Will academics drive or obstruct the Slovenian government’s internationalisation agenda for higher education?

The present article is concerned with the question of how conducive is the academic culture and climate in Slovenian higher education institutions to internationalisation. Our underlying assumption is that academic staff presents either an important driver or an obstacle to the implementation of internationalisation policies formulated at the national level and diffused into the institutional practices. Concretely, in this article we problematize whether the present academic attitudes and behaviours are in line with the internationalisation aims and objectives as stated in the National Higher Education Programme 2011-2020. Our findings point to academics’ overall favourable attitudes to internationalisation. We also find that academics report to prioritise the various internationalisation activities higher than they perceive the internationalisation priorities of their respective institutions. At the same time, however, the academics’ preferences for the various activities associated with ‘internationalisation of study at home’, especially conducting courses in foreign languages, are lower and highly divergent; and might obstruct government’s agenda in this regard.