2015 and 2020, and authored several NAFSA publications on internationalization.

In this interview, Hudzik shares how he first became involved with internationalization, how it has evolved over the course of his career, how the idea for the Hudzik Prize came about, and how he hopes the prize will contribute to the field of international education.  

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed.

How did you first get into the work of what we now call internationalization?

It took a long time. I was raised in a small Michigan town. Not much was taught nor discussed there about things international in my school, or, frankly, elsewhere. Even though this was a town with a rich immigrant origin, we were very domestically focused. An international trip for me was across the border into Ohio or Indiana. Then came a sixth grade world geography course, an anomaly in an otherwise meat-and-potatoes curriculum. The textbook told the story of a kid traveling the world with his father. I found it hard to put the book down. Wow—I was hooked. But I had a problem: There was no way for me to see that world outside and no further courses on things international until I went to university.

As an undergraduate I emphasized comparative politics, political philosophy, economics, and history. Then I did a master’s and PhD in public administration and in Soviet and Eastern European studies—the latter because I was mesmerized by a professor who taught Russian history. I was 29 years old before I had my first venture abroad. A friend and I drove through eight European countries in 21 days. An adventure and dream come true!

I taught my first study abroad program in England in comparative politics two years after that first trip. I met my wife-to-be on this trip (no, she wasn’t a student). And that was followed over the years with another 30 study abroad programs that I taught in more than half a dozen countries.

As dean, I also learned quickly about a comprehensive approach to internationalization.

Now came the real career bender. In 1994, a new president at MSU appointed me to chair a university task force on study abroad. We recommended quadrupling the number of MSU students studying abroad annually to 3,200, and to do that within a 10-year timeframe. He and the provost then decided that I should become dean of international programs to drive this massive growth. But as dean, I also learned quickly about a comprehensive approach to internationalization.

At various points in time, involving faculty, students, and staff, MSU had scores of internationally focused research, community development, and teaching programs in nearly 70 countries. Talk about taking a drink from a fire hose—I was knocked off balance by the scale and scope of internationalization activity.

During the first 30 years as a faculty member, my teaching and research emphasized judicial studies, criminal justice, court systems, and judge education. By 2000, most of my focus had switched to higher education internationalization and comprehensive internationalization.

When you first came into this work of internationalization, connecting the pieces to make a comprehensive picture of it, how did you define the term “internationalization” at that point? And how has that definition changed?

The term “internationalization” had been around in higher education a long time before I used it, albeit used by different people in different ways. “Comprehensive internationalization” as a term first appeared, at least to my knowledge, in an American Council on Education (ACE) publication around 2002, or so. But their use of the term was focused principally on the comprehensive internationalization of undergraduate education. My 2011 NAFSA publication, Comprehensive Internationalization: From Concept to Action, had a much broader meaning and definition of the term. That meaning came from 10 years of experience as MSU dean of international programs. That’s the origin of it for me.

I had learned over 10 years that leaving it to the international office alone to do, guaranteed it couldn’t be done fully. Ideally, everybody in the institution has a role to play.

I defined it then as a commitment and action to integrate international, global, comparative content perspectives throughout the teaching, research, and service missions of a higher education institution. It was meant to cover all three core higher education missions. It aims to achieve benefits in core learning and research outcomes and become an institutional imperative, not simply a desirable possibility. Part of the idea was to broaden faculty and student access to international learning. By implication, it was to greatly expand who supports and contributes to internationalization beyond the international office. I had learned over 10 years that leaving it to the international office alone to do, guaranteed it couldn’t be done fully. Ideally, everybody in the institution has a role to play. I emphasized later that comprehensive internationalization must have a long-term institutional commitment to its development in order to respond to a constantly changing global environment and to new thinking.

From your 2011 publication about comprehensive internationalization with NAFSA, fast forward to 2024 with the announcement of the Hudzik Prize. When did you first begin thinking about creating such a prize, and what was your inspiration behind the idea?

