BREAKTHROUGHS PODCAST

Clean Broadcast Transcript - Cumulative Timecodes
00:07: Seungah Sarah Lee: Hi, I'm Seungah Sarah Lee. I'm an assistant professor of management and human resources at HEC Paris based in the Doha campus. I'm doing a lot of work around the ways that global scripts, models get translated to various organizational contexts around the world.
My intro 
Yes, Seungah Sarah Lee welcoming you listeners to our latest Breakthroughs podcast. Seungah joined the school’s academic team in 2024 and is based on our campus in Doha. Prior to academia, she led organizational strategy and design for newly established education nonprofits. And she provided them with policy research and advisory services. That makes her ideally placed to study higher education institutions and to look at how internationalization is being shaped by geopolitics, visas, and student mobility. So, in the next half-hour we’ll discuss how universities could be actors in a fragmented geopolitical landscape. We’ll also be discussing her research on how China, and more broadly South-South cooperation, may be helping create alternative centers of higher education. And Seungah will also examine with us why universities are so interested in faculty mobility and student exchanges…
But first, let’s plunge into the foundations of Seungah’s research.
Jingle
INTRODUCTION: ACTORHOOD AND GLOBAL HIGHER EDUCATION

Daniel Brown: You've joined me here in the HEC Bar Club and West Building on campus, and you've flown in from where you usually live and work, and that is Doha, the Doha campus of HEC.As you said earlier, your research does examine how global models and norms travel across national settings and become institutionalized within organizations and societies.And you analyze how their diffusion and translation reshape organizational forms, their practices and trajectories of institutional change. And there's a particular attention to the evolving actorhood of higher education institutions and the Organization of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.And I slowed down and emphasized that word actorhood because it does come up throughout your two research papers that we're going to discuss today.And I'd just like you to define actorhood.
Seungah Sarah Lee: Actorhood, we define it as purposeful, goal-oriented organizations, organizations who have goals and objectives and act accordingly and create strategies and actions and structures. We distinguish it a little bit from agency because it might sound very similar to human agency, but because we're talking about organizations and for a lot of organizations, there's no single decision-making human person. So we abstract it a little bit further to think about it as a combination of different decisions that get driven by various purposes and roles and goals that we believe or society believes that organizations should hold. So that's where actorhood really comes from.
Daniel Brown: And what drew you to this topic?
Seungah Sarah Lee: So what drew me to this topic of organizational actorhood or looking at organizational purposes and the ways that gets enacted in various contexts is I personally grew up all over the world and have worked across different contexts and countries even prior to joining academia and saw there were quite a lot of similarities in how organizations work in the way that we sometimes talk about people are people are people everywhere, organizations are organizations everywhere. And so that drew me to the topic to begin with and then higher education in particular. to study this notion of actorhood because it's one of those organizational forms and institutions that people around the world are familiar with. And you could pretty much walk down the street in any country and ask someone to describe a university or a school. And you likely will get very similar answers. People might think they have different functions, but more than other companies or startups, it's one of those organizations that have global transversality, which is why I ended up becoming interested in the organization of higher education, the organization of universities from a cross-national global perspective.

PART ONE: IN THE NAME OF INTERNATIONALIZATION
Youtube extract
My name is Laura Rumbley I'm the director for knowledge development and research at the European Association for International Education I've been a student of internationalization for more than 20 years I think at its heart it isa phenomenon that is designed to allow all of us to experience new and different things that take us beyond our normal national context our normal cultural context and allows us to develop new ideas new insights new information that allow us to work in the world in more effective ways to bridge distances with others um and be able to collaborate and think um globally in terms of the the work that we do and the lives that we lead.

