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Yale and the Next Superpower
What Rick Levin wants from China—and what China wants from Yale.
November/December 2004
by Mark Alden Branch ’86

Mark Alden Branch is executive editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

On the morning of August 23, Yale College associate dean Penelope Laurans gave a presentation to a group of outside university officials about freedom of expression on the Yale campus. Then she opened up the floor for some collegial discussion.

“How do you handle it,” asked a member of the audience, “if the Mafia and organized crime come to your university to organize?”

The occasion was Day Seven of the Yale-China Advanced University Leadership Program. In a large Law School lecture room, beneath the portraits of generations of Yale legal luminaries, sat the presidents and top administrators of 12 leading universities of the People’s Republic of China. Some of the audience wore wireless headphones so they could listen to simultaneous translations of the proceedings produced by two translators, hired by Yale for the occasion, who were sitting in a glassed-in booth in the back. Others followed the discussion in English, occasionally referring to their laptops for the pictograph version of the PowerPoint presentations.

Laurans’s questioner seemed to be making a point: the reason American universities can afford to tolerate freedom of expression is because they operate in a comparatively peaceful and orderly society. Laurans didn’t take it up. She answered the question—lawlessness and physical threats are not tolerated even in a climate of free expression, she explained—and left it at that. When you have only 12 days for a bicultural survey of every aspect and ramification of running a major university, some issues have to be tabled.

Yale put on the 12-day seminar at the personal request of Chen Zhili, one of the 11 members of the State Council Standing Committee, China’s highest executive governing body. (Chen is a surname; for Chinese officials, this article follows the convention of putting family names before given names.) The 44 “students,” attending at the behest of the Ministry of Education, included some of the ministry’s own officials. The event marked the first time such a group has ever traveled outside China to study education.

Chen’s novel request is a sign that China is serious about adopting more of the practices of Western higher education. Says Yale professor Tian Xu '90PhD, a graduate of Fudan University in Shanghai, who runs a joint Fudan-Yale program on genetics: “I’ve had six different people from the program say, ‘This will change the history of higher education in China.’”

For centuries after the unification of China in 221 BCE, scholars were the most highly respected stratum of Chinese society. The administrators who ran the country were chosen for their scholarly qualifications in classical texts and poetry. In the eleventh century CE, the government introduced a three-tiered system of competitive examinations for government jobs, starting at the village level and culminating in a national exam given every three years in the capital. A man who passed the national exam (women were not eligible) could expect a position in government and the respect of his fellow citizens. “Every educated man in China would know the names of the top three finishers on the exams,” says Sterling Professor of History Jonathan Spence '61, '65PhD.

The examinations were abolished in 1905, as more Chinese were going abroad—a trend that started with the 1854 Yale graduation of Yung Wing (see Old Yale)—or studying in new Western-style universities in China. The first of these, Peking University, was established in 1898 and soon became the most prominent producer of Chinese leaders. In the first half of the twentieth century, China’s educational system became increasingly Westernized.

But after the 1949 revolution, higher education was quickly nationalized and reorganized on the Soviet model. Comprehensive universities were replaced by specialized institutions run by separate ministries, most of them focusing on narrow instruction in technical subjects—agriculture, forestry, metallurgy—in order to prepare students for specific jobs. “Students represented products in a centrally planned economy,” writes Peking University professor Min Weifang in a recent paper. Research was removed from universities altogether and housed in separate institutes.

Still more cataclysmic was the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and, says Tian Xu, “completely demolished” higher education in China. Many universities were closed in an effort to purge Chinese society of Western and Soviet influences. New undergraduate enrollments were halted for four years, graduate enrollments for twelve years. The number of students in college plummeted from 674,400 in 1965 to 47,800 in 1970. When enrollment began again, preference was given to workers, farmers, and soldiers. Tian Xu, who was in middle school in China at the time, recalls a story about a farmer who failed the entrance exam, then held out his calloused hands to the examiner and said, “This is my qualification to go to college.” He was admitted.

“The Cultural Revolution took a big toll on faculty,” says Xu. “There is still a ten-year generation gap where people did no scholarship or research. The impact of this is the breakdown of tradition that is so important for scholarship and research. To re-establish that chain is very difficult.”