Since World War II, there had been an emphasis on government policy and funding to develop higher education internationalization. Consider the massive and important programs like Title VI and the Fulbright-Hays Programs—there were lots of programs. While government initiatives are important through funding, policy, and encouragement, not much happens unless higher education institutions themselves engage in internationalization. Governments and politicians can talk a big game, but institutions need to do the work and follow through for anything to happen. The NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization has been an essential reinforcement of this reality, of the importance of the comprehensive internationalization of the institution itself.

However, it became clear to me a few years ago that real progress in internationalization—or frankly in any field such as physics, philosophy, psychology, you name it—depends on thought leaders and practitioners scholars to develop the ideas and programs that bring concepts to action and reality. We need to recognize and celebrate these leaders and their seminal contributions—and highlight them as role models for a next generation. Sir Isaac Newton’s observation that we stand on the shoulders of giants who come before us is as true today as then. And I would add that future advances depend on developing new leaders, new giants to take idea evolution to its next stages.

We need to recognize and celebrate these leaders and their seminal contributions—and highlight them as role models for a next generation. 

The idea for the prize gelled about a year ago when talking with NAFSA leadership and staff about a companion to the Simon Award, one that recognizes individuals. The field needs to recognize the individuals who are giants—those who provide a base for us to move forward. And here we are.

When you think about it, for every program that has won a Simon Award, there was a person at that institution who had the idea for that program, or who spearheaded the comprehensive internationalization work on that campus.

Yes, true, but it’s critical to go beyond the institutional level, because there are people who invent ideas and think about things that spread across institutions. We need to celebrate these leaders and need to keep nurturing them.

You have been very active with NAFSA for a long time. You served as president and chair of the Board of Directors and as a NAFSA senior scholar of internationalization. Your contributions in internationalization are well known in the field. Why did you choose to work with NAFSA for the Hudzik Prize?

I’ve been active in probably a half a dozen excellent, NAFSA-type organizations around the world: the Association of International Education Administrators, the European Association for International Education, FAUBAI (the Brazilian Association for International Education), the International Education Association of Australia, and others. So why NAFSA? NAFSA clearly has the size, longevity, history, stability, financial wherewithal, and breadth of commitment. Very importantly, it now has global reach to do the job. Something like 40 percent of the attendees (numbering in the thousands) at the annual conference are from outside the United States. Well, that is an indicator of global reach for me. Other international education associations are growing in size and influence on every continent, but NAFSA has been in this position for decades.

Regardless, though, I see this prize not as an American prize but a global prize. It is whoever, in any given year, a selection committee thinks best represents what the prize is about. And that will be people from any place in the world. I am particularly pleased to see that the inaugural selection committee includes people from various countries and cultures.

What are some of the qualities that you think are essential for someone to make a sustained impact in higher education internationalization?

The wording for the prize says it is for “sustained leadership and contributions to internationalization including in scholarship, administrative leadership, community engagement, and education.” Not just in one of these, but in more than one. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean in all those aspects, but it is someone who has broadly, significantly contributed to the ideas and actions that move internationalization along in its various manifestations.

People who qualify for the prize probably fall into three or four categories. They contribute ideas and thought, maybe scholarship, to our understanding and practice of internationalization. They have experience in being internationally involved; in other words, they’ve been on the shop floor in one way or another. Thinking is good and ideas are good, but have they motivated people and institutions to bring those ideas to reality in programs and other valued outcomes? Such leaders and contributors might act themselves or cause other people to act. Persistence is manifested in sustained leadership and, hence, it is among the prize criteria. A “flash in the pan” contribution is insufficient on its own.

How has the landscape of internationalization changed over the course of your time working in this field? Are there any exemplary achievements or contributions that you believe have done a lot to advance elements of comprehensive internationalization?

I think the most significant development since World War II has been to move the conceptualization of internationalization beyond mobility—in and out. Now, I’m not against mobility. Far from it; it is critical. It’s the experiential component of internationalization. But on its own, it’s not enough. To think more fulsomely and strategically about higher education international programming is really an important step forward. Among other matters, it is important to continue to develop internationalization of the on-campus curriculum, or as our European colleagues refer to it, “internationalization at home.” Developing an on-campus curriculum that reaches 100 percent of the students, not just the 4 percent who study abroad, is essential. Curricular integration has been a great and continuing development over the past 20 plus years.