Daniel Brown: So let's plunge into the first article that we're going to discuss. It's called In the Name of Internationalization and it has this subtitle, Varied Organizational Actorhood of Universities in the Global Higher Education ArenaIt was co-signed by Jieun Song. It was co-signed by Jieun Song of Hongik University in South Korea. How did you go about your research in terms of choice, approach, and so on?
Seungah Sarah Lee: this project really started out when we were both doctoral students back in the day, musing about similarities and differences. And Jun really had an interest in internationalization. I had an interest in organizational strategies and organizational expansion. And with a few other colleagues of mine in the U.S., we really started to think about how can we study universities around the world in a systematic manner. There has been a lot of case studies, comparative case studies of countries, of universities in different countries, or a lot of studies of universities in a particular country, but there hadn't been a broader, larger scope of a sample that take universities from around the world, both regionally representative, but also in terms of Global North-south, east, west. And we knew internationalization specifically was a phenomenon that was everywhere. Before, traditionally we knew of international students from Asia or Africa or Latin America, predominantly Global South, going to the U.S. or Europe to study. And that was how we thought about internationalization of international student support. But then we also started seeing that other kind of, there was much more Global South-south cooperation in internationalization, not only with the students, but faculty mobility and student exchange programs. So we started to become curious about Why do universities do these things? Who does this? What drives them? Are there particular differences and similarities of what this means for different organizations? Because that has implications for student experience, university competitiveness, and with global rankings, especially now that most universities, including HEC Paris, are quite conscious of. And we knew for some of the rankings, internationalization is a piece of the rankings. So we wanted to go deeper dive and understand what's behind this phenomenon.
Daniel Brown: So what makes internationalization the right lens for studying universities? And now you did your research over a three-year period, 2021 to 2024, but I'm sure it's just as relevant in 2026.
Seungah Sarah Lee: It's relevant in 2026 as well in the ways that internationalization hasn't completely gone away. And I think interestingly enough, once we got this paper published, and Jieun and I have been reflecting on this a bit as well, And I think it's becoming even more relevant now with the geopolitics, with the visas and with student mobilities and financing and costs, right? So then why universities internationalize, how they internationalize, and this is a bit of the preview of some of our findings is some of the findings that we find is the ways that universities are internationalizing and creating little packs in societies, especially in increasing global South-South cooperations and the ways that faculty mobility versus student affairs and engagement programs that universities offer vary by different kinds of countries. Actually, it tells us quite a bit of what's the trajectory of internationalization. What does it mean for not only student and faculty mobility, but also does that mean the centers of higher education would shift in the future if the current status of things changes or remains the same?
Daniel Brown: I'm sure we'll be coming back to those geopolitical realities throughout our conversation. But Seungah, you distinguish between those internationalization structures and internationalization activities. Quite a mouthful, that word. What does the distinction let us see that we would otherwise miss?
Seungah Sarah Lee
So these are mouthfuls. So I'm just going to talk about our structures and activities. So we conceptualize structures as more organizational forms, right, in terms of establishing an office versus just having a committee or a person working on internationalization. There’s an office, how elaborate is that office, the number of staff that are hired. So it's not just having an office, but also where does this office sit in the organizational hierarchy. So these are strategic decisions that a university or any organization really makes about positioning a particular department or a unit. If you've appointed someone who's like very senior at like the vice provost level or vice dean level for internationalization versus having a head of internationalization means something different symbolically for organizations and even the positioning of the role. So we think about those as kind of structures that are much more symbolic, but also quite strategic in terms of displaying how much the university really values that particular function. Like we think about, follow the budget, where the budget goes, that's where the priorities are, as opposed to the activities, right, which are more of the on the ground running type work of when you think about internationalization, there's different types of it. So there's obviously the international student piece of it: the incoming inbound students, but there's also the outbound students of exchange programs and studying abroad and exchanges. And then there is faculty mobility. That’s one piece. But in addition to students and faculty, there's things like international cooperation, signing MOUs and partnerships with other universities and sister universities, partner universities, having branch campuses. So there are different layers of it. So we think about those things as activities, as more of that’s much more action oriented as opposed to where does this particular function sit within the organization?

