On passing the academic intellectual torch

William Kirby is a renowned China scholar at Harvard. He has written a dozen books on Chinese history and our relations with China. He has a long list of accomplishments at the highest levels of international academia and professional societies.

When he writes about superior universities in Germany and the US and China, I can only marvel at the scope of his erudition. So I feel a bit out of my element commenting on his latest book Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.

Kirby writes that on academic engagement with China the educational resurgence is much less a threat than an opportunity for American and other international universities…. American research universities have been strengthened enormously by recruiting Chinese doctoral students, themselves largely graduates of Chinese universities, who are admitted exclusively on the basis of merit. Our faculty ranks, too, are augmented by extraordinary Chinese scholars. We restrict these students and colleagues at our own peril. Today, any research university that is not open to talent from around the globe is on a glide path to decline. 

True enough. Kirby is familiar with the finest research universities and students in China and the world. Some Chinese students go on to excel in academia and business, scientific and professional worlds in the US and China – fewer right now in the US, and that is an issue for American xenophobia.

Kirby is talking about intellectual leadership. In his historical progression, the 19th century German university model of openness and serious intellectual pursuit passed to the US in the 20th. He says the leading research, learning and education model for the 21st century is now being passed on to Chinese universities. No nation has greater ambition than China, or ability to devote resources to higher education.

Kirby’s approach to international cooperation is what one would expect from a man with so many interconnections – diplomatic and deflecting on sensitive issues and no one can fault that. It is sophisticated and mature. In Empires of Ideas, one is reminded of the marketplace of ideas, the informal, collegial and multinational networks that were part and parcel of the Enlightenment. Free exchange of information and ideas advanced science and engineering and freedom. True then, and true now.

I want to push back a little, though, basically to report on what I’ve seen at schools not in the top ten of universities in China. Kirby sees engagement with Chinese universities as an opportunity, not a threat. I agree. More exposure to the world is a good thing. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that (1) there are always good intentions behind the dinners and smiles; and (2) most Chinese students are international work-force caliber.

On (1), no one should assume that exchanges are all collegial. CCP has weaponized exchanges within the academy and between businesses. For evidence, one need look no further than the hundreds of cases brought by the FBI against researchers, Chinese and American, seeking to steal IP from university labs and from businesses. FBI director Christopher Wray’s “whole of state” threat from China is not hyperbole.

On (2), no one should fault Kirby for addressing the university environment with which he is familiar. But most schools, faculty, and students are not in that top 5% internationally. We know the myriad stories of cheating and plagiarism in schools in China, and students who come to the US with the same attitudes toward doing the work. I’ve seen myself how lack of respect for honest work tends to bring down the performance of an entire class, including that of domestic students. We know the Yale-Peking University program was cancelled in 2012, partly attributable to allegations of widespread plagiarism and cheating.

Dishonesty in academic work is not unknown among American students. But I know of many instances in which faculty at schools in China simply turn their backs on cheating in exams. And they get little administration support when they try to restrain the dishonest behavior. 

We know cheating on the college entrance exam – the gaokao – is controlled more now than a decade ago, when attempts to control cheating resulted in an angry mob of 2000 parents yelling at test administrators. “We want fairness. It’s not fair if you won’t let us cheat.

The national push in China to control cheating resulted in some odd experiments. At our school in Hangzhou the new president decided to promote an honor code in final exams, as is the case at nearby Zhejiang University (Zheda), one of those top schools in China. This is not to take anything away from Zheda. There is an honors option in the Global Engagement Program, designed to cultivate Chinese students for work in international organizations. The program is conducted in English. Professor Kirby would be happy to engage with these students, some of the best and brightest in China.

But at our provincial-level school an exam honor code was DOA among both students and faculty – no one thought it could work. The only faculty member who could give voice or pen to objection, though, was me. Everyone else had careers on the line. I didn’t have to care. But what the president wanted, the president got.

Before the honor code was to be implemented, I did my own experiment. In one economics course I had plenty of scores from homework, quizzes, and a midterm to provide final grades. I had noticed years before that a final exam with a significant weight – 30% or 50% of a final grade – almost never changed a grade from that going into the final exam.

In class we had some discussion of the honor code. I proposed an experiment. The final exam would only count 10% of the final grade. But I would hand out the exams and leave the room for two hours and we would see what result. No monitors in the room. If students cheated, others were supposed to report them to the instructor for consideration, as the university president proposed.

