Academic mobility and internationalization are changing the cultural climate of today’s universities. In Australian universities internationalization is creating multicultural universities where both staff and students from many different language and cultural backgrounds are expected to research, teach and study together. Alongside this, universities espouse the ideals of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ (Rhoads & Szelenyi 2011; Rizvi 2009). Language teaching lies at the heart of intercultural communication in this environment. Interviews with international staff at an Australian university revealed how they manage their multicultural milieu. How is intercultural competence enacted here? Interviewees identified cultural differences relating to language use, social practices and work practices, and strategies for responding to these issues. These faculty members’ sense of their own academic identity plays a crucial role in successful negotiation of this multicultural environment. For example, they saw themselves primarily as linguists belonging to a global disciplinary community, and only secondarily as Chinese linguists working in Australia. Cultural identities are put aside in favour of the academic identities of both local and international lecturers and students. Anderson’s (2006) ‘imagined community’ helps us understand this mechanism for accommodating multiculturalism. However, we are cautious about the acculturation and assimilation that allow for a harmonious work environment. Cultural diversity brings opportunities to see our disciplines in new ways; this is not always comfortable, but may strengthen disciplinary knowledge in the long term. The challenge is to build multicultural universities based on an ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ (Fahey & Kenway 2010), rather than ignoring difference (Ahmed 2012).