PART TWO: COMPETITIVENESS, LIBERALISM AND GEOPOLITICS
Daniel Brown: Seungah, one of your conclusions of this research is that you find national competitiveness is linked to activities, while national liberalism is linked to structures. How should we understand that split?
Seungah Sarah Lee: so when we think about both the competitiveness and liberalism. So in terms of competition, we look at universities that are in countries that are actively see themselves as competing in a global economy. So they're very cautious about university worldwide rankings, imagining themselves as having world class universities for one thing, in terms of like economic competitiveness. So that we find that drives more varieties of the different kinds of activities. So it's not just exchange programs, but it's exchange programs plus the mobility plus the cooperation plus the MOUs. much more expansive. And for us, that shows us that universities who are in more competitive countries are using internationalization quite strategically as a way to advance not only their own positioning and their own competitiveness and reputation as a university, but see themselves as also contributing to the broader global competitiveness of higher education that countries are also vying for. So that's shown out in activities. 
In terms of the liberalism, it's much more linked to more democratic values, more liberal societies, more progressive societies. So what we found quite interesting and surprising is that they predict different things. And so we find that the more liberal a country is, so the more democratic, more open society as it is, there's a lot more symbolic work that universities are doing to position internationalization at more senior places of the organizational hierarchy. which means they're able to input a lot more resources. But then people can go to the website and know that, okay, these are liberal economies, that these are liberal countries, liberal universities operating in very liberalized places. So then you know that these are much more advancing, progressive development of the world. So that's how we've seen the dynamics play out.
Daniel Brown: But of course, the geopolitics can change that framework so that we see that some countries like the United States, don't have quite the same approaches towards universities and internationalization. And then there are structural issues like visas that you mentioned, which come to play. How do you adapt your approach and your research to those evolving realities?
Seungah Sarah Lee: So the current study that's published is much more cross-national. So we're also collecting and looking at more historical data to see at what point does internationalization change? Does the structures change? And what we do find in some of our other studies is the structures often don't change, which is why the symbolic aspects of the hierarchy, because once it's established and ingrained into an organization, it's really hard to reverse that. So it stays, but then the activities change a little bit. And so we're trying to understand, with especially places like in the U.S. visas: how are the universities repositioning themselves in an international arena? Because as much as the country level policies are changing, the broader landscape of global higher education and the ways that the rankings and the centers of excellence and the prestige of global universities, that hasn't changed. So we are also looking at liberalism in the sense of not just the country's level of democracy, but also how much are these universities embedded in countries that also subscribe to these global ideals of university. We can measure by number of universities, a percentage of universities that participate in global rankings, that perceive themselves and their mission statements and vision statements as being participants of a global international world. And so what we predict might be happening is that the universities might either be overcompensating against the visa issues and regulations to frame themselves as distinct and push for more liberal progressive agendas, especially if they are much more elite. But we also foresee that if they're less elite or they're competing for resources much more locally, they might curtail some of those symbolic aspects and focus more on the international student recruitment or other ways of funding the universities, which probably gets to my other paper.
YOUTUBE EXTRACT CHINA 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcNmf2FNOJ4 
China's top universities are opening to foreign students. That's a big problem for US schools.

Good morning.Chinese universities are opening to international students from across the world. And that's a serious problem for universities in the United States right now who rely on international students who pay full tuition and full room and board just to stay open. It's going to be an existential problem for them overcoming years. And to understand the shift that's taking place, imagine your family lives in South America or Africa or elsewhere here in Asia. You have a kid at home and some money saved up to send your son or daughter to a good university. And so soon you'll have to make some hard decisions as to where you should send them and your money.