I also arranged with six of my very good students, three foreigners and three Chinese, to take the final exam a day earlier and then take it again during the whole class exam. In the whole class exam they were to very obviously cheat in any way they wished, but so that other students could see. Open textbooks, read from notes, use phones, copy from other students. Make it obvious. And oh, yes – the whole class exam was different from the one I gave my star students.

You can guess the result – my good students cheated as best they could, and no one reported them to me. When my six finished the exam, they hung around outside the exam room and took pictures of students getting up from desks to look at other exam papers and using phones with abandon.

I don’t know if you call the experiment a success or a failure. But no one told me I had to use the honor code in subsequent semesters.

There is little sense of honor built in to these students. Lots of American students are no different. But an honor code needs good intentions. What good intentions do exist can get waylaid by pressures from family, culture, and particularly CCP.

Kirby is impressed by the earnestness, even in the current days of trauma and contestation, with which Chinese academics pursue joint arrangements with American schools. On one hand, that is understandable. Chinese academics are desirous of contacts for academic and personal reasons (including the ability to publish in western journals and to get their own kids into American schools). Kirby alludes to the CCP corporate overlords that can work to encourage or discourage such arrangements. For a few years before 2012, university joint ventures of all kinds were the rage. CCP pushed for engagements and wanted measurable results. A couple of my Chinese government students from Chicago were responsible for those foreign outreach programs. The pressure to get some agreement was palpable – one-way semester exchange, two-way, with or without American faculty in China, some sort of joint program, and even in some cases a joint degree with an American school. My school had a joint civil engineering degree program with San Francisco State University. A couple of years in China and then to the US for the last two or three years. The American degree was worth something. The Chinese degree – not so much. Until recently there was no international accreditation for most Chinese engineering degrees.

We need the Chinese students, undergrad and PhD candidates, for our own development. But we should not lose sight of the ill-preparedness and ill will that still lurks.

Plenty of Chinese, students and families, come to the US for education and business and – dare I say it – the freedoms that accompany a green card. There are tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the US each year – 150,000 in 2018. I know several student immigrants personally- come for the advanced degree, stay for the high-paying job. Quite often, their parents tell them not to come back to live, but to stay in America. 

Not so many Americans go the other way.

Kirby is right to promote engagement for the good of American schools and students and faculty. Some Chinese universities may well join the upper ranks of international schools in the next ten years. But I hope he – and other administrators and scholars – can go into the engagements with a  bit of the skepticism and hard evidence-seeking that led to dismissal of Confucius Institutes at the University of Chicago, Penn State, William and Mary, SUNY, Oklahoma, Texas A & M and others and cancellation of the Yale-Peking U program and consideration of the continual warnings of Chinese deception and theft from attorneys experienced in Chinese business arrangements. Harris Bricken is a good example.

We can take a hint from Ronald Reagan’s treaty policy with the Soviet Union – trust but verify. The expensive dinners and gifts and warm smiles are enticing. Its easy to become enamoured under the influence the velvet-gloved fist. I keep thinking of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus’ warning to street cops before going out on patrol in Hill Street Blues –“Let’s be careful out there.” It can be hard to do that, especially after the wining and dining and graciousness of their potential partners. But Kumbaya this ain’t.

I don’t have hard recommendations for administrators of great American universities. But they should jealously guard the reason they became great in the first place – freedoms of expression, dissent, and honesty in relationships. Too often we have let the Chinese camel’s nose into the academic tent to the detriment of American academic quality standards, research and innovation. A little caveat emptor is always a good idea.

Whoops! Just slipped right past me! …

From the Daily Beast, a wowser of a scoop – Berkeley’s $220M Mistake Exposed in Massive Deal With China
 
from the article – “U.C. Berkeley takes the matter of undue foreign government influence seriously,” he said.
 
That much is quite clear. Berkeley can clearly undercut the businessman in selling CCP the rope. Go Golden Bears!
 
And as with lots of scandals, the flaw may not be in the deal but in the avoidance of reporting. Again and again, whatever happened to avoiding the hint of impropriety?  Answer – when you lose civil society or public morality, all that is left is the finely parsed letter of the law.
 
 

Berkeley’s $220M Mistake Exposed in Massive Deal With China

 
OOPS!

U.C. Berkeley repeatedly neglected to disclose its deal with China to the U.S. government.

Yuichiro Kakutani

Updated May. 22, 2023 7:18AM ET Published May. 22, 2023 4:59AM ET 
 

U.C. Berkeley has failed to disclose to the U.S. government massive Chinese state funding for a highly sensitive $240 million joint tech venture in China that has been running for the last eight years.

