Stanford Report: The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, spoke at SCPKU today and said study abroad allows students to realize that countries all have a stake in each other's success.  Following her remarks, she held a conversation with students on the Stanford campu via SCPKU's Highly Immersive Classroom. Read more.

Alluding to the famous dictum by China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, Min Weifang, the executive president of Chinese Society for Education Development Strategies and professor at Peking University (PKU), China, noted that the “water has become very deep, it is difficult to touch the stones [to cross the river].” Min’s comments came at the end of a conference titled “Building World-Class Universities: An Institutional Perspective,” and they specifically referred to the challenges facing Chinese institutions of higher learning. Yet, the phrase nicely captured the challenges facing institutions of higher education worldwide in remolding institutions, social norms and structures to better adapt to the 21^st century. Institutions of higher learning – whether “world-class” or not – need to grasp the demands of a rapidly changing future that is hard to discern. Speakers highlighted the complexities of globalization, market pressures, and a contracting public purse which encumber university governance and produce conflicting goals.

The conference, which was hosted at the Stanford Center at Peking University from Nov. 4-5, was part of the Beijing Forum 2016 and brought together over 30 scholars, university presidents and other thought leaders from 11 countries in Europe, Russia, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. The Forum aimed to focus on the institutional contexts that promote the construction and longevity of world-class universities. The second half of the Forum featured debates about the criteria for and, even, the very definition of “world-class.”

The Forum generated cross-cutting themes among a wide range of experts in attendance. The most prominent themes that emerged included the role of the government; government-university relations; and the tensions between education and knowledge production in universities. The Forum first highlighted the various “world-class university-projects” and elite national university-projects around the globe including in China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Pakistan. Forum discussions then shifted to focus on questions such as “what is a university?” and “what is world-class”? Various university ranking systems drew skepticism, yet were also recognized as a resource used by donors, governments, alumni and prospective students.

As a policy prescription, a heavy role of the government in university education drew the most fire especially from Chinese colleagues who emphasized China’s need for greater university autonomy from government interference. All could agree, however, upon the important role of the government in tertiary education and, in particular, for building world-class universities, even if striking the proper balance between the role of the government and university administration necessarily differed depending on the national context.

Panelists agreed that contemporary challenges facing top-tier universities are many. They include social and economic pressures that favor “multiversities” over smaller, more cohesive universities; tensions among conflicting stakeholders in “multiversities”; intensification of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) research; commercialization of knowledge; diminishing focus on undergraduate education; overproduction of doctoral degrees; inequality in access to and quality of higher education; and increasing administrative scale and complexity of university management. Many panelists throughout the conference appeared to concur that accelerated knowledge production, a more direct connection to national development goals, increased specialization and commercialization have produced significant benefits in recent years. But they also acknowledged that these benefits have come with a price – perhaps in the form of excellence in undergraduate teaching.

The gains that Peking University and Tsinghua University, in particular, and Chinese universities, in general, have made were widely acknowledged. Increasing numbers of Asian universities, too, have entered the top-tier in global rankings. Yet, solving 21st century demands – as opposed to just managing them – still appeared difficult as experts and thought leaders grappled with what, if any, institutional models can best meet those demands. Some experts suggested providing students access to different kinds of tertiary education (for example, in the form of community colleges, vocational colleges, liberal arts and research universities, as in the U.S. context). Most experts, if not all, agreed that universities need to shore up their educational missions and ensure balanced support for both the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences and technical fields. In addition, many experts emphasized the need to address societal imbalances and provide better access to quality higher education to all socioeconomic classes.

Related links:

Forum agenda and list of panelists

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A new course jointly taught by Stanford and Peking University brought together students and scholars in China and the United States in dialogue using videoconferencing.

Each week during the past spring quarter, students at Stanford and Peking University (PKU) gathered in a classroom to learn, just as they would for any other course. The only difference was these students were neither in the same classroom nor on the same continent.

Despite being separated by nearly 6,000 miles, 18 students in Palo Alto and 28 students in Beijing held ‘face-to-face’ conversations via high definition videoconference in a course taught by American and Chinese scholars. On each side, they sat in a three-rowed amphitheater and looked directly ahead – not at a whiteboard – but at a screen that projects a video ‘wall’ of their colleagues at the other campus. The venue, known as a ‘Highly Immersive Classroom,’ enabled the distance learning experience between the two universities, using advanced software to create a cross-Pacific virtual classroom. The course titled The United States, China, & Global Security, led by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and PKU professor Fan Shiming, was organized under the auspices of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative whose research focuses on security challenges in Asia with teaching as one of its core activities.