Daniel Brown: In your qualitative analysis of this first paper, universities frame internationalization differently across contexts. Which contrast was most revealing to you? Perhaps a few concrete examples.
Seungah Sarah Lee: In the more qualitative areas where what we found most interesting was the difference between what's happening in the positioning of China, for example, and the centrality of China and some of the Russian universities and the the collective aspects of it compared to the more, like the Anglo-Saxon. So we talk about the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada that have more Anglo traditions where we find that a lot of these traditionally Western, traditionally Anglo aspects of internationalization, their conceptualization of it is less about the mobility, but it's really about the learning and the experience. So there's much more emphasis on the experiential aspect of the students. which for us made sense because these are also societies that have emphasized human agency as in looking at university students as agents of change, et cetera. So there's much more of this like globalization, global citizenship dynamics that we saw coming out of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Whereas if you looked at the way that internationalization is positioned in Asia, particularly in China, we saw that it was much more linked to faculty mobility and also international cooperation. I think it's also because these countries have historically had less students coming into these countries, with study abroad students, international students coming into their universities, but it's also been shifting and we've seen that as they're emphasizing international cooperation, they're also emphasizing the cooperation not between the West and the East, but more like East-East cooperations and East-South cooperations with having a lot more exchange type mobility work with universities in Southeast Asia or parts of Africa or parts of Latin America, but mostly Southeast Asia and Africa. And that was much more tied to national agenda, which makes sense for China, but it was much more geopolitically oriented. It's much more creating this South-South cooperation as another way of carving out, at least we saw it qualitatively, a different center of higher education and almost they started framing internationalization and international programs being increasingly English language programs. We see that ironically in some ways, but pitched that as a way to giving alternative options that foster the South-South cooperation, which I think That is quite interesting because even these universities are riding on a broader progressive liberal agenda of increasing equity, global equity, et cetera, but reshaping it to foster their own centers of influence and spheres of influence. So that's some shifts that we saw that get reflected, the geopolitical shifts being reflected into the ways that universities are also reaching out to each other and forming cooperation, MOUs and relationships.
Daniel Brown: I'm curious about one word I haven't seen in this paper and that is soft power. The use of universities and higher education in the four different categories that you have drawn up and we haven't talked about that. But is that a factor that's in the back of your mind, the use of universities as a tool to further a political agenda or other? Or economic, sure.
Seungah Sarah Lee: yes, I think yes, like in the back of our minds, most definitely there's a soft power piece to it. It's not part of the paper because we didn't have the right data to be able to show it. And so we didn't want to conflate our findings to the soft power dynamics of it. But I think it is important to have that lens and even reading the paper and interpreting the findings and thinking about the implications of it is I think our big core contributions to the literature that is of relevance is not only in this differences between the liberalism and the competitiveness and the ways that it influences the way that universities themselves are acting and responding to. 
So we're taking that premise that universities are not necessarily independently moving as actors on their own for their own volition, but they're also influenced greatly by these national embedded societal factors. So then the question really becomes, do universities end up reflecting the soft power geopolitical dynamics of it? Or is it the other way where the geopolitical soft power is influencing universities? It raises further questions both for inquiry, but also political implications of the politicization of higher education. And then what does that mean for funding structures? What does it mean for grants? What does it mean for I don't know how much, some of the critiques that are happening in the U.S. right now and the pushback in higher education with the Trump administration, for example, is the curtailing of visas has not only implications for universities just in terms of their standing, but it's threatening because there are financial reasons or ranking reasons. So then what does that do for the legacy of the broader image and the soft power of the countries, right? And so I think there are a lot of these implications and I would invite people to pay attention to that qualitative piece of that paper when we talk about similar birds flocking together in terms of the universities as the analogy that we use because we start seeing these regional blocks that are more recent phenomena that has started forming in terms of cooperation. I think for us, we didn't write about it more explicitly in the paper. It raised some questions and a bit of concerns in an increasingly polarizing world. will these blocks lead to further polarization or where the internationalization in the early days and historically really started as a way of cosmopolitan international exchange for greater global understanding? Now we're are we at a place of same sword, double-edged sword type situation? or not, and it's a choice that I think universities have an opportunity to make about shaping that global landscape, perhaps against some of those regional geopolitical tensions.

