Erik Ringmar, Improving Chinese Universities

8/2/2019 Erik Ringmar, Improving Chinese Universities

1/5

For the Sake of Chinas Future, Improve the

Universities!

Erik Ringmar

At the University of Washington, New York Times reports, some 11 percent of

freshmen are now Chinese (Taking More Seats on Campuses, Foreigners Now Also

Pay the Freight, Feb 4, 2012). Altogether there are some 57,000 Chinese

undergraduates in the United States this year. If they all pay the same tuition as at

Washington U, $1.6 billion leaves China this year, ending up in the coffers of

American universities. In addition the students probably have to pay just as much

again in living expenses. And then there are of course all the Chinese Masters andthe PhD students who study in the US, and they too have to pay both tuition and

living expenses. Every year, in other words, several billions of dollars are leaving a

still relatively poor China and going to the richest country in the world. This is a

strange aid program in reverse!

The inflow of money is a blessing for American universities. Individual states who

used to fund their respective university systems have been strapped for cash since

the 2008 recession, and universities have cut back on student intakes, classes, and

professors salaries. The deepest cuts have happened in the once world-leading

university system in California (UCLA, Berkeley, etc). Thanks to funds from China,

however, the University of Washington can now provide free tuition to a quarter of

its local students. I wonder if American parents are grateful for the help Chinese

parents are giving them? Or perhaps they complain that their own kids cant get in

to the local university anymore since there are so many darn Chinese kids around?

For China this massive outflow of money is a problem. It would have been far

better if the funds had stayed in China and helped finance Chinese universities. Yet

the monetary loss is nothing compared to the far greater problem of a loss of brain

power and entrepreneurial drive. Most Chinese students eventually return home of

course, but not all of them do, at least not right away. America is providing great

opportunities for a career, especially for PhD-holders in sciences and technology.

The American dream is surely far removed from American realities, but for many

professions, Americas liberal values, freedom of speech, and protection of property

rights are very attractive. In the US Chinese students develop products, companies

and industries which greatly benefit the US economy. Why are Chinese people

helping develop the US and not China?

Teaching in one of Chinas top universities, as I do, there is no doubt that the

students who remain in China are of outstanding quality. In fact, my students here

in Shanghai are among the best Ive ever taught. Yet it is also clear that the quality

of the student body gets progressively worse -- the undergraduates are the

smartest, the MA students are not as smart, and the PhD students are the worst. I

1/ 5


2/5

mentioned this impression to a colleague who explained that the best students at

each level as quickly as possible go off to the United States. The students left to do

a PhD in China are the ones who never got any American offers of admission. But

the really smart kids, my colleague added, are the ones we never see -- the ones

who go straight off to the US after finishing their high-schools.

Every year, in other words, United States attracts the smartest, most creative,

most entrepreneurial young people from around the world. Like a gigantic vacuum-

cleaner the American university system sucks them all up. This explains a large part

of the dynamism of the American economy. The US itself has terrible problems.

Americans cant manufacture things anymore, the infrastructure is crumbling,

people are badly educated and ignorant, the political system is dominated by the

wealthy who use it to further enrich themselves. Yet it is a foolish investor who bets

against the long-term prospects of the American economy. The explanation, to a

large extent, is to be found in the universities. American universities are still

leading the world and they -- and their constant influx of smart and creative young

people from around the world -- are still keeping America afloat.

why Chinese students are going to the US

There are lots of good reasons to study abroad. I know. I got both my MA and my

PhD from the United States. You go abroad to widen your horizons, to see things

you havent seen before, to encounter new cultures and ideas. Going abroad is fun,

and it is educational in ways that go far beyond the university curriculum. Besides,

China was effectively closed for so long, foreign universities were prohibitively

expensive, and if they now have the opportunity of course Chinese kids want to see

the world. It would be foolish to try to stop them.

In addition, there is the traditional Chinese obsession with education. Getting ahead

in China was always a matter of proving your educational credentials. Scholars are

gentlemen and gentlemen rule. Although those days are gone, academic credentials

are still a source of both authority and legitimacy. Chinese parents who want the

best for their children, want them to get a university degree. This is true for parents

everywhere no doubt, but more aggressively so in China than elsewhere.

There is a substantive aspect to a university education and, shall we say, asociological aspect. The substantive aspect concerns what you actually learn while

taking your courses. The sociological aspect concerns the credentials which a

university education provides you. The two aspects clearly vary independently of

each other, and what really matters in China are the credentials and not the

substance. It doesnt matter much what you learned in university as long as you

have the diploma.

This quest to credentialize children explains the obsession with good universities.

In the mind of Chinese parents, all universities are ranked and social success

depends on sending their child to a university as high up the ladder as possible. The

best universities, everyone seems to agree, are in the United States, and the best

2/ 5


3/5

of the best are the ones in the Ivy League. This, consequently, is where their

children must end up. Some Chinese parents go through extraordinary hardship,

denying themselves basic conveniences for years on end, in order to save up

enough money to send their children to America.

The truth is of course that American universities are world-leading. Yet this is not

for the reason that most people assume. American universities are notworld-

leading because the courses, the textbooks, or the teachers are all that much

better than elsewhere. American universities may be a bitbetter in these respects,

but this alone does not explain the difference in reputation. The real difference is

instead a matter of the student body. Since its so extraordinarily difficult to get

into the very best American schools, the students who end up there really are

exceptional. They are, in my experience, not only smart but creative too, full of

optimism regarding the future and generally fun to be around. The ability to fill its

classrooms with truly exceptional students is more than anything what explains the

superiority of the American university system.