“We set out to host a course that addressed topics critical to China and the United States in a new type of classroom format,” said Eikenberry, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and director of the Initiative. “What resulted was a truly unique academic exchange that considered topics even beyond the bilateral relationship and carried a certain ‘Silicon Valley spirit’ being divided by an ocean yet connected through technology.”

Over eight weeks, a select group of graduate students from the two universities explored a wide array of subjects related to international security, ranging from terrorism to trade and energy and the environment. The course aimed to provide students with a forum to discuss current issues in U.S.-China relations and to analyze areas that could be applied to other case studies. 

“Because each week was a different topic, it didn’t feel like I was just thinking about the United States and China again every Wednesday night,” said Sam Ide, a Stanford graduate student who studies China’s relations with Central Asia. “Each session was very interesting to me in a different way.”

Guest-taught by prominent scholars and former senior government officials from the United States and China, the course sessions allocated thirty minutes for each lecturer to present, followed by a thirty minute question-and-answer period in which students were given the opportunity to interact with the lecturers and their peers on the other campus. Lecturers from Stanford included nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Thomas Fingar, a former deputy director at the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and from PKU, Dean of the School of International Studies Jia Qingguo, and arms control and disarmament expert Han Hua. All discussions were off-the-record to encourage candid exchange of ideas. 

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At Stanford's Highly Immersive Classroom in Palo Alto, students look ahead at their counterparts in Beijing.

One course session in particular resonated with students. The session, taught by Zha Daojiong, a professor of political economy at PKU and Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, focused on the changing nature and future of cybersecurity relations between China and the United States.

“I loved the cybersecurity class because there was a lot of candor on both sides,” PKU student Shan Jee Chua recalled.

Kimberly Chang, a second year Stanford graduate student in management science and engineering, noted that it was beneficial to hear the Chinese view on cyber “because most of the talk within the United States has been from an American perspective.”

The course revealed a broader range of perspectives and provided a chance to interact first-hand with international colleagues while remaining at their home campus. Discussion amongst peers uncovered the “behind the scenes stories” and added context to media reports found online or in print, said Seung Kim, a student in Stanford’s East Asian studies program.

Besides the technology, a unique aspect of the course was its diversity. More than half of the course participants were international, representing 15 countries beyond China and the United States. That setting encouraged debate and reinforced the notion that “neither the United States nor China is the center of the universe,” said Zhu Jun Zhao, a PKU international relations student.

When students were asked what could bring about better understanding between China and the United States, continued dialogue was a common answer. The future of U.S.-China relations rests in the hands of people talking to one another: “I think we need more honest conversations,” Chang said.

And for some students, an opportunity to hold those conversations in-person may be close. Ide said he anticipates traveling to Beijing over the summer and plans to try and meet with a few of his counterparts whom he met through the course.

“Hopefully, I’ll be able to meet some of these people in real life who I’ve met on the ‘wall.’”

Related Links:

Video showcases SCPKU's Highly Immersive Classroom enabling co-teaching across the Pacific

“The Friends of Beida,” a philanthropic group established in 1996 by Hong Kong entrepreneurs to support the development of Peking University, visited SCPKU on April 16 as part of their 20th anniversary celebration.  The group celebrated 20 years of partnership with Peking University which includes providing Mingde Scholarships to the top two test takers on the college entrance examinations from each province who are admitted to Peking University.  A number of past and current Mingde Scholars joined the celebration at SCPKU.  Lead donor, David Chan and his family, also have been generous supporters of Stanford.  The anniversary celebration truly used SCPKU as a bridge across the Pacific.  Leveraging the teleconferencing facilities at SCPKU and at Stanford, Jean Oi, Lee Shau Kee Director of SCPKU, speaking from Stanford welcomed David Chan and his group who were in the tiered classroom at SCPKU.  Mike McFaul, Director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and former US Ambassador to Russia, also speaking from Stanford presented “An Analysis of the Upcoming Presidential Election and the Political/Economical Implications to Asia Pacific” and then took questions from the group at SCPKU.  During the highly-interactive session, Michael Chan, an alumnus of Stanford, also announced his family’s generous donation to complete SCPKU's IT facilities, an upgrade that will allow teleconferencing from even more spaces within the center.