Reorienting internationalisation of higher education in Taiwan: From outwardlooking to inward-looking

This paper explores how internationalisation of higher education is reoriented in Taiwan through a new initiative known as the Higher Education Sprout Project. It elaborates how perceived domestic problems in higher education, like the phenomenon of emphasising research but neglecting teaching, the overemphasis on certain performance indicators and the resulting effects of homogenisation, are considered the consequences of emphasising internationalisation and the associated discourse on global competition. It also examines how the initiative, which is a response to the problems, constitutes a reorientation of higher education policy. Many studies have commented on how teaching and local studies are threatened by the tendency to stress research and publishing in international journals. Based on these commentaries, apparently the reorientation reveals a shift from outward-looking to inward-looking strategies. However, the paper argues that the reorientation also illustrates the constraints that governments confront in internationalising higher education due to political conditions. Copyright © 2018 SRHE International Conference on Research into Higher Education.