ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer an overview of the scarce academic literature on the long-term mobility of international faculty around the world and attempts to include an institutional perspective on this phenomenon. This task is challenging for four reasons. First, the literature on academic mobility prioritizes discussions about student mobility and, to a large extent, neglects issues connected to the international mobility of faculty. Second, the academic literature on faculty mobility overwhelmingly focuses on aspects related to short-term mobility, as opposed to analyzing the realities related to long-term mobile faculty. Third, when long-term faculty mobility is addressed, the literature uses either the individual perspective of the mobile faculty themselves, in the form of personal narratives, or the system perspective, in the form of describing general push and pull factors causing the mobility of faculty. For the most part, the prioritization of the individual viewpoint and of system-level descriptions has marginalized the perspective of universities as key actors in the faculty mobility phenomenon. Finally, the relevant academic literature disproportionately focuses on ‘star’ faculty and the surge of international mobility into prestigious institutions, not the mobility of ‘worker bee’ faculty moving toward demand-driven tertiary education systems. This focus on a minority of the world’s internationally mobile faculty is due to the preeminence of discussions about university reputation and the challenges faced by institutions located at the center of the academic world within the relevant literature.