The Californian university has not registered with the U.S. government that it received huge financial support from the city of Shenzhen for a tech project inside China, which also included partnerships with Chinese companies that have since been sanctioned by the U.S. or accused of complicity in human rights abuses.

The university has failed to declare a $220 million investment from the municipal government of Shenzhen to build a research campus in China. A Berkeley spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the university had yet to declare the investment—announced in 2018—because the campus is still under construction. However, a former Department of Education official who used to help manage the department’s foreign gifts and contracts disclosure program said that investment agreements must be disclosed within six months of signing, not when they are fully executed.

Berkeley admitted that it had also failed to disclose to the U.S. government a $19 million contract in 2016 with Tsinghua University, which is controlled by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education.

The project’s Chinese backers promised lavish funding, state-of-the-art equipment, and smart Ph.D. students for Berkeley academics researching national security-sensitive technologies, according to contract documents exclusively obtained by The Daily Beast. After the project got underway, Berkeley researchers granted Chinese officials private tours of their cutting-edge U.S. semiconductor facilities and gave “priority commercialization rights” for intellectual properties (IP) they produced to Chinese government-backed funds.

A Berkeley spokesman said that Berkeley only pursued fundamental research through TBSI, meaning that all research projects were eventually publicly published and accessible to all; it did not conduct any proprietary research that exclusively benefited a Chinese entity.

Still, Berkeley’s ties to the Chinese government and sanctioned Chinese companies are sure to raise eyebrows in Washington, where U.S. policymakers are increasingly concerned about the outflow of U.S. technology to China, especially those with military applications.

Under the radar

The project is called the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), a joint research initiative backed by Berkeley and Tsinghua University, a top science school often called “China’s MIT.” The institute’s website shows that dozens of Chinese companies, including Huawei and others sanctioned by the U.S. government, also supported the institute as industrial advisers.

Through TBSI, Berkeley built an unusually close partnership with the Chinese government. Berkeley’s then-vice-chancellor, Patrick Schlesinger, said in 2015 that the “active participation of the Shenzhen municipal government” is an “unusual feature” of TBSI that sets it apart from other U.S. universities, according to meeting minutes obtained by The Daily Beast.

And yet, Berkeley never disclosed a single cent of the financial support it received from Chinese sources to the federal government for TBSI, possibly not complying with a U.S. disclosure law that requires universities to report large donations from foreign sources.

“If the facts are as Berkeley’s documents seem to assert, this is exactly what universities must report,” Dan Currell, a former deputy under secretary at the Department of Education—who has also worked on policy related to foreign influence in U.S. universities—told The Daily Beast. He later added that “the school isn’t complying with a clearly applicable federal statute.”

Memorandum of Agreement between China and UC Berkeley.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast

To this day, TBSI remains one of the most fully realized examples of U.S.-China research collaboration. In the 2021 fiscal year, the institute hosted 586 students from across the world and pumped out more than 130 science and engineering articles. According to its website, at least 20 Berkeley academics participated in TBSI, working alongside dozens of Chinese and international colleagues. At its peak, the institute hosted 18 laboratories located within three research centers, each focused on a research area relevant to national security: data science and IT; environmental science and new energy production; and public health and precision medicine.

Since the early days of the institute, the Chinese government has occupied three out of 11 seats on the governing board, according to a 2015 Berkeley document. Shenzhen’s then-mayor, Xu Qin, attended the 2014 signing ceremony that launched the institute. Tsinghua University President Chen Jining, another attendee of the signing ceremony, explicitly positioned TBSI as a “university-government-industry partnership.” TBSI also has a Party committee, which in 2018 held a seminar to study a speech by Xi Jinping.

While both Berkeley and Tsinghua contributed faculties to TBSI, the Shenzhen government was responsible for the lion’s share of the program’s funding, promising to provide the “necessary financial support” for the institute, according to 2014 contracting documents obtained by The Daily Beast. In the documents, the government said it would cover a wide range of initial expenses, including “costs of equipment, settlement allowances for newly recruited [principal investigators], as well as the cost of all day-to-day operations (ie. salaries of staff, research subsidies, and student scholarships, etc.)”

As part of the promised financial support, the Shenzhen municipal government first promised in 2014 to pitch in $52 million to support the “initial phase of work” for TBSI, according to a 2015 Berkeley document. More than half of the funding was to finance the purchase of new equipment in China “in consultation with Berkeley faculty… effectively adding facilities and equipment to Berkeley’s research capacity.”

In 2018, the Shenzhen government drastically scaled up their monetary support for the project, agreeing to spend at least $220 million to build a massive research campus in Shenzhen with nearly 1.7 million square feet of classroom space and cutting-edge research facilities. Tsinghua University also chipped in $19 million to fund TBSI.

