Canada’s reputation for tolerance and inclusion is increasingly being tested on campuses in the wake of the country’s international student boom, a conference heard. The number of international students at Canadian universities increased by 11 percent in 2017, with learners thought to be increasingly shifting their attentions north from a US perceived to be more hostile under Donald Trump. But this year’s conference of the Canadian Bureau for International Education heard that celebration over increasing revenues and diversity is being accompanied by mounting doses of anxiety. Barbara Old, director of international education at the College of New Caledonia, a 5,000-students institution in British Columbia that offers university access courses, says 30 percent of enrolment is now from abroad, nearly all from India. This shift is strong enough to provoke disquiet on campus, Old warns. “I’m getting kickback from the classroom, kickback from the cafeteria, kickback from the library, the community,” she says. “There are allegations, and some of them are true, of sexual misconduct from some male students; there are rumours of rape of girls and their being threatened or blackmailed that this is going to be on the internet,” claims Old. The expansion of the foreign cohort has also led to a greater focus on the risk of plagiarism in classrooms, the conference heard. Martha White, assistant manager of international marketing and recruitment at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, an 18,000-students institution offering bachelor’s courses in Ontario, describes the amount of “push-back” from academics complaining about problems such as plagiarism as “terrible”. However, Sandeep Rane, an international services manager at 23,000-students Sheridian College in Ontario, acknowledges that plagiarism is a “very foreign” concept to many Indian students who are taught to complete examinations by repeating back as accurately as possible what their instructors say. Both he and White recommend aggressive efforts on campus to teach foreign students about the expectations of Canadian institutions.
