China's MIT Upgrades Itself
BEIJING -- Tsinghua University, long known as China's MIT, is getting a 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 brick rotunda and manicured lawns give it a feel more of Charlottesville, Va., than of China.
These days Tsinghua resembles an American university in many other ways as well. Through aggressive poaching of star faculty from around the world, fund raising, infrastructure building and curricular reform, Tsinghua is now 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, unemployment 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."
COURSE WORK
Beijing's Tsinghua University, whose brick rotunda looms over manicured lawns, is overhauling its curriculum to meet China's new needs.
1911: Founded as Tsinghua School, a preparatory school for U.S.-bound Chinese.
1949: Communist Party comes to power; old Tsinghua faculty flee, establishing National Tsinghua University in Taiwan.
1952: National restructuring of higher-education system; social science and humanities departments close as Tsinghua is designated a polytechnic.
1984: Tsinghua establishes China's first graduate division; School of Economics and Management founded.
1988: School of Architecture founded.
1993: Plan to turn Tsinghua into a "comprehensive, first-rate world university" begins; School of Social Sciences and Humanities founded.
1998: Ministry of Education gives major funding to top universities.
1999: School of Law founded; Tsinghua acquires design academy and changes it into the Tsinghua School of Arts and Design.
2000: School of Public Management established.
2001: Medical school established; faculty conference sets out overhaul of undergraduate curriculum.
2002: School of Journalism and Communication founded.
China's red-hot economy has been straining the limits of its education system. Multinational companies, scrambling to expand, complain that the dearth of talented people is their chief constraint in China. At the same time, many college graduates struggle to find suitable jobs. Efforts of universities such as Tsinghua to better match graduates to China's new jobs will be key in sustaining the country's rapid development.
China's top universities -- Tsinghua, Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai -- are best able to transform themselves, helped by Ministry of Education funds targeted at the elite schools. Although most institutions lack the resources to go as far as Tsinghua, the changes there serve as a political green light for other universities seeking to emulate it.
These days, Tsinghua's professional schools feature curricula heavy on American-style case-based pedagogy, often employing Westerners as instructors.
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 University'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 Taiwanese-born computer scientist recruited from Princeton University 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.
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.
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-student freshman seminars taught by full professors, unprecedented in a system characterized by massive lectures and student 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.
Some Chinese students who might have looked abroad for graduate school a decade ago feel drawn to 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." His department chairman, Gavriel Salvendy, came from Indiana's Purdue University.
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."
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 interns, he says Sun has yet to work 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."
And tensions still exist between a conservative government and a more free-thinking faculty. 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."
中国的麻省理工学院欲振翅高飞
一直被誉为中国的麻省理工学院(MIT)的清华大学(Tsinghua University)正在经历著一场变革，中国政府力图将之打造为和其全球目标相衬的高等学府，并培养出能够在市场竞争中脱颖而出的优秀人才。
很长时间以来，清华大学一直都是中国学术和知识发展的领头羊，它还是国家主席胡锦涛和前任国家总理朱