YOUTUBE EXTRACT
Top 10 Problems with American Universities Today | Richard K. Vedder of the Independent Institute


171 vues 18 juil. 2025 RALEIGH
In the first chapter of my newest book, Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction and Higher Education, I list10 problems with American universities. First, as already indicated, enrollment decline has occurred for the first prolonged period in American history……..Fifth, the cost of college is high both for the consumers and the broader public. Per student spending in the US is far higher than in other comparable industrial democracies like neighboring Canada or Great Britain or Japan.

GLOBAL MODELS, LOCAL CONTEXTS

Daniel Brown: What does this paper tell us about how universities adapt global models to their own national contexts?
23:05: Seungah Sarah Lee: I think with this paper, what it tells us is that as universities are adopting global models to their national context, it tells us that the adoption process isn't uniform. I think a lot of people assume that we often look for best practices and say best practice will be adopted by different organizations. It's not limited to universities generally. But what we show and what we find is that what sticks and what doesn't stick is often very conditioned on the local context of the economy, but also the way that the countries are positioning themselves as where they are in the political aspects, the political economy of it. So then it really means that universities are dealing with multiple shades and multiple ways of embeddedness of universities themselves have to respond to a global market of higher education. So they have to perform certain things and do things and adopt programs and initiatives in a way that makes them look like a university of the way that we conceptualize what internationalization is. Because if you don't do that, then people are start questioning, are you really a university? Are you really internationalizing? But they also have to add in some of those national flavors get embedded in what gets emphasized, what gets prioritized, and what comes up at the foreground of action and decisions and structures and some other things might get backgrounded in.
Daniel Brown: I have to ask you a question about HEC Paris, which has something like 130 different nationalities. You're based in Doha, which is in another category in terms of the four that you draw up in your study. I'm wondering how you position HEC and its approach towards internationalization.
Seungah Sarah Lee: I think HEC is unique in that it's a business school. And it's not in our sample, partly because we only look at universities that have a broader faculty across multiple disciplines. So that's the traditional model of a university. But I think HEC is not different from the ways that some of the other universities that we have studied behave. I think in that sense there are HEC itself is also going through some interesting times and responding to global changes and globalization and the dynamics of the composition of international students have also changed for different programs. There's greater pressures to internationalize. There's greater pressures to bring in international students. And I think the next question is, in addition to bringing students for international students, where is position on international exchange and the types of activities that it engages in, not only for financial reasons, but also for reputation and elite maintenance reasons. And then the questions about what does it mean for the French diplomatic aspects, right? The Doha campus, yes, we are independent, but there are ties to the French embassy. Like, we're not going to pretend it's not there. And so there is a level of soft power that happens. And so then it also then becomes how can a university like HEC, a business school, leverage that role that the university can play in that soft power dynamics that the government can play in ways of both positioning itself within France, within Europe, but globally.
