How to Love Someone Who Posts “No Internationals” in a Facebook Housing Ad? Thoughts from the UCU International Ofce

by Julia Gasperik

Last August, three years after graduating from university, I started working in the International Ofce of UCU. Having been on exchange four diferent times during my studies, I was able to make a convincing argument to my interviewer that I was motivated about internationalization.

Besides meeting amazing people, walking through great cities, eating delicious food and winning social media for fve-months, these experiences are way more than that. Going on exchange helps people see beyond their own reality, understand problems and issues in context, and relate to new people and situations. It leads to a deeper appreciation and understanding of other cultures and ways of life. Besides, it improves intercultural confdence and in a way, it makes you feel at home in a lot of places. It's an amazing experience but, it's also important to acknowledge that going international is a privilege that is not to be taken for granted.

Now, I don’t think that UCU's student newspaper is the place where I need to convince people that internationalization is great and that it's an amazing opportunity for students. Having spent six months in College Hall, one of the best parts of my job is just talking to students and feeling reassured that the next generation is doing fne in terms of self-awareness, intercultural conf- dence and empathy. Internationalization becomes a more controversial topic behind the closed doors of academia.

The student housing crisis is an evergreen topic in the Netherlands, but it seems to emerge in the daily news of a lot of student cities worldwide. Last year, Dublin and Amsterdam made the headlines of several higher education news platforms with articles about homeless international students. Limiting the number of international students has been often proposed as a solution to this problem for a long time, but concrete policy initiatives have been emerging since last year in the Netherlands. Indeed, admitting more international students while not being able to provide suitable housing is not the way to go.

There's no doubt that there is a student housing crisis that needs to be fxed, but as with most things in life, we need to consider the larger context of this problem and what we can do about it as passionate defenders of internationalization.

"Indeed, admitting more international students while not being able to provide suitable housing is not the way to go."

There's a big gap in terms of how we see internationalization. As mentioned above, in academic circles internationalization is widely seen as an added value. Besides the cultural exposure, personal growth, career opportunities and educational improvement it has a huge economic beneft, direct and indirect. Moreover, it's one of the easiest ways to attract talent to a country. These are benefts that students, teachers, administrative staf and policy-makers understand. So what about the rest of people?

“No internationals!”we have all seen these posts on Facebook while looking for a place in

Utrecht or other international student cities. These warnings are often not posted by landlords but by other students. At this point, we may ask how the larger public sees internationalization, even if a student following courses in English wouldn’t share a bathroom with their own classmate from abroad.

If we step beyond our own bubble the value of internationalization is not as clear to a lot of people as it is to us, and that's understandable. At the end of the day, what positives do they see coming from all of this?

“'No internationals!'- we have all seen these posts on Facebook while looking for a place in Utrecht or other international student cities. These warnings are often not posted by landlords but by other students."

I would like to mention a personal example from my student years. While I was an international student renting an overpriced room in the periphery of Groningen, I worked parttime in a bar. The owner tried everything to attract international students and expats as he felt most at home among them. Part of his plan to bring in these customers was to hire mostly international staf. In my time there we had ten international students from all over the world working at the bar, but this did not seem to attract international customers.

Most of the people spending their evenings at this place were locals. Many were senior citizens who did not attend university. However, they still loved coming and talking to us. For them, this was the frst time talking to an international student, and some of them just came to practice English. Having contact with us also helped us in spreading the spirit of internationalization, and sharing this amazing experience with someone from a diferent context.

Limiting international students or decreasing English-taught programs would defnitely feel like going back in time and renouncing the progress we have made. At the same time, we need to consider other people’s realities and decide what our role and responsibility is in this conversation. It’s February, it’s Valentine’s day, so it can be a nice opportunity to connect with someone in Jan Primus, Nobelstraat or in the Woolloomooloo.