Berkeley has repeatedly failed to disclose any of the above donations to the Department of Education. According to Currell, U.S. law requires all annual foreign donations exceeding $250,000 to be reported to the department, which in turn publicizes the donations to the general public.

A Berkeley spokesman acknowledged that it failed to report to the U.S. government the $19 million contract with Tsinghua University, but said the rules at the time were less clear.

“Like many universities across the country, UC Berkeley did not have a reporting process in place… in 2016, thus the initial sponsored research agreement was not reported. In 2018, due to national security concerns with China and countries of interest, the Department of Education’s reporting process was recertified and all universities were required to start reporting,” he said.

The $19 million—which was spread over five years from 2016—was thus never reported.

He said Berkeley also failed to report a renewal of the TBSI agreement in January 2022, an omission that he blamed on “an issue in the query pulling the data.” The spokesman said Berkeley corrected the error on Feb. 14, 2023, five days after The Daily Beast first reached out for comment for this story.

On the $220-million investment from the Chinese municipal government, the spokesman initially said: “UC Berkeley does not have any ownership of property at Tsinghua, therefore, is not required to report investments made in, or for, the Tsinghua University campus.” He later admitted that “the provision of a facility and/or equipment could qualify as an in-kind contribution and thus require disclosure.”

Still, Berkeley has not declared the foreign investment because the campus is still under construction, according to the spokesman.

However, according to a 2019 Department of Education guidance, universities must report foreign contracts “at the time that the institution ‘enters into’” them. Currell, the former official, noted that the universities must in practice disclose the foreign investments within six months of the research partnership being signed, not when it is implemented.

“Under the rule, whenever they signed the contract is when they had a reporting obligation within six months,” Currell said.


Perks
The Chinese government funding directly benefited Berkeley faculty members, according to a 2015 Berkeley document obtained by The Daily Beast. The government funding benefited them as researchers, as they used the construction of the new campus as an opportunity to “procure equipment that is not presently available at Berkeley, thus extending [their] research capabilities.” It also benefited them as private individuals, as faculty members earned “consulting fees” for working as research advisors.

After the donations from the Chinese state, TBSI and Berkeley researchers gave access to their government patrons.

Throughout the late 2010s, Berkeley officials frequently gave exclusive tours of the Marvell nanofabrication laboratory, a cutting-edge facility used for semiconductor research, to Chinese delegations connected to TBSI. According to a press release, the Chinese visitors “hoped to learn information” from the lab to “build a better lab abroad”—they did not explicitly say their knowledge would be deployed back in China.

These Chinese delegations to the lab went beyond normal academic exchanges between researchers. Multiple senior Chinese officials, including the vice mayor of Shenzhen and the party secretary of Shenzhen, visited the lab, surveying one of the most advanced semiconductor fabrication facilities in the United States.

There is no evidence that Berkeley or its staff broke U.S. export-control laws by organizing private tours to help Chinese individuals build their own cutting-edge semiconductor labs. However, Robert Shaw, an export-control expert at the Middlebury Institute, said the trip would have had to be organized with the utmost care to ensure that China does not get access to controlled U.S. technology.

“That’s a tough thing, a facility tour like that,” Shaw said. “That’s something that has to be organized very carefully. They need to be extremely careful about what’s visible in there [to the visitors].”

The Chinese government also gained access to some IPs created through research at Berkeley. Shenzhen Waranty Asset Management, a state-owned enterprise controlled by the Chinese government, served as an industrial sponsor for the $19 million grant from Tsinghua University, according to Berkeley’s spokesman. In exchange for the financial support, a Waranty-owned angel investment fund received “priority commercialization rights” for intellectual properties produced by TBSI, according to its LinkedIn page.

The Berkeley spokesman explained that Waranty as the industrial sponsor got “first right to negotiate a license to IP arising under the sponsored research agreement,” an arrangement that he said was the same as those given to other industrial sponsors at American universities. The spokesman said that Waranty did not exercise their licensing rights and the three inventions that came out of the sponsored research were “dedicated to the public.”

The Berkeley spokesman emphasized to The Daily Beast that all TBSI-related research projects were “fundamental research that is openly and publicly published for the benefit of the entire scientific community,” rather than proprietary research that exclusively benefited Chinese entities. He also added that the university does not license IPs to foreign entities that are under sanctions or export control by the U.S. government.

“U.C. Berkeley takes the matter of undue foreign government influence seriously,” he said.