Daniel Brown: Finally, on this paper, Seungah, I'm wondering about how you would like to see universities take this huge amount of research that you've done, over 500 universities, 89 different countries, and perhaps apply some of the conclusions or analyses. It's always, I think, a researcher's dream to see some of their research being applied in some ways.
Seungah Sarah Lee: I think with this particular work and some of my other work that look at universities, but I would love to see universities do, granted a lot of our work is quite phenomenological and it helps describe why things are the way they are. It helps explain why universities act the way they do and why we have these structures. So what I would love university to start thinking through is being a bit more critical of universities' own practices and business schools' own practices when you think about internationalization. What is internationalization for really and how much is it really driven by organizational goals versus the influences of it in a more critical way and then reimagine its role and its decisions for why it's internationalizing and for what purpose and consider what implications that might have, not only for the students and the faculty that are engaged, but then what is the kinds of knowledge, what is the kinds of culture, what is the kinds of global understanding that the university is propagating and bringing into the world. I think those are some things for universities to really think about and use internationalization a bit more both strategically beyond just financial reasons. I think often it's easy to think about internationalization tied to finances and resources, but we show and we know that it serves broader purposes. So combine the two much more intricately, I think.
JINGLE
PART THREE: DREAMS, DOLLARS AND DONORS
Daniel Brown: Let's move on to a sister paper that came out just last month in Social Forces, another peer-reviewed journal, very respected.And it's called Dreams, Dollars and Donors.I love that title.And I'm just wondering if you see a link, first of all, between these two papers?
29:42: Seungah Sarah Lee: So these two papers are part of a broader project that look at globalization of higher education and looking at the ways that the organizational actorhood in some ways, but really the structures and the organization of higher education has transformed over time. And so they're linked together, but then we've separated into different papers because we thought each of these topical choices of these offices warrant their own inquiry and particularly we found the development piece, the fundraising piece, which is why it's called Dreams Dollars and Donors, important because universities in the past, in the 21st century for the most part, have been under fire and have had to fundraise and had to raise funds and been asked to fundraise much more than before, especially outside of the U.S.. I think HEC is a good example where it had one model of being funded by the Chamber of Commerce and then we're in a very different era, right? And so we really wanted to call attention to the rising model of fundraising and what's the influences of it, how it came about, how it shapes and challenges the ways that universities do this. and point out really that this model really came from the United States. So it's not something that was just conjured up out of nowhere globally, but it's a very U.S.-centric model that we believe became much more diffusive because American universities for better or worse, have been perceived as models of excellence as the more elite, more established universities. I think the rankings ended up showing that and supporting that. People were looking to the Harvards and the Stanfords and the Yales and the Princetons as the ideal models of higher education, even though universities and higher education existed elsewhere much longer. But it's that dominant player that's driven. Other universities who are much historically institutionally much richer and longer and have heritage have started questioning what have we done wrong that we've allowed the U.S. universities to dominate. And so that was where we started.
YOUTUBE EXTRACT on illusion of US universities
Conservative economist, Rich Vedder listing his top 10 problems with American universities today.