The shift to a market-driven economy, begun after Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, is driving a wholesale reform of higher education along Western lines. University enrollment has gone up from about a million in the early 1980s to more than 13 million in 2001. Many of the overspecialized Soviet-style institutions have been reconsolidated into comprehensive universities. And in 1998, then-president Jiang Zemin called for an effort to turn nine of China’s top institutions—seven of which were represented at Yale this summer—into world-class universities.

The Ministry of Education has begun pouring hundreds of millions of dollars (more like billions in Chinese buying power) into improving its elite universities. “But money is not enough,” says state councilor Chen. “We have to learn from other world-class universities, and we must think more about internal management and reform.”

It was during a 2001 visit to China by Yale president Rick Levin ’74PhD that Chen first suggested that Yale might help counsel Chinese universities on reform. Last November, when Levin and other administrators visited again, Chen made her request more specific: could Yale lead some sort of workshop for Chinese university officials, discussing the components necessary for developing a world-class university? And could they do it in August?”

“It took me a while to understand they meant this August,” says university secretary and vice president Linda Lorimer '77JD, who had to scramble to put together a complex program from scratch. Lorimer devised the curriculum with Laurans and university deputy provost Charles Long. They included the lofty (Yale College dean Peter Salovey '86PhD on the philosophy behind liberal education), the nitty-gritty (the fund-raising division directors on techniques for approaching donors), and everything in between: research, faculty hiring, admissions, campus architecture and maintenance, alumni affairs. “It was kind of like Administration 101,” says Lorimer. The point was to “elucidate Yale’s practices so they could see what might be adaptable to their situation.”

The requests set off a flurry of activity in offices all over campus. The speakers had to produce advance materials that, once translated into Chinese, filled four-inch-thick binders the participants received shortly before their trip. “We had two undergraduate and two graduate-student translators working at full tilt throughout July and August,” says Laurans.

After a formal opening ceremony on August 15, the Chinese and the Americans both adopted a relaxed dress code, but that’s about all that was relaxing about the program. The schedule included nine day-long sessions that consisted mostly of informational presentations and question-and-answer exchanges on how Yale works. Some of the afternoons featured small-group workshops. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld from the School of Management led an event in which participants could assess their leadership styles and focus on goal-setting for their institutions. On another day, an all-star panel of architects and planners gave talks about campus planning at Yale and elsewhere, then met with administrators from each university to look at their campus plan individually.

The schedule did offer occasional diversions. One evening, it was dinner at the Gilder Boathouse, where the visitors boarded a “chase boat” to watch a Yale crew scull down the Housatonic. Another afternoon brought a trip to the Yale golf course. Coaches taught the visitors the basics of the sport, which was new to most of them. Arguably, golf is a useful skill for university administrators who are studying how to woo top donors; but besides, says Laurans, “they—and we—were having a marvelous time.”

The visitors' questions revealed broad curiosity about both philosophy (“Why doesn’t the faculty have more say in admissions?”) and tactics (“How often can you solicit someone for a capital gift?”). And sometimes, like the query about organized crime, the questions were pointed. After the fund-raising presentations, Jacob Leung, secretary of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, commented wryly, “As you speak, we’re feeling more threatened and insecure.” Yale fund-raising, he said, is highly professionalized and impressive—and active in Hong Kong. Would Yale consider collaborative, rather than competitive, fund-raising efforts there, as they did successfully in the early 1990s? (That issue, too, was tabled.)

Lorimer says the learning didn’t flow in just one direction. “We can learn some very sophisticated information technology things from them,” she says. “They’ve also been very innovative in the commercialization of research. Their university presidents are now CEOs of spin-off corporations.”

These issues aside, what’s in it for Yale? Before the program, there was some grumbling around campus about the work it required, as well as some wild speculation about the costs. (Lorimer declined to say how much the program cost, but said part of it was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.) Levin’s commitment to China is already highly visible on campus. All of the world’s top universities are pursuing some collaborations with China, but Yale now has some 60 separate projects there, including joint research centers with Peking and Fudan universities. Levin has made six trips to China in the past three years. And not everyone at Yale understands why the administration is putting this level of resources into projects halfway around the world when there are so many deserving priorities here at home.