Tsinghua Uni prez shakes hand with a Berkeley dean.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Berkeley Press Release

 
Shaw said that while it is possible for TBSI to work with Chinese government-backed funds in a legally above-board way, the language about priority commercialization rights is a “red flag in an export-control compliance sense.”

“That sort of language sounds like the purpose of the research is IP generation versus the sharing of knowledge globally in an academic context,” he said.

In addition to its funding from the Chinese government, TBSI also courted support from dozens of Chinese companies. Executives from 21 Chinese companies sat on TBSI’s industrial advisory board, supporting the “creation of joint laboratories, collaborative research projects and visiting industry fellows” at TBSI and enjoying access to Berkeley researchers.

Companies later sanctioned or put under export control by the U.S. government—including telecom giants Huawei and ZTE and the drone company DJI—sat on the industrial advisory board; so too did Chinese firms accused of complicity in human rights abuses, such as internet company Tencent and automobile firm BYD.

Some of these companies that participated in TBSI benefited from Berkeley’s innovation. Take for example Shenzhen Waveguider, a Chinese biotech company that built a joint laboratory with TBSI. Waveguider Chairman and CEO Yu Dongfang reportedly said that by leveraging Berkeley’s “best-in-the-world” biosensor technology, Waveguider was able to achieve multiple innovations in the field of diabetes medicine through its partnership with TBSI.

Berkeley’s comments regarding its Chinese corporate sponsors have also been inconsistent. A Berkeley spokesman initially told The Daily Beast that no Berkeley faculty members ever participated in TBSI’s big data research laboratory. The statement contradicted Berkeley’s own websites, which listed three Berkeley academics as participants in the lab. (The spokesman later acknowledged that one of the researchers conducted some work with the big data research lab, but said that the other two left the project in its early stages.)

For the time being, Berkeley appears intent on continuing the TBSI, albeit on a narrower scale; in 2022, Berkeley administrators announced a “phase II” for the institute, committing to support the partnership for another five years.

However, some Berkeley officials may be having second thoughts about its relationship with China. In 2018, Berkeley submitted a complaint to the U.S. Trade of Representatives, saying that Beijing’s tech regulations unduly restrict the university’s ability to license IPs in China.

And even as far back as in 2015, a member of the U.C. Board of Regents expressed reservations about Berkeley’s participation in TBSI.

“Who would decide what research directions to take or what ethical rights they should follow?” Regent Hadi Makarechian said in 2015 at a board meeting about TBSI. “Because we hear all that stuff that in China, they do all this research that’s not ethical.”
 
 

More on Monkey See, Monkey Do

Two years ago I wrote a bit about the governor of Florida enlisting students to record and spy on college teachers to ascertain whether instructors were deviating from the permitted DeSantis script on American history and morals. DeSantis (and his GOP ilk) were clearly borrowing policy from CCP, which encourages students to report teachers to CCP discipline inspection organizations for punishment if they mentioned support for … well, anything of which CCP does not approve. Of course the boundaries of such limits are left vague, in accord with CCP practice – no way to tell when a red line is crossed, so self-censorship becomes the norm. See Monkey See, Monkey Do. I warned DeSantis against his choice of Chinese imports, but apparently my entreaty fell on deaf ears.

Now from William Spivey at The Polis comes news of the free expression crisis at East Florida State College – Eastern Florida State College Shuts Down Class Over Civil Rights Discussion. From the Spivey post –

It should come as no surprise that a US government class was canceled on March 9th before it started in Ron DeSantis’s Florida because a single student filled out a complaint form saying they were “uncomfortable with the subject.” Josh Humphries, a political science instructor, sent home the class of twenty students to “avoid a disruptive situation,” according to an EFSC spokesman.

“There’s a climate of fear, an atmosphere created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that has blurred the lines between scared and opportunistic. The victims of this censorship are history and the truth.”

In DeSantis’s Florida, teachers don’t know what to teach, and administrators don’t know what is allowed. The penalty is severe; they could either lose their jobs, be charged with a third-degree felony, or both. Welcome to Florida! Should this man become President, people will look back fondly on Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, until she resigned after he tried to overturn an election. We won’t learn from our history because people will be afraid to teach it.

Not only welcome to Florida. Welcome to education under the Xi Jinping Communist Party. Who would have guessed that GOP and CCP would have so much in common?

(Actually, I did. See my series Xi, CCP, DJT, GOP from almost five years ago)

Monkey See, Monkey Do

History professor Heather Cox Richardson reporting a few days ago – “Not to be outdone, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis today signed a law requiring that public colleges and universities survey students, faculty, and staff about their beliefs in order to make sure the institutions support “intellectual diversity” … Without citing any evidence, Republican lawmakers have warned that there are “socialism factories” in the state universities. The law permits students to record lectures without the consent of the professor or other students to be used in legal cases against the school.”

