November 22, 2000
Dear All,
Recently I visited Fudan University in Shanghai, one of the Chinese universities with which Colorado College has a partnership. For several years now, Hong Jiang has taken students to Fudan for intensive Chinese classes in the summer. Last June I sat in on a few of the classes and came to realize how important this language training is for students serious about learning Chinese.
Also, Fudan faculty members in the humanities and social sciences participated in a symposium on our campus, several Fudan professors have taught as block visitors, and CC faculty have spent time at Fudan for periods from several days to several weeks. It is a lively and flourishing relationship with one of China’s best universities. We are lucky that Hong Jiang has helped to build this partnership for CC with her alma mater.
The visit to Fudan also focused the thinking I have been doing about Chinese higher education and also about Colorado College. While my messages have often focused on my travels, I have also been working.
First, I realize with renewed clarity how lucky I am to be at CC. It is not true that the grass is always greener…. This is definitely the case with respect to China and it is also true with respect to the United States. Those of us who work at Colorado College are fortunate to be in one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country.
Being back in the classroom reminds me that teaching is a noble and difficult enterprise. I had forgotten how long it takes to grade a set of papers, or how much care it requires to prepare for a good class session, and what a big responsibility we have to our students. Those of you who are full time teachers know all this instinctively; since I have been out of the classroom for more than a year, however, I came to these renewed understandings with a bit of a shock. I appreciate even more than before how hard my colleagues work every day.
Also, this is my first experience teaching international students. Perhaps the difference between American and international students is not so great when dealing with such seemingly objective materials as calculus or supply and demand curves, but I am teaching a course in American Studies. The readings I have assigned are all written by Americans for Americans, so they assume an amazing amount of cultural background which Chinese students cannot be expected to know. Thus much of each class period is spent in deciphering the assumptions presented by the authors, or even just dealing with terminology. What is a WASP? How did people in the mainstream view hippies in the 1960s? Who were the Black Panthers? And on and on.
For me the hardest part is determining what should be the proper standard for grading papers. Of course I need to calibrate for the fact that they are writing in their second language, not their mother tongue, but how good should the English of graduate students be? I also am aware that my students have few sources of information beyond the readings I provide for them from books I brought with me. In addition, I know that academic traditions are different here-creativity, innovation, and fresh ideas are not valued in the same way that they are in the US. For example, the prevailing ethos among many students is to master the material presented and then repeat it back. I had a long talk with my students before the first paper about American views on plagiarism and proper attribution for ideas taken from others. Despite these warnings, however, several papers were basically a string of quotations with very few of the students’ thoughts at all. In one case the student had gone to some lengths to find additional materials in the library, which she carefully listed in her bibliography; I didn’t go and check the books directly but whole paragraphs of her paper sounded more like a professor from the University of Michigan than a student from Sichuan University.
In an article I read recently, an American historian teaching as a Fulbright scholar in China made the following comparison:
Many of my Chinese students appeared to approach the discipline with a very different understanding [than the relativist approach of contemporary American historians] of past and contemporary and the relationship of the two to one another. Assuming a scientific and objectivist history, some seemed convinced that the role of the historian was to get the story right so that the book could be closed and the task declared completed, an attitude that I attribute less to the kind of naiveté I find among American undergraduates than to a historiographical assumption that history is directional and progressive and that, with proper attention to the science of the discipline, the bits and pieces of the story will fall into a coherent whole.
I am not teaching at such a sophisticated level, but I find some of the same “there is one right answer and we expect to get it from you” attitude. In fact it was very hard for some of my students to offer personal opinions in their first paper. I told them quite clearly that there was no right answer (the assignment was to predict the future of race relations in the US) and I was only interested in their ability to demonstrate their understanding and use of the material in supporting their position. Description, yes, analysis, in many cases, no. So how much can I expect them to overcome years of a different educational culture?
Enough! Needless to say I am enjoying the pleasures and the rigors of being in the classroom, and a very different kind of classroom than anything I have experienced before. It puts me in awe of those of you who teach with excellence year in year out.
Another part of my sabbatical puts me in the role of student as I take Chinese language lessons and Chinese painting lessons, each twice a week with requisite homework. It is good for teachers to be students from time to time to remind us what it is like to face new material, especially to be a beginner with unfamiliar material like Chinese characters. While we teach subject matter that we have worked with for decades, our students confront new material every semester. It is humbling to remember that learning a totally new subject is very hard work.
My observations at Fudan and at Chuanda also make me very glad to be at Colorado College because I believe the quality of education for CC students is so good. We are very lucky to be on a campus where teaching is central, where learning is valued, and where people are committed to an intense, personal style of education. Here at Chuanda, classes here are large (my beginning enrollment was 47); the library is weak especially in contemporary materials; the building in which I teach is shoddy although it may be at the low end on this campus; the computer system is so slow that even university officials advised me not to use it; faculty lack access to up to date resources; and the value system is totally skewed toward research. And this is one of the best universities in China, considered in the top 20 out of more than 1000 colleges and universities nationwide. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining, just observing how lucky I feel to be at CC.
In China the lecture method prevails, consistent with the view of education as finding the right answers. My students have become more willing to ask questions as the semester progresses but they tend to think discussion is a waste of time. When I have tried to encourage different kinds of participation, the students not speaking tend to whisper to one another or to start reading other material surreptitiously. I often ask them to write a short anonymous note at the end of the class: What is the most important thing you learned today? What questions do you still have? I learn a lot about their understanding through this simple exercise. I get other kinds of comments as well; several students have remarked that they like the lecture classes better than the discussions.
