Collective Agency Begins with a Better Map

Building the next era of international education requires institutions organized to act.

A recent Latitudes flash survey asked international educators how they were entering the academic year.

Respondents described policy pivots, conflicting guidance, funding instability, and the strain of interpreting them for colleagues and students. Many also named ways of coping: exercise, boundaries, family, therapy, and rest.

Those practices matter, but regaining a sense of agency requires understanding what is changing and where collective action remains possible. No amount of personal resilience can supply a missing map.

Leaders see the need for change. Can their institutions act?

A recent Via–AIEA report identifies an institutional gap: participating leaders call for change, yet many lack confidence in their institutions’ current strategies. Disorientation and institutional inertia compound one another.

For a generation, international education navigated a market-liberal settlement in which governments wanted talent, universities wanted enrollment, employers wanted skilled workers, and families wanted portable credentials.

Those interests increasingly pull in different directions. A university’s enrollment strategy may depend on mobility that government policy restricts, while families weigh costs against uncertain career pathways.

What appears to be unrelenting volatility is structural change.

Some of what is being lost deserves to be grieved. Some familiar arrangements need to be reconsidered. Leadership requires judgment about what to carry forward and what to change.

Hope is not looking away from hard realities. It is a commitment to build institutions capable of expressing international education’s deepest purposes under new conditions.

Where collective action remains possible

When the old map no longer fits, every development arrives as another exception or emergency. Collective agency begins by recognizing that disorientation is not the same as powerlessness.

International educators cannot determine every federal choice or geopolitical shift. They can decide where to invest, what to stop doing, which relationships to protect, and whose experience should shape those decisions. Acting together requires institutions to give those choices time, resources, and shared authority.

Structural change requires leaders to reconsider the purposes, assumptions, roles, measures, and relationships organizing the work itself. Which purposes remain worth serving? Whose needs have familiar models overlooked? What could institutions now make possible?

That is moral imagination in practice: seeing reality truthfully, recovering goods neglected by familiar arrangements, and imagining credible alternatives with the people affected. It connects what is changing to what institutions should build, for whom, and why.

A new map must change the work

At AIEA’s 2026 closing plenary, I called on the field to reclaim agency: recognize that the rules had changed, make data local, and build while others panic. Hope through data meant facing hard truths and using evidence to imagine and build what could come next.

Responding to structural change means changing how priorities are set, resources are allocated, responsibility is shared, and success is judged.

A better map helps us see where action is possible. Deciding which direction is worth taking requires moral judgment. Collective agency grows as we build institutions capable of acting on those judgments.

Join the conversation

On October 14, I will join AIEA colleagues for Future Forward: Building the Next Era of International Education, continuing the “hope through data” conversation.

I will offer opening remarks drawing on research on mobility geopolitics, organizational change, and moral imagination, followed by questions and interactive discussion.

The conversation is designed for international offices large and small. Participants will leave with questions and frameworks they can use with their own teams to organize for what comes next.

Register to Join us October 14, 2026, from 2:00–3:00 p.m. EDT.

This conversation is sponsored by Boston College’s Executive Ed.D. in Higher Education, which invites experienced leaders to examine consequential questions about themselves, their institutions, and the future of higher education.