You would think that future presidential candidate DeSantis would be more careful about the Chinese imports he chooses to buy.  But there it is in all its fear and trembling – students recording professors and turning them into the authorities.  Where else do we find such exhortations to students?

Well, of course, in Mr. Xi’s China.  From the New York Times, almost two years ago – With a neon-red backpack and white Adidas shoes, he looks like any other undergraduate on the campus of Sichuan University in southwestern China…But Peng Wei, a 21-year-old chemistry major, has a special mission: He is both student and spy.

Mr. Peng is one of a growing number of “student information officers” who keep tabs on their professors’ ideological views. They are there to help root out teachers who show any sign of disloyalty to President Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party.

“It’s our duty to make sure that the learning environment is pure and that professors are following the rules” ….

In a throwback to the Mao Zedong era, Chinese universities are deploying students as watchdogs against their teachers, part of a sweeping campaign by Mr. Xi to eliminate dissent and turn universities into party strongholds.

The students said they were inspired by a call by Mr. Xi in March to strengthen ideological training and to prepare for a “national rejuvenation.” They started an anonymous social media account where they published line-by-line criticisms of Professor Lü’s lectures….

I am personally aware of a couple of Chinese professors being disciplined or demoted in this crackdown on speech and thought.  All students need do is report on professors to the tuanpai (Youth League) in the school.  The Party organizations will do the rest.  No doubt DeSantis will have a similar procedure.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts on similarities between Mr. Xi and DJT, GOP and CCP.  Even post election, nothing persuades me that the GOP and CCP are not still aligned in their goals of purification and elimination of dissent.  Power corrupts. Ok. But power doesn’t necessarily take down leaders. It first takes the innocent, the curious, and the thoughtful, whether the power is in GOP or CCP.

Nice to know that in this era of restrictions on Chinese imports, the GOP can still be selective about the imports it chooses to freely adopt. 

SFSU kills Confucius Institute Program

In May, 2019, San Francisco State University (SFSU) announced it was closing its Confucius Institute program that had been in operation since 2005.

Closure was not due to concerns about academic freedom, freedom of speech, or even any suspicion of ulterior motives on the part of the teachers sent from China.  In the SFSU case, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 denied federal funds for an intensive Chinese language programs if a university also hosted a Confucius Institute, and SFSU has an excellent DOD funded language program.

Sure, DOD can kill Confucius Institutes.  But DOD has nothing on me. I helped kill another SFSU Chinese program ten years earlier.  That was not on the basis of politics, but solely academic rigor.

In 2010, Chinese and American universities were near their peak desire for joint exchange and degree granting programs.  Many of the best US schools – HarvardYaleStanford – had programs in China, for both American and Chinese students.  Second tier American schools were eagerly establishing joint programs or 2×2 programs (two years in school in China, two years in the US, perhaps resulting in a highly valuable American degree). 

In this frenetic academic lovefest, San Francisco State University (SFSU) approached Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) about a joint undergraduate civil engineering program.  An administrative official from SFSU – I don’t remember who – came to ZUST to promote the as-yet not completely defined program. He spoke in Chinese to our students – “Two years at ZUST, two years at SFSU, possibly a joint degree, possibly a SFSU degree.  A valuable exchange program in any case.”  He made a convincing case.

The fit was pretty good on paper.  ZUST had a new undergrad civil engineering program taught all in English, for both Chinese and foreign students.  There were about 35 students in the first year, with more to come.

SFSU had a large Asian student population, so it was accustomed to dealing with foreign students.  Foreign students paid full tuition.  There were a number of Chinese civil engineering faculty, so language problems could be minimized.  The SFSU civil engineering program was internationally accredited by ABET (Accreditation Bureau for Engineering and Technology).  No Chinese undergrad program in civil engineering was internationally accredited, so a joint degree would look mighty fine for a ZUST graduate looking to work outside China.

Even in 2010, there was extensive reporting of academic problems with Chinese students in exchange programs.  Yale cancelled its ecology and evolutionary biology program with Tsinghua in Beijing, after extensive plagiarism by Chinese students.  Everyone understood that Chinese learning, even in the best schools, was dominated by repetition and attention only to the book.

SFSU wanted to make sure ZUST students could do the work.   An SFSU core requirement was – still is – a course in American history.  I was a foreigner, so I was tapped to teach.

