In what ways does the rise of China’s universities pose a threat to the American liberal arts model?

The argument I am making is that the rise of China itself is not really a threat to our liberal arts model, but rather the way in which American education has responded or reacted to the rise of Chinese higher education does pose a threat. I think that everyone has become increasingly worried about the possibility that Chinese universities are going to overtake American universities in these crazy world rankings of colleges and universities. As a result, what we do is compete with each other and we all start looking more and more alike as a result of that competition. Just as Chinese universities are trying to imitate Western universities, we increasingly see more American imitations of Chinese universities. Our new campuses resemble the big Chinese campuses that have recently been built. And American universities increasingly emphasize engineering and other applied sciences, just as Chinese universities do. 

We've all bought into one standard model of what a university is supposed to look like and that model does not include a central role for the liberal arts. It doesn't deny the importance of the liberal arts but it really puts stress on the STEMs—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it puts much less of an emphasis on training people for citizenship or for living meaningful lives of service. That’s where I think the real threat comes from. I don't believe that China itself poses much of a threat, but our interpretation of China as competition causes us to look more and more like the things that, in the beginning, we didn’t really like so much about Chinese higher education. It's an ironic outcome which suggests that we should look internally to reaffirm our own liberal values and commitment to a diverse educational system. I don't blame China; I blame ourselves for falling into the trap of thinking about higher education as a kind of global competition.

In recent rankings, Tsinghua University topped MIT as the number one school for engineering. Do you think this will have an impact on the number of international students heading to China to study? Should the improvement in the international rankings of Chinese universities be viewed as a measurement of Beijing’s success?  Will such improvement challenge the existing dominance of American universities?

It's already impacting that. We're seeing more and more foreign students from countries all around the world going to China to study all kinds of things. So far, it hasn’t been an issue in terms of depleting foreign students for the U.S. in large part because the number of Chinese students is still increasing. But over time, yes, I do think it can make a difference because people take these rankings seriously. The best engineers want to study at what they think are the best engineering schools in the world. I don't know enough about engineering to be able to say whether it does or doesn't make sense to have these kinds of rankings in engineering, but I do know enough about the things I study, in the humanities and social sciences, to know that these kinds of rankings are virtually meaningless. 

We can't say that there is a single “best” political science department in the world, for example. It so happens that my department, the Harvard Government Department, is ranked the best political science department in the world, but it is certainly not the case that we've actually figured out how to explain politics—we haven't at all! And so, for everybody to be imitating the Harvard Government Department means that everybody loses; everybody should be doing something different and trying to develop alternative ways of studying politics and that's where I think the biggest loss comes from. It may be that in engineering or the hard sciences, these ranking systems get closer to some genuine measure of quality, but I'm skeptical of that too. I can't quite believe that there aren’t multiple ways of teaching and studying engineering and physics and so forth and that we shouldn't have different approaches to them as well. At the very least, I'm convinced that for the humanities and social sciences, these rankings are a big mistake. They are based on senseless criteria and are doing a lot of damage in creating one single brand of scholarship at a time when what we really need is all kinds of different approaches and answers.. 

The core of liberal arts is an appreciation of diverse ways of thinking about problems. Liberal arts is supposed to liberate the mind; it’s supposed to make us more creative; it’s supposed to remove our inhibitions from thinking innovatively, from thinking imaginatively, from thinking in ways that might initially seem outrageous and against the grain. If we are all trying to conform to one perceived standard of quality, we do severe damage to what the liberal arts advocates. Because global education now is not only a competition for who has the best ranked universities, but also a competition for how many tuition dollars are pouring into the top-ranked universities and the countries in which they're situated, there is a lot of economic pressure to try to compete in this way. Still, while international economic pressures are a real concern to American universities, I think there are genuine costs associated with conforming in this way.

Chinese students currently make up one third of all international students studying in the U.S.. With the rising prestige of Chinese universities, do you foresee more Chinese choosing to stay in China for college?

Foreign names are much less important these days than where one falls in the rankings in terms of where families are generally willing to invest their money. Harvard has such prestige in China not because it's the oldest university in America but because when China started focusing on rankings, Harvard was number one. Over time, the rise in rankings will probably mean that Chinese students are more likely to stay at home unless we can somehow revolutionize the way we think about these rankings—to make them less meaningful and expose them for what they are in most areas of learning, which is a poor approximation of actual academic value. Frankly, I think it's great that so many Chinese students are currently studying abroad, not because it brings money to American universities and colleges, but because it gives young Chinese a more cosmopolitan perspective. 