Support for faculty engagement and development in internationalization through their teaching and research has been another very important component, and one that in my view, was only marginally enjoined until more recently. I was asked once, “Why are the faculty important to internationalization?” Well, you can have the rhetoric of internationalization but if it is without the benefit of foundational ideas, scholarship, and rationales, you almost guarantee that what you do will become intellectually vacuous (e.g., recruiting international students for revenue rather than for mutual learning purposes). We need faculty with the ideas, scholarship, and experience teaching our students to ground the relevance and advocacy of internationalization in substance. An internationally unaware and inexperienced faculty trying to teach students anything about international seems almost oxymoronic. This support for faculty began slowly in the United States with Title VI and Fulbright in the 1950s and 1960s, and has grown more robustly since.

If we ignore the necessity of helping our communities to understand and negotiate between the local and the global perspectives, we deny them a vital service for the 21st century. As the sources of cutting-edge knowledge expand globally, research and scholarship demand global connectivity. The number of institutions with internationalized civic engagement has greatly increased during the past decade or two, as has scholarship related to civic engagement.

If we ignore the necessity of helping our communities to understand and negotiate between the local and the global perspectives, we deny them a vital service for the 21st century.

The various uses of technology in a myriad of forms have become indispensable and will only continue to increase in importance, thereby expanding reach to much wider audiences.

In the past, internationalization was driven by a fairly limited and nonstrategic paradigm. It is what dominated thinking and action from the end of World War II until our initial reaction to Sputnik in the late 1950s and early 1960s via Title VI of the National Defense Education Act. These developments began to awaken a wider set of rationales. Later, the birth of the Erasmus Program in Europe was and is a massively essential paradigm shift that continues to evolve and develop. These developments edge on massification as a goal. Who should go out the door with a degree in hand and know nothing about the world outside our borders? Answer: no one.

Because mobility was driven intellectually by goals of improving cross-cultural learning and understanding—essential objectives—it had an unintended consequence. Action tended to be modeled mainly in the liberal arts disciplines (languages, the humanities, and social sciences), and wasn’t generally inclusive of the professional programs and the science disciplines per se. Yet, a huge portion of our graduates came out of the science disciplines and professional programs (business, communications, education, agriculture, and engineering, for example). The spread of international content and perspectives to professional programs and the natural sciences has been a very significant development over the last two to three decades.

Who should go out the door with a degree in hand and know nothing about the world outside our borders? Answer: no one.

There was also the view that long-term immersion programs abroad were perhaps the only type of mobility program with value. As one of the old guard said to me, “anything that’s short is worthless.” Well, I think we’ve debunked that. Value is not about length or duration but about the program’s content. It is different value structures and varied valued outcomes that we are now documenting under a wide variety of program models. As diversity in education abroad models expands, so does diversity and access to participation.

Back to faculty for a moment. I did a calculation one time, that if you took the faculty at MSU who were internationally engaged, which at that point in time was about 1,500 to 2,000, probably 60-70 percent of them became internationally engaged because they were involved in international development projects or Title VI funding. You can’t discount the importance of these programs and their continued impact even though they still affect a minority rather than a majority of faculty.

What are some of the challenges for “future giants”?

Now is not the time to sit down. We still have to work on nearly all of the issues I’ve mentioned, but we now face new and significant challenges that are going to require very creative responses from the next giants, thinkers, and doers. Among new challenges compared to the recent past, internationalization is not the “flavor of the month” that it was a decade or two ago. It is, however, no less important and probably more so given challenges posed by an evolving environment that includes renewed isolationism, anit-immigration, and multiple sources of threat to world order and peace. The “old” rationales and motivations for internationalization (by e.g., Knight and deWit) are as relevant as ever in the face of such an environment that makes internationalization suspect for many.

The degree of internationalization of higher education is very uneven across the world. We need new thinking to widen internationalization among the 4,500 institutions in the United States and the more than 17,000 institutions around the world. Internationalization will be shaped in part by mounting and ongoing reform of higher education itself. Calls for reform are not going away. They’re strengthening, particularly when it comes to cost control and in documenting societally relevant outcomes. How will internationalization respond effectively to these pressures?