The ZUST administrators told me I should teach the course “American style”- to me, that meant quizzes and homework and writing and, above all, no cheating. I told the civil engineering dean that was a mistake.  I knew the quality of the students from prior courses, and cheating was rampant.  The school reiterated – “yes, just like you would in America.”  Reluctantly, I said yes.

There is a saying in China about universities in China compared with those in the US – “in China, it is difficult to get into the university, but once there, everyone graduates; in the US, it is easy to get into the university, and easy to flunk out.”

No need to belabor the details.  We had a standard textbook, the Eric Foner Give Me Liberty! with quizzes and very short – five page – writing requirements.  The English listening, speaking, and writing abilities of the Chinese students were adequate.  Their cultural preparation was not.

First off, no more than one or two of the eighteen Chinese students purchased the textbook.  It was expensive by Chinese standards – about $40 – but in the US, students would be buying six or eight of those each semester.  The twenty or so Chinese students were also roommates – they probably occupied a total of four or five dorm rooms – so joint studying would be possible, although tough.  But not possible for two students to read the book at one time.  They were unaccustomed to homework, written short answer questions from the chapter covered that week.  Most tried to copy the homework in class or right before class.  We had a quiz every week on the chapter – ten or fifteen minutes, to see if they had read – anything.  Most had read something, probably just looked at the powerpoints, but the cheating in the quizzes was blatant.  I tore up some quiz papers when students were looking at their phones and writing answers.  There were a lot of low grades on quizzes.

Paper submittals were very disappointing.  I spent more than one entire class – 135 minutes – on how to write – five paragraph essay, formatting and references, APA style. References and citations were a … let us say, foreign … concept. Students had powerpoint notes, other notes from me, and examples.  I emphasized the importance of good references and avoiding plagiarism.  This was not a completely wasted effort.  But mostly.  Papers came back in two or three different color fonts, with different size fonts, with the plagiarized sections often in one of the unique colors or sizes so there was no need to do any checking.  I didn’t know whether to feel discouraged or insulted that the plagiarism was so poorly done. 

References were often simply to “Baidu” the popular online source in China.  This was like using “Google” as a reference.  To be fair, Baidu did not provide good citations for its published materials, and there were few other sources for the students to use. The library was useless as a source for materials in any language.  Students had no access whatsoever to academic journals.  All blocked.

But they needed to know how to write an acceptable five page paper, even as engineering students.  A couple of the Chinese students got the idea.  A few more of the foreign students did.  I allowed students to rewrite papers after my comments.  Some did so.  Most did not.

I point out again that these were not problems with English language. These were cultural differences, and unwillingness to make the changes necessary if they were to venture, as is said in China, outside.  

With the plagiarism, refusal to correct the plagiarism, cheating, and general mopery, we had a lot of failures in the course.  About two-thirds of the class.

I had earnest meetings with several levels of faculty and administrators and deans.  They had warnings before and during the course.  But I had given them what they wanted.

The civil engineering students learned the wisdom of the second part of the saying about universities in the US, without having to actually attend school in the US and spend thousands of dollars for nothing.  No civil engineering student applied for the 2+2 program with SFSU.   The program died a natural death before it ever went live.

I think I did good work on the SFSU program.  Curiously though, no one ever thanked me.  Sometimes, teaching is a thankless job.

The International Student Office – Evaluation

This is the executive summary of a report prepared by students in my Modern Chinese Economic History course in spring 2014.

At that time, every Chinese university was competing to admit foreign students, mostly from Africa and the middle east.  University programs got put together on very short timeframes, with no training for staff and procedures more or less made up on the spot.  The pawns in this process were the foreign students themselves, who often arrived unprepared for college work, unfamiliar with China, lacking any Chinese language, their first time out of the home country, and certainly unprepared for Chinese university norms.   This work was an attempt to bring some efficacy, functionality (rather than efficiency) to the international student program.  Although this report is from 2014, there is no doubt that international programs in China still require upgrading to bring them to a minimal acceptable standard of responsiveness and care.

 Any student looking to attend school in China should read this, at least to get the jist of the boots-on-the-ground feel among foreign students.  This is not to say, do not attend school in China.  But forewarned is forearmed.   The full report is available by emailing me. 

