Professor Rudner confuses CAUT’s concerns about the inclusion of education services within the General Agreement on Trade in Services with a general anti-internationalist stance. This suggests that opposition to trade agreements like GATS necessarily translates to opposition to the internationalization of higher education. On the contrary, CAUT has long been and remains a strong advocate for increased international cooperation, mobility and exchanges of students and staff. The point is that these initiatives should be governed by educational priorities, and not by the commercial mandates that dominate trade agreements, such as GATS.

In fact, there is a growing international consensus among educators that to include education services in GATS and other trade agreements would profoundly distort the educational mission of our institutions. Agreements like GATS can lock-in and intensify the pressures of commercialization and privatization and thereby undermine the public service principles that should guide universities and colleges.

Along with our international colleagues, we adopted last month a joint statement calling on countries not to include education services in GATS. We did this because we believe that education is not simply a commercial product. Its most important characteristics are cultural, social and developmental. For it to be governed by commercial agreements like GATS is simply inappropriate.

David Robinson
Associate Executive Director — Research & Advocacy, CAUT