32:10: Daniel Brown: And that model also has an impact on Chinese universities because they're coming up and yet they're not quite perceived in the same way given the role of the state in the universities. 
32:24: Seungah Sarah Lee: And so it's quite different in the Chinese universities in that sense. And so Partly why we wanted to look at development offices globally is because we know that some universities that are highly state driven and state funded, publicly funded, might not engage in fundraising activities as much as privately owned universities that really need those sources. And not just China, but we have universities in Germany, for example, that are largely state funded. You have the chair system. But even the German universities, even they're highly state funded, they're very public. There's a very traditional system of the, from Bologna days, but then we also see things like German, some German universities, especially the polytechnics and some of the more technical schools, starting to not just have chairs, but also have endowed chairs that are corporately sponsored, which if you are a historian of higher education, you might be shocked at what is happening. And some of the German scholars might feel even offended that there is corporate influence now in university academic research. So these kinds of phenomena led us to start looking at, okay, what is it? What's driving it? Is fundraising, development, funding of universities truly an American model? Or is it something that's been infiltrating other countries because of different budget situations? Or is it that now for universities to not engage in any development work at a minimum in the way that the American universities do it, does that mean that they're less of a university? So these are some fundamental more philosophical, theoretical, esoteric questions. that we had in looking at this paper.
Daniel Brown: Your main finding is that universities with more elaborate structures and links to professional associations are more likely to adopt a development orientation. What does that tell us?
Seungah Sarah Lee: Something that we found both not quite surprising, but quite interesting given the high significance of it was less about the organizational elaboration of structures, but more on its links to professional organizations. And I don't know how much the public realizes, but there is a international nonprofit organization called CASE that is all about educating and developing development professionals to help universities fundraise and raise funds through various means. And so what we find in the story is less about universities creating development offices and engaging a lot of financial fundraising activities, not necessarily just out of their need, resource need, which is partly true, but that ties to international organizations and professional organizations that push this particular agenda are more likely to engage in particular forms of fundraising and development activities that are much more akin to what university fundraising, what university development activities in the U.S. look like than looking at other forms of financing higher education. Because we can imagine a world which we've seen before, where universities are not actively asking their alumni networks to donate, where universities are not always calling up donors and establishing foundations, but rather looking to either corporate sources and more community sources as a way of collective engagement and investment into higher education. So it's a very in some ways capitalistic U.S. American model of picking up your bootstraps and going on campaigns and raising funds. And so we're realizing that it's the universities that have these links that invite these professionals to engage that they end up being convinced to one mode of university development than others. And then the more elaborate universities is with their structures, with people, the more forms they are, they're much more comfortable establishing various ways of sourcing funding than having smaller offices.
Daniel Brown: You also find that several indicators of marketized societies don't explain development orientation as expected. What surprised you there?
Seungah Sarah Lee: So what really surprised us is the fact that initially we thought the more marketized, the more market-driven a country and a society is, and the university is in those societies, but also engage in lots of fundraising and marketized activities. But what we find is that it's not negative, but it's quite insignificant. So then it told us, what it told us is that it's less about the economic privatization push and that culture of market economy is less relevant. It's really more about linkages to different forms of fundraising that mattered more in appointing people to be development officers, appointing entire slews of staff, we jokingly called like armies of fundraisers, entire like alumni networks got formed. And so and but simultaneously some things that don't pick up that's very American is like university sports. That doesn't diffuse all over the world as a vehicle for fundraising. That doesn't get blown out. But then the more office structures are some things that end up being picked up by universities worldwide, regardless of whether they are state-funded organizations or not, increasingly so in the West and less so in the East, to engage.
YOUTUBE EXTRACT:
China Welcome all students from all countries to stay Universities in China
Daniel Brown: You mentioned the domination and dominance of the American model in terms of fundraising and development offices is almost taken for granted. In your study here of the 437 non-American universities, did you find any really interesting models that could challenge that approach?
Seungah Sarah Lee: So something that we found interesting is that a lot of the Anglo-Saxon, like the British, the European, some East Asian models are very similar to the U.S. in adopting it. But we've also found that in some universities that do engage in some level of development, activities in Africa and Latin America, for example, it's quite limited. It hasn't quite been diffusive and they're largely state funded. But we started seeing things about how they're utilizing university programs around like agriculture. So there's particular university that was using agricultural their courses and their programs as a way to generate revenue in not only for the students, but also for the university taking it. So it was almost like some university are taking a business model, which we found interesting. We spent a lot of time contemplating does this count as a development activity versus not. What are different forms of it, which we found quite interesting as a different way that was much more tied to financial need and operating the university themselves than the symbolic aspects of it. Whereas we had universities in I think one of the universities in South Korea that I'm not going to name a specific university because that would be, that might lead to some other conversations. But there's a university in South Korea, they have an extensive alumni network and they do engage in fundraising, but they're very, but then the way they framed fundraising was less about… and they had like buttons on the main page about donate here, right? So it was much more of an active way of engaging in fundraising, which is not too different from what happens in other countries, especially the U.S., but they would link it to just different aspects of contribution and responsibility as an alumni, which is quite different from it's not as pushy in other places, but it was much more explicit. So we found that to be quite interesting. And then they were using that as a way to create corporate partnerships, which happens quite often, but there was much more explicit statements of those aspects in their fundraising strategy, which we thought was interesting, given that they also get quite a bit of state funding.
Daniel Brown: Seungah, same question as the previous paper. In terms of what you would like to see universities, authorities, educational authorities take from your paper, your research, which by the way is co-signed with Nadine Skinner and Francisco Ramirez of the Cornell University and Stanford University respectively, “Dreams, Dollars and Donors”, what would you love to see in terms of them reading that and say, hey, that's a great analysis and I'd like to apply it?

