Tsinghua's Transformation --- Poaching of Foreign Faculty Is Linchpin of an Overhaul To Develop Creative Thinkers-Tsinghua University

By Philip Tinari

The Asian Wall Street Journal

27 July 2004

Beijing -- TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, long known as China's MIT, is getting a major makeover as the government here seeks to create a university to match its global ambitions and produce graduates to compete in its market economy.

The alma mater of top leaders like President Hu Jintao and former Premier Zhu Rongji, Tsinghua has long been one of modern China's intellectual engines. Set up in Beijing in 1911 -- the year the Qing empire fell -- to prepare Chinese students to attend U.S. colleges, its earliest funding came from the indemnity China paid in 1901 for damage to American property during the Boxer uprising.

With a brick rotunda sitting on a manicured lawn and purple banners bearing the school's motto "Never Cease in Self-Improvement" fluttering from the lampposts, it feels more like Charlottesville, Virginia, than China.

But these days Tsinghua resembles an American university in many more ways than that. Through aggressive poaching of star faculty from around the world, fund raising, infrastructure building and curricular reform, Tsinghua is transforming itself from a socialist-style polytechnic into what it calls a "first-rate world university."

The goal of these changes is twofold: to create a great Chinese university to match the country's global ambitions, and to produce the kind of independent, creative thinkers the country's increasingly free-market economy demands. While students still must take courses in Marxist philosophy and "Mao Zedong thought," professors cite Tsinghua's relatively open atmosphere, which allows them to research and teach on sensitive social problems like AIDS and population control, as a big asset.

"We realized that the old system doesn't fit with the current society," says provost Hu Heping. "We need to produce people who can think for themselves and one day lead a powerful China."

While Chinese universities have been changing, those at the top -- Tsinghua, Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai -- are best able to transform themselves, helped by Ministry of Education funds targeted at elite schools. Though most institutions lack the resources to emulate Tsinghua, its reforms also serve as a political green light for other universities.

These days, Tsinghua's professional schools feature curricula heavy on American-style case-based pedagogy, often employing Westerners. John Thornton, a former co-chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs Group, serves as director of global leadership at the management school; Laurie Olin, once chairwoman of the landscape architecture department at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, now heads the same department at Tsinghua's architecture school. There is even a Princeton-inspired Institute of Advanced Research, now headed by Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a prominent computer scientist who Tsinghua recruited from Princeton earlier this year.

Student life is changing too. In recent years Tsinghua has renovated its library, recruited a rowing team that competes in Europe and reduced the number of students per dorm room to four from eight. Architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who have worked at Ivy League universities, were brought in to consult on the campus master plan, "to help them create an atmosphere of culture," says Ms. Scott Brown. Even the hours of the student shower facilities were extended, to 11 p.m. from 9.30 p.m.

Tsinghua also has overhauled the undergraduate curriculum. It simplified a byzantine system of academic credits, reducing the total number required for graduation, and introduced "cultural quality education" electives aimed at rounding out students at a university where scientists still outnumber humanists, and where old requirements leave little room for the broadening that has long been a staple of U.S. higher education.

One such course last year was "The Adventure of Humanity," an introduction to anthropology and race theory that drew 170 students. Last year, Tsinghua added 15-person freshman seminars taught by full professors, unprecedented in China's college system that has massive lectures and a tradition of students showing extreme deference to faculty.

Many students support the changes at Tsinghua. "Just in the four years I was there, it got much easier for us to take classes outside our own department," says Wang Weina, an English major bound for the University of Illinois in September. "Tsinghua really cares about letting students develop in whatever direction they choose. It's easier to change majors here than elsewhere in China." Ms. Wang, who spent one semester as an exchange student at Baylor University in Texas, says she still finds academic life in China more difficult than in the U.S.

Other Chinese students who might have looked abroad for graduate school a decade ago are now feeling the pull of Tsinghua. Li Yong, a first-year Ph.D. candidate in industrial engineering, came to Tsinghua to study logistics. "The things we learn here are so much better suited to the current situation in China that it didn't make sense for me to go abroad," he says. "Besides, we have plenty of opportunities to work with foreign faculty right here." This includes his department chairman, Gavriel Salvendy, who came from Purdue University in West Lafeyette, Indiana.

Faculty poaching has been at the center of the change. Jing Jun, a 46-year-old Harvard-trained anthropologist and AIDS expert, gave up tenure at the City College of New York for an appointment in Tsinghua's college of humanities and social sciences in 2000. "I came back because I'm incredibly proud of Tsinghua's history," he says, referring to the school's pre-eminence in the social sciences before a 1952 government mandate that it teach only science and engineering.

Mr. Jing also cites the lower financial barriers to doing empirical social research in China. "In the U.S. you spend half your time writing grant proposals; here all you need is a few thousand yuan, and you're set to go." He also notes the caliber of his best-in-nation students, and the excitement of teaching in a department that was built from scratch less than a decade ago.

However, efforts to emulate Silicon Valley's cooperation between business and academics have had limited success. A new science park aims to bring enterprise closer to the campus. It counts Sun Microsystems Inc.'s China engineering and research institute as a key tenant. But while Gong Li, general manager of the Sun operation, praises the facilities and employs 60 students as full-time interns, he says Sun has yet to work seriously with Tsinghua faculty members in the classic Silicon Valley manner. "We would collaborate with them, but it's just too much hassle," he says. "They don't think or act the way we do."

For all the school's high-power alumni, tensions still exist between a conservative government wanting a great university and a more free-thinking faculty with unorthodox ideas about how to achieve it. One proposed change -- abandoning the system of channeling students into specific majors based on test scores, in favor of admitting students school-by-school and letting them choose their own majors -- has been tied up in the Ministry of Education for years.

"The leaders are determined to make Tsinghua a great university, but what's the model they should follow or create?" asks Wang Hui, a literary critic at Tsinghua since 2002. "It's not as simple as just trying to imitate Harvard."

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