Educational quality can be measured in other ways. China has not chosen to devote much of its GNP to education. Even compared with other developing countries it is underinvesting. In “The State of China Atlas,” a recent publication that uses official Chinese government statistics, the authors note that in 1995 China devoted 2.3% of GNP to education, compared with 5.3% in the US, 7.6% in France, and 3.5% in India. The authors compile three averages: the most developed world spends 5.1%, the less developed world spends 4.3%, and the least developed world spends 2.5%. So even if you acknowledge that China is not a wealthy nation, you can still criticize her for her lack of education spending.
China’s system is based on an elite European model. In 1996 there were 3 million college students in China, out of more than a billion people. I have heard statistics estimating 3-5% of the relevant age group in China attends college. This is compared with 67% of American high school graduates in some form of postsecondary education. Chinese families and students want a college education desperately but realize that places are restricted to those who do very well on the entrance examination; the pressure on high school students is intense. Apparently high school grades are irrelevant for college admission. The exam is everything.
Like many European systems, students go directly to a major when they enter college and they have a prescribed curriculum with few or no electives. Historically China provided education free to all those who were admitted but, like many other countries, the system has changed in the last decade. Central government funding to colleges and universities has declined as a proportion of institutional budgets, and tuition charges have become the norm. By piecing together information from a variety of sources, from the China Daily (a government newspaper) to my students’ reports on costs at Chuanda, I have determined that a year of college costs more than the average annual income of an urban worker (and rural workers make much less). This conclusion suggests that only students from wealthy families can be assured of the financial wherewithal to attend college-and in the past there have been disparaging stories of wealthy students with low exam scores getting admitted simply because they could afford the tuition. Otherwise families must save and sacrifice to send a child to college at levels that would be considered unacceptable to most Americans. On the other hand, a college education is the ticket to a vastly different career path than that available to non-college graduates. The students here are privileged in many ways.
Because of the rapid and dramatic changes in education funding, universities are scrambling to develop alternatives. There are several tiers of colleges and universities in China: 31 schools are under the direct control of the central Ministry of Education and receive their funding from the national government (the rest depend on provincial or local funds); there is a larger group in the 211 program (the top 100 universities will be world class in the 21st century). I also learned that five universities (other people have said seven or eight or nine) have received special appropriations for construction of new facilities. When I asked the president of Chuanda what his goals are as president, he said without hesitation: to be among the top ten universities in China. I don’t think it is just the prestige and pride that comes with a good ranking, and I don’t believe university admissions are influenced by the rankings as they are in the US. I think he wants to get a bigger share of the pie for Chuanda and believes that the rankings will be all important in that quest.
Since philanthropy is not part of the Chinese tradition (and tax laws provide no encouragement for private giving), an important method of fundraising is the creation of “enterprises” or service provision. The foreign languages college has an advantage over other units since it has knowledge and skills that are quite marketable to outsiders. So, for example, they offer language lessons on the weekends to adults, and Sunday enrichment lessons in English to kids, mostly children of faculty. They have signed contracts with a series of middle schools (perhaps senior middle schools which would be high schools to us) in the province to upgrade their language programs by sending faculty and students out as well as providing training for the teachers.
High tech enterprises also seem to be popular sources of external funds for science departments to pursue. Of course, business and economics units have obvious skills to market. And, when I visited China in 1995, there were even some universities engaged in nonacademic enterprises such as bicycle manufacturing. But for some humanities departments there are little obvious ways to earn money, hence a growing gap between entrepreneurial and more staid departments. In traditional Chinese culture, the scholar was at the top of the status ladder and the merchant or businessman was at the bottom. The latter may be richer but not more prestigious. So it is even more of a shock in China than it would be in the US to be a scholar suddenly required to generate money through entrepreneurial activities.
My visit to Fudan highlighted the difference between the haves and the have nots. Fudan is often called the Yale of China, ranking right up there with Beijing and Qinghua Universities (considered the Harvard and MIT of China). First, there is the difference between the coast and the interior, which I have mentioned, in earlier letters. Second, Fudan is in Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan, wealthy, international, entrepreneurial city in China. Third, Fudan has historically been a science school so it has a long tradition of good labs and classrooms in the sciences. Finally, Fudan was a private university until the 1950s when all Chinese universities were nationalized. When I was given a tour of the campus, some of the buildings looked very much like a US university; the same was true when I visited Beijing University in October. Even some of the buildings at Fudan for the humanities and social sciences had been newly renovated with bright classrooms and appealing spaces. My tour guide pointed with pride at the donors’ names on several of the new buildings. “We learned that from you Americans” he said with a smile.
Thus my sabbatical experiences lead me back to Colorado College. I realize in new ways the importance of the campaign; I am committed with new vigor to returning to campus in January and finished the last six months of our campaign with great success. It has been very gratifying to learn of large gifts this fall from the Packard and Coors Foundations as well as numerous alumni, trustees, and friends of the college. The total is now almost $80 million, so there is no question in my mind that we will more than exceed our $83 million target. Kudos to the hardworking colleagues in the development office and elsewhere for achieving what looked so daunting several years ago. It will be wonderful to be part of the home stretch with all the satisfactions that will come, I am sure, in the final months of the campaign.
Once again, thank you to everyone who has made this sabbatical possible-trustees, colleagues, and especially Dick Storey and Tim Fuller. One goal of a sabbatical abroad is gaining new perspectives on one’s work, and that certainly has been true for me. These reflections are only a small part of the many ideas about China, but especially about Colorado College, that are now part of my thinking.
I look forward to seeing you in the new year.
Cheers,
Kathryn