What’s the answer to the question, “Why is it important to become internationally engage?” The answer, “Trust me, I know it is,” isn’t enough. We have got to convincingly document value from internationalization in societally relevant terms!

We now face new and significant challenges that are going to require very creative responses from the next giants, thinkers, and doers.

We have to respond to the changing landscape of teaching itself. There is much more self-directed learning. Active learning models don’t let students sit like a bump on a log in a classroom, nor allow faculty to hide behind a podium with lecture notes that are ragged from years of use. There are internships, there are field experiences, undergraduate research participation, and technology-assisted learning. All of these and more will grow in importance. And the question is, how is international education pedagogy going to grasp onto these things and make use of them? We need some giants on these topics; a few of them are beginning to show up.

The foci of internationalization are going to be recalibrated in response to an already massive and continuing global realignment of geopolitical, economic, and intellectual power and influence. It clearly involves Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We’ve been pretty content looking toward Western Europe and North America. But there are a lot of people, events, and trends that force a rebalancing of our attention toward Asia and Africa and Latin America. A greatly widening list of countries are now advancing cutting-edge knowledge and the development of higher education systems. The nature of the global competitive model in higher education, research, and maybe just about everything else is morphing. Where do you find partners and collaborators for research and idea generation, and where do you go to study or learn abroad? Increasingly, the trending answer is toward “everywhere.” International education and scholarship collaboration must diversify to respond to this radically changing global environment.

What are your hopes for this prize? What do you hope it will contribute to the field and internationalization efforts in general?

At the very least, I hope the prize highlights the contributions and reputations of the recipients and the wider list of people who are “near recipients.” People who have made outstanding contributions should be acknowledged. Even though there will be only one prize awarded annually, there will be many individuals who are making such contributions.

What I really hope is that the prize will call attention to the role of individual leaders and thinkers who advance this field of internationalization. And even if they aren’t a recipient, we understand the importance of a wider circle of contributors.

What I really hope is that the prize will call attention to the role of individual leaders and thinkers who advance this field of internationalization.

I’m not a physicist, but here’s what I am told by friends who are. The Nobel Prize in physics serves the purpose of recognizing those truly astounding people who receive it and, in a way, thanking them for their contributions. But when I talk to my friends in physics, they say that for every person recognized, there are tens and probably hundreds of people who have made very important contributions to the advancement of their field. A prize in internationalization, if it doesn’t exist, can’t do that. If it does exist, there’s a chance that not only an individual will be recognized, but the importance of such individuals more generally will be recognized and understood.

The existence of the prize itself is an acknowledgement of the contributions of many people. For those who are doing this work at higher education institutions, how can those institutions better support and foster a culture of internationalization on their campus?

The word culture—a culture of support for internationalization—that is, to me, the most important thing to breed on our campuses. I’ve looked at who has been successful, particularly institutions. In more cases than not, it usually began with an institution-wide dialogue on internationalization to uncover compelling answers to the question, what is internationalization? Why do it, how does it enhance institutional missions in people’s jobs?

Of course there is resistance. A lot of people say, “you want me to do this international stuff too? I don’t have enough time and money to do the stuff I’m supposed to be doing.” The answer to that is, internationalization can actually help you do your existing job better. Well, perhaps the real answer is not that you can’t afford to do it, but that you can’t afford not to do it in a twenty-first-century world and beyond.

Steven Toope, who was vice chancellor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and later vice chancellor at Cambridge University, led a multiyear campus discussion about internationalization at UBC. Lots of institutions do this, and if you engage in this campus dialogue, everybody should participate.  Yes, I realize that is like herding cats, but it is important that faculty, students, people in clerical positions, and support staff of all kinds are involved. If you’re going to internationalize your institution, everybody should be involved. What is done in the classroom can be quickly undone by insensitive staff in the library, by residence hall staff, or by campus police. You know what this is really about? This dialogue is about developing a culture that recognizes, broadly speaking, that we are an intentionally internationally engaged institution. And as a part of the process, it is important to develop some pride in being able to say that we are such an institution.

If you’re going to internationalize your institution, everybody should be involved. What is done in the classroom can be quickly undone by insensitive staff in the library, by residence hall staff, or by campus police. 

