The Office of International Affairs (OIA) Director for Global Alliances Linda Chang and Executive Secretary Josephine Chiung-Fen Chen traveled to Washington, DC in February to take part in the 2018 Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) Annual Conference. The OIA delegates’ main goal in attending the conference was to join their counterparts from seven elite universities around the world in delivering joint presentations on their new ventures in promoting the internationalization of higher education during the conference’s concurrent sessions.

This year’s AIEA conference addressed the urgent need for internationalization under the theme, “The Internationalization Imperative in Turbulent Times.” Nearly 1,000 higher education international affairs administrators from 47 countries and 46 states in the United States attended the conference, which ran February 18–21.

The delegates from the seven universities that cooperated with the NTU delegates came from major NTU partner universities in five countries. They included Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), University of California, Davis (UC Davis), University of British Columbia (UBC), University of Tsukuba, University of Bordeaux, and University of Sydney.

Submissions for the conference’s concurrent session presentations are selected through a competitive process. For the last four years, NTU has taken the initiative to invite major partner universities to jointly submit presentations on important issues in international education. This year, all four of the presentations submitted by NTU and its partners were accepted, marking the first year all of NTU’s submissions made it to the conference floor.

During the conference, the OIA’s Director Chang and Executive Secretary Chen each delivered two presentations. The titles of the presentations were: “University, Leadership, and Responsibility: Challenges and Strategies in Turbulent Times” (presented in cooperation with Harvard and UBC); “The Impacts of Political and Global Trends on Student Mobility and Enrollment” (UIUC); “Developing Sustainable International Institutional Partnerships” (UC Davis and University of Sydney); and “Breaking Intra/extra-murals for Multilateral Borderless Education” (University of Tsukuba and University of Bordeaux).

Chang and Chen’s co-presenters included: Harvard’s Administrative Dean for International Affairs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Margot N. Gill; UIUC’s Vice Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela; UC Davis’s Vice Provost and Associate Chancellor of Global Affairs Joanna Regulska; Founder of International Canada, former UBC International Office Executive Director, and current AIEA Chair Adel El Zaïm; the University of Tsukuba’s Vice President and Executive Director for Global Affairs Caroline F. Benton; the University of Bordeaux’s Deputy Vice-President of International Relations Laurent Servant; and the University of Sydney’s Pro-Vice Chancellor Global Engagement Katherine Belov.

The NTU delegates and their international counterparts received high praise from the audiences at all four of their presentations. Not only did the presentations provide insight into complex issues, they stimulated lively dialogue and discussion, as well.