Levin offers two main reasons for what he calls a “strategic focus” on the nation he and other economists expect will become the world’s next superpower. First, he says, “China has a very large fraction of the world’s population and an even larger fraction of the educated population. The opportunity to become the best-known university in that country will help us attract students.” Because of Yale’s long history there—going back to Yung Wing and the 103-year-old Yale-China Association—China is one place abroad where Yale is as well known as Harvard. “It’s our good luck that we have this history with China, and it would be very short-sighted not to draw on that and be a part of what China has to offer the world,” says Penelope Laurans. Tian Xu’s Fudan-Yale Biomedical Research Center is already making use of some of what China has to offer. Taking advantage of the low cost of labor in Shanghai, the center is working to identify the function of every gene in the genome of the common mouse—a project that would be prohibitively expensive in the United States.

Levin’s second reason has less to do with Yale’s self-interest and more to do with—as melodramatic as it might sound—the fate of the world. “China is going through an important transition,” he says. “If higher education and our intervention can push that transition in the most positive direction, that’s worth doing.”

Tian Xu puts it more directly: “In the best win-win situation, China will grow and merge with the rest of the world and collaborate on the world’s issues. The nightmare would be a confrontational relationship between China and the U.S. The best way to promote human rights and democracy in China is by influencing the educational system, and the best way to promote collaboration is through education.”

Much of what the Chinese took away from the program seemed to center on students and education. “We always thought that top-tier research universities in the United States would emphasize research excellence, often at the expense of quality teaching,” wrote Jacob Leung in a post-visit e-mail. He and others were surprised that even the highest-ranking Yale faculty members are expected to teach.

Yale’s admissions process, which selects for leadership and extracurricular talent in addition to test scores, also drew comment. “We are sure we should cultivate students for leadership, but we must learn how to select the students,” says Peking president Xu Zhihong. Yale’s system is too labor-intensive even for most U.S. universities, let alone Chinese universities, which receive huge numbers of applications and rely on a single exam for evaluation. But elite institutions are taking steps toward more individual evaluations; Peking now selects 5 percent of its students for their extracurricular abilities.

But the most interesting aspect of Yale, apparently, was the notion of a liberal education built on a system of open electives and give-and-take discussion—a system still mostly foreign to China. A market economy, some believe, will require elite universities to teach students to be lifelong learners and innovators rather than technicians. “We cannot think outside the box,” a Chinese participant said during one of the program sessions.

Chinese students now learn almost exclusively in lecture courses. They do not participate in discussions, but simply repeat in exams what they have been told. Fu Weidong, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School who edits a magazine in Beijing for college students called China Campus, thinks change will be difficult. “The students and faculty all know they ought to think critically and independently,” he says. “But from primary school they have a 'force-feeding' type of education. The language structure is so complicated you have to learn that way. There is also a tradition of respect, so it is hard to get students to challenge their professors and ask questions—and it is hard for the professors when they really do it. Even though all these leading universities want this, it is very difficult to implement.”

What’s more, critical thinking is still a dicey issue in a country that severely restricts freedom of speech and access to information. “It’s clear that these changes create some tension,” says Levin. “But the motivation for the change is coming from the top. I give the leaders credit for recognizing that they have to do this to succeed.”

Spence thinks the Chinese are already making strides in teaching critical thinking. “A lot of independent thinking is already possible,” he says. “There’s a lot of creative research. Certain kinds of overt political criticism are not tolerated, but I wouldn’t say the students are lacking in creativity. Indeed, many of them are outstanding.” He adds, “Of course, this kind of exchange may not just change China. We may find that it changes us, too.”

On one of the final days of the conference, Qin Shaode, secretary of the party committee at Fudan, was asked about the differences he saw between Chinese universities and Yale. “I see more similarities than differences,” he said. “The major difference is that China is in the early stage of what Yale has done for hundreds of years. Liberal arts education is the exact same goal we have in China, but we’re in the earlier stages.” He smiled. “And that’s making us very busy.”  

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