Now, what’s the use of internationalization of teaching and learning? Guess what, the vast majority of graduates are going be working in a global environment. If they don’t know anything about it, they’re going be handicapped. What’s the value of internationalizing research and scholarship? Because cutting-edge knowledge and ideas are now developed everywhere, and we need access to everywhere.

What about community engagement and problem-solving? I happen to be sitting here looking out on one of the Great Lakes where I was born and raised, and thinking about the recent past and likely future of my hometown. It is now much bigger and more cosmopolitan; its growth has been inexorably tied to breaking loose from its domestic foci and starting to think internationally in terms of business, sources of ideas, and technology. It is prosperous. But communities need help negotiating that evolving boundary between the local and the global.

A lot of time has passed since your first trip and experience abroad. Do you recall what was most significant about the trip?

I certainly do and I still carry it with me today. Here I was, 29 years old, had never been abroad. I remember coming back from my first trip; my family (none of them had ever been abroad) asked, “What’s the most important thing that struck you?” My response was, “How similar we are.” Not how different we are. Oh, there are differences. Maybe when you are not there you tend to see the differences more strongly. But when I was there and talked to people throughout these countries, it was the similarities that profoundly struck me. It helped me understand that the vast majority of people in other cultures and lands are so like us in crucial and core ways. By last count, since I was 29 years old, I’ve been to more than 100 countries. People ask me if I have a favorite, and I say no! They’re all unique and they all contribute something, but they’re all so much like us when you get right down to the very basics. And I guess that’s what I learned on my first trip. It’s in the nuances of similarities and differences where you get the real value added and the opportunity to learn.

What advice would you give to an early career professional looking to make a difference?

There is a book put out a few years back by Bernhard Streitwieser and Anthony Ogden. The topic of the book is the scholar-practitioner. To oversimplify, they’re talking about the intellectual contribution that study abroad folks, those in offices of international students and scholars, and others can make because they know things at the practical level that need to be incorporated into the literature and understanding of the field. The vast majority of people in NAFSA and in most other such associations are not academic faculty per se. They’re study abroad directors and study abroad advisers, work with international students or curriculum, and are administrators. They have intellectual contributions to make, even though they don’t have the responsibilities of research, scholarship, and writing in the way that faculty have.

What I would say to anyone who wants to have a serious impact in this field is to engage. Not just in terms of practice in your work area—such as advising study abroad students—but intellectually. What are you doing and why? How is it important? What do you observe the outcomes of this are? After all, the gold coin of the realm, for good or bad in higher education, especially among faculty, is new ideas and the publication of those new ideas. That’s where you get the gold from. It doesn’t have to be quite the scale of developing the unified field theory in physics; understanding about how and why young adults change on study abroad programs is very important. There are lots of study abroad advisers who have answers to that question and access to the data to show it.

What I would say to anyone who wants to have a serious impact in this field is to engage. Not just in terms of practice in your work area—such as advising study abroad students—but intellectually. What are you doing and why? How is it important? What do you observe the outcomes of this are?

My other main point of advice is to be persistent. Almost anything worth doing would have been done already if it was easy. So, if it is hard to do and needs to be done, you need to be persistent. There are a lot of people in the field who could be making much broader sets of contributions if they were persistent in doing so.

Can you tell us the significance of including your wife Anne’s name in the naming of the prize?

The answer is simple. While she doesn’t write scholarly pieces and is not an academic, she is a smart and experienced internationalist in very practical ways. She bore a lot of the stress and the wear and tear along with me from my job because she felt deeply that internationalization is the right thing to be doing. She’s Australian, well traveled, and experienced. She spent a year traveling across North Africa and the Middle East. We met in London when I was guest teaching in programs colocated with the University of London and Cambridge University. I quickly learned that I had a lot to learn from her. I have spent nearly 50 years living with someone from another culture, who thinks differently, and who is hardly afraid to express her views—especially over early drafts of my writing and talks. She critiques my thinking. Because of this life-long “cross-cultural” experience, I am a far better person than I would have been. She deserves recognition for all that she has done to support the internationalization of higher education and me.  •