Kuo Ting-yee Memorial Lecture: The World of Universities in the 21st Century (Lecture 2)

Date(s)： 2017/10/19

Time： 10:00~12:00

Venue： Archives 2nd Conference Hall

Speaker：Prof. William C. Kirby(Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University)

Organizer： IMH

The World of Universities in the 21^st Century
German universities established the foundations of modern universities everywhere in the 19^th century. American universities had enormous international influence by the end of the 20^th century.  What then are the prospects for Chinese universities to set global standards in the 21^st century?  This lecture series will be based on eight case studies of universities on three continents.  These lectures will investigate the past and present as well as the future prospects of leading universities in Germany, the United States, and Greater China. It will explore the role of faculty, finances, and governance in what makes for a great university.  It will examine and assess three systems of higher education that have defined, or promise to define, excellence in higher education.
 
 
Lecture 2 (10am, October 19, 2017)
A Chinese Century?  The Challenges of Liberal Education in China, Past and Present
 
In the half-century before 1949, China had a small but dynamic system of higher education composed of universities public and private, Chinese and foreign.  That system was Sovietized in the 1950s and nearly destroyed in the 1960s.  Today, mainland China has the fastest growing system—in quality as well as quantity—in the world.  Can China, like Germany in the 19^th century and the United States in the 20^th century, now set global standards?   We shall investigate this question by studying three major universities:  Tsinghua, which began as a preparatory school to send Chinese students to the United States, and which now attracts students from around the globe;  Nanjing University, which is the successor to National Central University of the National Government, modeled on the University of Berlin; and the University of Hong Kong, one of the leading universities in Greater China not under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.  In the past several centuries, no country has been a global leader without being preeminent in higher education.  So the question is:  in education as in other realms, Can China Lead? 
 
 

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