MCLC: Chinese universities attract foreigners

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Chinese universities attract foreigners
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Source: NYT (3/11/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/asia/12iht-educlede12.html

Chinese Universities Send Big Signals to Foreigners
By LIZ GOOCH

In the 1990s, Jeffrey S. Lehman, then the dean of the University of
Michigan Law School, began visiting Beijing to help open a program for
members of his faculty to teach at Peking University¹s law school during
the summer.

Given China¹s rising influence, he thought it would be beneficial for his
colleagues to learn about legal education in China at one of the country¹s
most prestigious institutions.

But Mr. Lehman, who is also a former president of Cornell University, did
not expect to work for a Chinese university himself.
³I would have given long, long odds against that possibility,² he said.

In 2007, the leaders of Peking University, with whom he had developed
strong relationships over the years, asked him to help establish a school
teaching American law to Chinese students on their Shenzhen campus. That
summer he became the chancellor and founding dean of the school, called
the Peking University School of Transnational Law.

³It¹s been deeply gratifying,² Mr. Lehman said of his Chinese experience.

The number of foreigners working at the law school has increased since it
was established, with Americans, Germans, British and South Korean
academics. Of the nine permanent faculty, seven are foreigners.

The rise in foreign academics at the law school reflects a broader trend.
As institutions in Western countries continue to suffer from budget cuts,
academics looking for opportunities farther afield are finding that China
is welcoming foreign professors with open arms.

Individual Chinese universities have been increasingly recruiting Western
academics in recent years, but the Chinese government is also enticing
foreigners with a new program that offers a range of incentives.

³We are going to see more foreign professors coming to China,² said Wang
Huiyao, director general of the Center for China and Globalization in
Beijing.

Late last year, the Chinese government started the Thousand Foreign
Experts program, which is designed to attract up to 1,000 foreign
academics and entrepreneurs over the next 10 years to help improve
research and innovation.

It has already attracted more than 200 applicants from countries like the
United States, Japan and Germany, according to a report in February by
Xinhua, China¹s official news agency.

The program is an extension of the Thousand Talent program, which started
in 2008 as a way to attract experts, academics and entrepreneurs to China.

While 1,600 experts ‹ more than half of them academics ‹ came to China
under that program, most were Chinese-born, said Mr. Wang, an adviser to
the government on its talent policy.

Mr. Wang said the government wanted to further lift its intake of overseas
experts, which led to the establishment of the latest program specifically
aimed at foreigners.

Under the new program, successful candidates receive a subsidy of up to
one million renminbi, or nearly $160,000, and scientific researchers can
receive a research allowance worth three million to five million renminbi.

Mr. Wang said the program, run by the State Administration of Foreign
Expert Affairs in Beijing, aimed to attract academics to tenured professor
positions.

He said the program was targeted at ³people who have been recognized in
the West, those who have a good track record.²
Mr. Wang said that while there were already many foreigners working in
Chinese universities, particularly top-tier schools like Peking University
and Tsinghua University, he expected the new government program would
accelerate the number of foreigners joining other Chinese schools.

³They are sending a big signal to all universities in China that they
actively support this,² Mr. Wang said.

With funding harder to come by in many Western countries, China¹s
impressive investment in research and development is proving a draw for
many Western researchers. And with China itself becoming a rapidly growing
field of research for scholars, academics like

Marc Idelson are moving there to further their research.

Mr. Idelson, who is half French and half British, joined Peking
University¹s HSBC Business School in Shenzhen last August as an assistant
professor after an interview with a Peking representative at a business
conference in Canada in 2010.

Mr. Idelson, who previously worked at the Essec Business School in Paris,
joined the university on a tenure track where academics are expected to
receive tenure in six years.

Mr. Idelson, whose wife is Chinese, had not set his sights specifically on
China and said he was willing to move anywhere, as long as the job and
location met his criteria.

³The first criteria was strategic alignment,² he said. ³Would this job
enable me to further my research? The second criteria was, would I
integrate socially? And the third was financially, what was the package
like?²

The position at Peking University ticked all the boxes, he said.

Li Jun, an assistant professor at the Department of International
Education and Lifelong Learning at the Hong Kong Institute of Education,
said mainland Chinese universities were now well-funded by the government
and able to offer foreigners lucrative packages.

He said China wanted to attract more foreign academics to help lift its
international competitiveness.

At the institutional level, Chinese universities were increasingly
competing with one another to improve their status and employing
foreigners helped their reputations, he said.

³They can use that to recruit students and to get recognition from the
public,² Mr. Li said, adding that top foreign academics also helped
Chinese universities attract more research funding and made it easier for
them to connect with the international academic community.

³Their papers will be written in English, which is a big barrier to the
local academics,² he said. ³In terms of international recognition of
scholars, that will be a big help for the universities.²

Mr. Li, who said that Chinese universities preferred academics from highly
developed Western countries, especially the United States and Canada, said
the schools recruited foreigners by advertising on higher education Web
sites, using their consulates to help target particular academics and
encouraged Chinese academics to use their personal connections with
foreigners to reach out to them.

Alex Katsomitros, a research analyst at the Observatory on Borderless
Higher Education in London, said Chinese institutions would most likely be
more interested in attracting academics who specialized in the so-called
Stem subjects ‹ science, technology, engineering and mathematics ‹ which
lift economic growth through innovation and are seen as ³politically
neutral.²

³Social science and humanities academics are less willing to move to China
for obvious reasons,² he said in an e-mail.

Mr. Katsomitros cited the case of the French virologist Luc Montagnier,
who received the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his discovery of H.I.V. and
joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010, where he set up a research
institute.

In an interview with the journal Science in 2010, Mr. Montagnier, then 78,
explained China¹s appeal. He described how he was no longer able to work
at a public institute in France because of the country¹s retirement laws,
and spoke of the ³intellectual terror² that made it difficult to obtain
funding for research related to homeopathy in France.

Mr. Katsomitros said Chinese universities may be ³mainly interested in the
status and publicity² such ³academia superstars² bring, rather than the
results of their research.

Nevertheless, he says that Western institutions should not fret about
losing academics to China.

³In general, the flee of academics might have been an issue of concern in
the past, but it shouldn¹t be that worrying today, as higher education and
academic research are going through a phase of rapid
internationalization,² he said. ³The fact that academics go to China for a
couple of years doesn¹t mean they have defected. On the contrary, they
might bring back home valuable knowledge and help their home countries
understand China better.²