 

An Evaluation of the Efficacy of the Administration of the International Student Program at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology

 

                     Prepared by

                     Students of

           Modern Chinese Economic History

        Zhejiang University of Science and Technology

 

 

                     Spring, 2014

 

              William D. Markle, Ph.D. Professor

 

Participating Students

茅晚菱 Mao Wan Ling

Bogdan Oprea

杜亚芳 Du Ya Fang

严丽文 Yan Li Wen

李亚男 Li Ya Nan

Nikodemus Hermanto

Lukas Cavalcante Baier

杨雪芳 Yang Xuefang

Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Ali

Maingi Joy Nkatha

Dorothy Mutsamwira

沈洁妮Shen Jie Ni

阮芳波Ruan Fang Bo

陈雪Chen Xue

李丹Li Dan

Candy Shirly

Gladis Tshizainga Kasongo

Tariro Kurly Chingarande

章旭霞Zhang Xu Xia

顾盛霞Gu sheng Xia

吴越 Wu Yue

江添 Jiang Tian

Diana Madalina Nemes

Mary Assumpta Muhoza

Golden Chifune

Twagirayezu Didier

Sadick Mahdi Aden

Stefanie Bracher

Martina Odermatt

葛佳锋Ge Jia Feng

张晨凯Zhang Chen Kai

吴雯雯Wu Wen Wen

包舒影 Bao Shu Ying

 

An Evaluation of the Efficacy of the Administration of the International Student Program at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology

 

Executive Summary

 

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) has a long history of cooperation with foreign schools, particularly schools in Germany. While there have been many years of exchanges of faculty for research and lecture purposes, there were no foreign full-time degree candidate students at ZUST until the fall semester of 2009. This is considered the beginning of the ZUST international student program.

In the spring of 2014, there were 392 full time degree candidate foreign students at ZUST. In civil engineering, 167 foreign students; in the School of Economics and Management, in marketing, 47; in international economics and trade, 120; in the Language School, in business Chinese, 47; and a new major, information science, 11 students. First year students in the spring of 2014 numbered 142. There are additional exchange students, mostly from Germany, who stay at ZUST for varying lengths of time, from a few weeks to one year. (source: ZUST International Student Office, personal contact)

International programs are complex, perhaps more for university administration than for university academic faculty. Teachers need to address language barriers and perhaps cultural barriers in class; but administrators must deal with a far broader range of concerns, from admission standards, dorms and living conditions to food and health issues and visa and language and cultural difficulties. 

ZUST has now had an international student program for five years, with a second graduating class this June (2014). It is time to assess the quality of the international student program – is the program working as intended? Are students satisfied with outcomes? Are teachers satisfied with outcomes? What remains to be done to blend the international student program into the culture of a Chinese university? How effective is the program in creating customer satisfaction?

The fundamental goal of this research is to assist ZUST staff in making the International Student Office more effective in serving students, and thereby providing a better experience for foreign students. 

This evaluation addresses the administrative elements of the international student program. We reviewed student experience with health services, postal services, dorms and living conditions, and the international student offices, within the university and the individual department.Individual academic units within the School of Economics and Management and Civil Engineering should address academic quality. But students are the customers, in a real sense, of a Chinese university, and we want to ask whether their consumer needs are being met.

We conducted surveys and interviews of ZUST students, staff, and faculty. We document a wide range of concerns from students, less so from teachers and administrators. This is suggestive, in itself. 

We were also interested in how the ZUST international program compares with that at other schools. While we could not get substantial information due to time constraints, we did obtain good information about the experience of students and administrators. We interviewed students and administrators at two other schools, Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Gongye University (Zhejiang University of Technology).

Many students do not find significant problems in dealing with either the International Student Office in A4 or their department office. Problems that are identified by other students generally are about communications, in various forms.  

Conclusions are described in detail in Chapter 6.  Broadly speaking, we consider three fundamental areas requiring attention –

  • Quality and details in communications with foreign students verbally and in print, by email and text and online

There are difficulties in communication in both directions – Chinese staff to students, and students to Chinese staff. Additional training and techniques are necessary here, particularly for communications that involve student health and safety.

  • Timeliness and trust in communication

There are significant problems in lack of trust in communications from Chinese staff. The problems are attributable to communications that are too late for effective response, last minute requirements, communications that are wrong, and communications that are perceived by foreign students as simply lying. This harms both the administration of the program and academic quality.

  • Management of the International Student Office and department office functions – quality of management and policy direction

There does not appear to be any systematic training for international program staff. Nor can we see program goals, objectives, measures of performance, or an ongoing program of quality improvement.  As ZUST adds more foreign students, these defects will become even more apparent.  By accepting foreign students who are not qualified to be in the classroom, either due to English or preparation difficulties, the International Student Office defeats the purpose of having foreign students at all – to make Chinese students better.  The current model is a business model, not an academic model.

Particular recommendations are described in Chapter 6.