This set-up, moreover, is self-reinforcing. The better a university is considered to

be, the more difficult it is to get in to, and the better the students are who actually

make it -- thus making sure that the university really becomes as good as everyone

thought it was. But observe what this means. If a universitys greatest asset is its

student body, then the students are paying for something that they themselves

provide. The university supplies the creative environment, to be sure, and creative

environments make a great difference, but students are the ones who fill the

environments with content. To the extent that foreign students are responsible for

the quality they provide, they can take that quality with them home provided thesame creative environments is recreated where they come from.

The truth is of course that the real benefits of a university are quite unrelated to

teaching and research. Thus lets forget about these formal aspects for a moment

and consider instead the university as a pretext for interesting people to get

together. By making the smartest and most creative students interact with one

another, often for years on end, all kinds of unexpected things will start to happen.

They will share experiences, have fights and love stories, drink beer, but they will

also write software applications and movie scripts and come across unexpected

ideas. This is how a creative environment is established. Most of these

consequences are unintended and therefore unpredictable. You cannot planscientific breakthroughs, but you can plan the environment in which they take

place. American universities are very good at this.

how to improve Chinese universities

There are, we said, a number of good reasons why Chinese students should stay in

China, but there is only one way to prevent them from going abroad and that is to

make Chinese universities better. The aim should be to establish a handful of

Chinese universities as world-leading institutions. Universities where students are

happy socially and well looked after intellectually; where they can developed their

3/ 5


4/5

critical faculties and curiosity; where they are challenged and provoked; where

unexpected creative encounters take place on a daily basis. Chinese universities

should become places were the worlds leading scholars in each field are proud to

work and where the very best students are proud to study.

Yet Chinese universities have a long way to go before they reach this point. This is

my list of suggestions for improvements:

Chinese universities must establish a creative research environment. What is

needed are not a few famous names or Nobel Prize winner -- they are

unlikely to stay long or to contribute much. What is needed is instead an

environment which encourages everybody to engage in creative research. All

research and all teaching should be conducted as answers to questions and

students should be encouraged to ask questions of their own and to criticize

the answers given by others. There should be plenty of regular seminars

where students and researchers are forced to discuss their own work with

each other, and where everybody gets together to discuss the things they

read. Faculty members and PhD students should be made to publish in

English-language publications and to travel to international conferences.

Chinese universities must develop their own sense of intellectual judgment.

The lack of a research culture means that many Chinese professors are

unable to judge scholarly work by themselves. Instead they rely on

foreigners to do the work for them. They consider someone good because

she got a degree from an American university or because an international

citation index said so. Or worse: an academic discussion turns into pure

name-dropping and the professors compete with each other regarding howmany times they can say Harvard University in a sentence. Instead of

sounding impressive, this sounds hopelessly insecure. Instead of hiring and

promoting people based on foreign credentials, Chinese universities should

hire the people they themselves, for their own intellectual reasons, have

chosen.

The government should get involved, but also stay away. A great advantage

of Chinese universities -- like universities in Europe, but unlike universities in

the United States -- is that they are state-run institutions. This means that

they can take a long-term view. This is important since much of what

universities do is impossible to justify in terms of short-term profits. This

provides Chinese universities with a competitive edge. This advantage issquandered, however, if the government tries to directly influence the

universitys intellectual life. Researchers must have the freedom to pursue

their own work, grants should be general and not tied to government-

approved projects, and promotions should take place based on criteria which

the university itself has established. Politicians are powerful and researchers

are weak, and the latter must be protected from the former. The best way to

do this is to assure that politics and academia occupy separate spheres.

Chinese universities should hire more foreign professors. Foreign professors

are not necessarily better, but they provide the quickest way to replicate the

environment of an American classroom in a Chinese setting. Foreign

professors must be given an environment where they can thrive. Salaries

4/ 5


5/5

must be competitive, they need health care, schools for their children, and a

reasonable place to live. And these conditions should be good enough to hire

world-class people. Given that universities in the US now are cutting back on

academic positions, it is easier than ever to get these people to come. Much

like many foreign companies hit by the recession, foreign professors cannow be had on the cheap. However, foreign professors must also be given

power within the institutional structures. So far Chinese universities have

resisted this. No foreigner has ever had real power over the allocation of

resources or over Chinese colleagues. Foreign professors until now have

been treated as fashion accessories.

Chinese universities must become more attractive places for young scholars

to work. Chinese students returning from the US with a PhD have many

options. They dont have to work in a university, and most of them would

earn more respect, and more money, elsewhere. Today many younger

faculty members complain about being exploited. They are made to do

tedious administrative work, translate boring texts into English, give courses

to teach which have little connection to their own research and which require

a lot of extra work. Junior colleagues are often treated as the serfs of senior

colleagues. The senior colleagues will say that this is the Chinese way, and

that might be the case, but it also makes it difficult for Chinese universities

to improve.

The list is longer, but I wont go on. There is much to do. The best Chinese

universities have already started reforming and the pace of change is brisk. Im

looking forward to being a part of this transformation. More than anything,

however, Im looking forward to the day when the very best Chinese studentschose to do their PhDs in China rather than in the United States.

Erik Ringmar received his PhD in political science from Yale

University and worked for 12 years at the London School of

Economics. He is Zhi Yuan Chair professor of International

Relations at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

5/ 5

Erik Ringmar, Improving Chinese Universities

Documents

Transcript of Erik Ringmar, Improving Chinese Universities