Internationalisation is one of those "motherhood & babies" subjects that is hard to criticize. Australian universites have large international programs. We are always being told how beneficial it is to us. Some experiences are relevant to the US.
(a) Internationalisation is costly in salaries, labour and money and takes on a life of its own that has little to do with education.
(b) It is not a cash cow despite what the spin-doctors say. Nearly all the money raised by the international program is consummed by itself. Rather like the proverbial college football team. The football team might be bringing in $200 million a year but the benches in your lab may be 50 years old and when was the ceiling last painted?
(c) Any money that does trickle-down goes to "relevant" subjects such as IT, commerce, economics or engineering not the History or Botany Department.
(d) State funding. In Australia the states do not give universities any money. All government money is federal. Student's fee scales are based on whether you are an Australian citizen/permanent resident or not. Not so in the US. Provincially minded US state governments do not even look kindly on students from out-of-state. You do not have to be a political genius to realise that internationalisation will encourage US state governments to lose interest in university funding.
(e) The distribution of international students will be very uneven. A university can have over 20% international students but students in some majors will never meet one.

Internationalization requires:
1) going out requires going in (J. Campbell) so without emotive, reflective, social science, humanities depths of self analysis going out becomes missionaries wondering what makes these natives so stupid
2) going out students without faculty who went out decades earlier produces nasty arguments students lose with bigot faculty who think themselves global but what are just local snobs pretending to global understanding and sympathies
3) the USA will shortly have no money for anything including internationalizing--so internationalization will be pioneered by colleges with money and only six or so US colleges in our future will have enough money to laggardly participate
4) the peoples and nations needing internationalizing most are those least likely to do it and least competent at doing it when they try
5) going out is not the same as surveying and using all that is without---the latter is a different order of internationalizing seldom talked about, seldom funded, but very important and more felt in Europe by Europeans than by others, due to WWII and the European Union experience
6) lots of educated foreigners hanging around local cities in some nation, tends to produce upset locals who find what is automatic and good to them, laughed at and criticized by visitors
7) the kind of depth that going out requires is seldom aimed for by faculty, curricula, and college students---everyone seems willing to settle for a path to a salary in some sort of corporation---the new "educatedness" ideal.
8) our civilization seems to be dying so perhaps we should shift all this sort of future development to China and East Asia where the future and money increasingly will be.

Raymon_j_richie and Richardtaborgreene,

Excellent points/observations! I am an international educator who has observed many of the trends you both point out. Internationalization is the key word today in university circles, but many colleges and universities are going to have to take a realistic approach on that given the recession we are currently in.

Internationalization is a feel-good word, but it has not been explained very well how it contributes to campus internationalization (I especially like ritchie's point e--very true!)beyond the general rhetoric that emanates from International Programs Offices. Richardtaborgreene, I like your first point: students who go out (by this I mean study abroad) must be capable of performing self analysis and process their experience in a reflective way. The field of international education is only now doing this and it remains to be seen how effective this will be in the long run.

Another development to look out for is the Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act, which states as its goal to send one million US undergraduate students abroad within ten years. Currently, just over 260,000 study abroad annually. The US government will fund study abroad, but is there a way to make this investment postively impact internationalization efforts on campuses beyond sending larger numbers of students abroad?

This is a topic that merits much discussion.

Are we really talking about what Dr. Levine is saying or are we reflecting on current practice in place. My take is that Levine's notions of "internationalization" go far beyond current practice into notions of institutions without walls, a globalized professorate, multicultural curricula, and more. It requires changing the perspective of a university from a specific place. set of facilities, and course and activities list, to one of a global community of scholarship. Utopian, maybe, but definitely needed in our increasingly "flat world" to reference Friedman.

Most of the above defines internationalization purely in terms of student mobility. This certainly will remain part of the discussion, but it is not the whole discussion. Issues such the increasingly global competitition for talent include the search for outstanding graduate students and top tier research and teaching talent.