WHAT UNIVERSITIES SHOULD TAKE FROM DREAMS, DOLLARS AND DONORS
Seungah Sarah Lee: I think for universities with fundraising with this paper, something that we're hoping to uncover and we would like to see universities reflect on is the fact that how American fundraising is and that there is this role of a professional institutions and organizations in influencing the trajectories of university fundraising. And there are different kinds of ways and functions of university fundraising. So then for universities that I know that need to actively fundraise and engage in development activities, we're not necessarily advocating for more fundraising or less fundraising. That's up to the university and there are realistic expectations of it. But I think for development professionals who read this paper that might relate to, I think they might start seeing that there are different functions that development office plays that might help them think about how do they pitch their own fundraising activities in a ways that, they might have not thought about: it is signaling for us that we are an entrepreneurial university by engaging in these things. It signals that we have a… the campaigns are signaling to our donors and our stakeholders that there is a particular vision that's worth investing in. So that might give them some more marketing language. if needed. It's not necessarily the point of the paper, but that could lead to some interesting implications. And I think another aspect that it reveals is that fundraising is still very much a U.S.-centric Anglo-Western phenomenon, and it's not necessarily the default. And so I think the other big push that we wanted to emphasize with this paper is really highlight how American of a model this is. And so for both scholars and university practitioners and professionals, who are envisioning different ways of being a university that does not just acquiesce to the American model because fundraising is not the core business, it's an added business that universities have adopted, then it would be, you're also in good company because a lot of universities don't engage in fundraising actually. I want to know that so you don't have to feel like you need to. And then it might be an opportunity to be what, this is a very U.S.-centric, U.S. phenomenon. We want to have alternative forms of university operations. And so then hopefully this paper shows that unlike the internationalization paper where it's much more diffusive, the development function of a university is not necessarily a core marker of legitimized model of excellence of universities. So then it almost frees universities to pursue different ways of funding, different ways of financing, different ways of conducting operations to push the current. situation in the state of global higher education, and perhaps for universities who are thinking about different visions, alternative visions, it might give them an opportunity to think about a different kinds of operating model that allows universities to really focus on what they believe they need to do best, whether it's being more locally rooted or globally oriented, and it's an okay choice.
Daniel Brown: Seungah Sarah Lee, thank you very much.
Seungah Sarah Lee: Thank you. Thank you so much. 

MIKE:
Seungah Sarah Lee who’s assistant professor in HEC Doha’s Management and Human Resources department. Seungah is also looking at why some business leaders turn ideas about inclusion into ambitious, concrete initiatives, and at the same time others walk away with far more limited plans.
So, plenty to talk about the next time we invite her to a Breakthroughs podcast.
Well, that rounds up this month’s show. Next time round, we’ll enjoy some of the books that have most marked some of HEC’s research academics. Books like Abundance by Ezra Klein et Derek Thompson, or Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson. So join me on the various platforms broadcasting Breakthroughs. Until then, good-bye.
 
EDITORIAL CUT NOTES
The strongest editorial spine is universities as actors in a fragmented geopolitical landscape: internationalization, soft power, China and South-South cooperation, and the fundraising model as a separate American-influenced template.
Best Part 1 moment: 07:11-08:24: Internationalization has become more relevant because geopolitics, visas, mobility, financing, and emerging South-South cooperation may shift centers of higher education.
Best Part 2 moment: 16:20-22:53: China, South-South cooperation, soft power, and the possibility that internationalization may reinforce geopolitical blocs rather than overcome them.
Best Part 3 moment: 34:39-38:51: CASE and professional networks matter more than broad marketization in explaining the diffusion of development offices.