| AU asked to advise on American-style university to be built in China BY SALLY ACHARYA China’s first American-style university is still in the planning stage. But significant input is already being sought from AU, which has drawn from its experiences in Sharjah and Nigeria to make recommendations on the form such a university might take. An AU team led by Robert Pastor, vice president of international affairs, traveled to Nanjing in late November to talk about the preliminary report, which envisions a university with small interactive classes taught in English, a number of general education courses, and a focus on communications, international affairs, and business and entrepreneurial studies. It was the second trip for AU officials, who also visited Nanjing this summer to discuss the Chinese initiative. The plans are grand ones. The proposed American-style campus is to be part of a vast complex of a half-dozen universities in a newly-built “university town” on the outskirts of Nanjing, a sprawling commercial hub of some six million people. “They’re really creating a city,” Pastor said of the university complex. “They expect the city within a decade will have 600,000 people in it . . . They’re doing this all over China. They’re consciously moving to dramatically expand education for their population. They have a sense of their future, and they are redefining what is possible.” The Chinese have proven receptive to recommendations in a preliminary report to finance the university through a private donor, Pastor says. A Chinese investor has already committed to financing the enterprise. It is intended at this point to be a small university—“by Chinese standards,” Pastor added—with an initial batch of 4,000 undergraduates that doubles to 8,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate students within the first decade. Its small size would allow for the personal interaction and classroom discussions that are the hallmark of U.S. universities, in contrast to the large lecture halls and single comprehensive year-end exams that mark the Chinese system and many others around the world. The members of AU’s China University Project Team who traveled to China in November with Pastor were assistant provost Violeta Ettle; senior associate general counsel Bethany Bridgham; John Allee, director of international programs at the Kogod School of Business; Youli Sun, director of AU Abroad’s Beijing program; and Joan Straumanis, special advisor to the delegation. The first visit included Kay Mussell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Douglas Kudravetz, assistant vice president of finance; and Mark Huey, assistant to the president. Also on the team are Peter Thun, director of the China Task Force of the Coordinating Council for International Universities, and Glenn Bucher, executive director of the Boyer Center. “We’re still at the stage where we’re exchanging ideas on how to do it,” Pastor said. While no firm decisions have yet been made on what role AU may have in the planned university, one thing seems certain. When American-style universities are discussed abroad, the name of AU increasingly comes to the fore. |