Students don't necessarily have to go abroad for their degrees; there can be more international exchange programs of various sorts. Many American college students spend their junior year abroad and, for instance, at Stanford University, you may spend different academic terms in different Stanford overseas programs. We should encourage a variety of such international opportunities so that young people have exposure to other countries, cultures, and approaches. I think it's a positive development if more Chinese students would prefer to get their degrees in China. However, I would hope that that would not be accompanied by a kind of closing up and insular quality of education. In recent years Japanese students have been going abroad much less than in the past. This is in part because Japanese universities are reasonably well ranked, because Japanese students found it difficult to get jobs with overseas degrees, and a number of other factors that have in turn made for a more insular Japanese approach. And that I don't think is to be encouraged. In my own view, it's really valuable for people at a young age to get out of their comfort zone, to live in foreign cultures, to learn how to survive, and to really become citizens of the world. Who knows, they might learn some positive lessons that they will want to incorporate back in their own country in the future, or they might learn some negative lessons of things they want to be sure to avoid in the future, but either way I think internationalization is important for improvement.

There is more than double the number of universities/colleges in the U.S. than there are in China.  American higher education institutions are also more diverse in many ways. Do you think the large number and rich diversity of American universities is part of the reason why so many students leave China for the U.S.? If so, should China emulate the U.S. model, both in terms of number and diversity of institutions?

The higher number of institutions does mean that there is a better student-teacher ratio here, but more important is that there are lots of different kinds of institutions of higher education: small colleges, large public universities, elite private universities, parochial religious schools, women’s colleges, experimental colleges and so forth. That diversity has been an attraction for Chinese students and for students from other countries as well. It is difficult to build new institutions these days, it’s extremely expensive to buy land in most parts of the world as well as to recruit a world-class faculty, and it’s hard to convince students to go to a school that has no reputation or ranking. So I don't know that it is realistic to expect China to double its number of universities. What it has been doing is vastly increasingly the enrollments at its universities and I don't think that’s a great idea, either. Chinese universities have been building satellite campuses for its mega-universities in suburban sites where land is less expensive than where the central campus is located. It’s also been amalgamating universities so that it actually has fewer universities now than it did a while ago because it has been combining what were previously independent colleges and research institutes to construct these new mega-universities. I am not in favor of this trend and I think most Chinese educators are not in favor of it, either. It’s not necessarily true that bigger is better, especially when it comes to education. I think it would be better to consider splitting up these huge conglomerates rather than attempting to build new universities. What they perhaps should do is to break up these universities of 60,000 to 70,000 students, but they've been doing exactly the opposite. The focus should be on increasing the diversity of institutions.

The Chinese government has been investing enormous resources to build what they call “world-class universities.”  How would you assess their efforts and success?  What’s working?  What’s holding them back?

It is superficially working in that they are investing in all the metrics that go into the global rankings. For example, the rankings give high points for engineering infrastructure and Chinese universities have been putting a great deal of money into that. The rankings give points for the number of publications that the university produces in certain kinds of journals and so they've been hiring a veritable army of post-doctoral researchers just to publish these articles. The researchers don't teach and they don't actually benefit the students, but their publications improve the reputation and ranking of the university. From my point of view, it’s a misallocation of resources but from the Chinese state's point of view it’s a perfectly rational investment. As you said, Tsinghua University has been skyrocketing in the rankings.  That is due in large part to just these kinds of strategies. It doesn't necessarily mean that the teaching has improved or that students are getting a superior education, but it means that the various quantitative measures used in the university rankings are being impressively fulfilled.

One of the strengths of the U.S. liberal arts model is its flexibility in the curricula, in choosing a major.  Compared with U.S. institutions, are Chinese universities less flexible?  Is this a shortcoming for them?

Flexibility is a real strength of American higher education. When we're 17 or 18 years of age we don't really know what we might want to be doing for the rest of our lives, and I think that’s a good thing. Because students haven't yet been exposed to all the possibilities, one of the real benefits of a liberal arts education is that it allows them to roam around and discover what things most appeal to them. I'm very much a believer in allowing students to defer a choice of a major and allowing students the flexibility to put together curricula that are tailor-made for their particular interests. They may not discover some of those interests until their sophomore, or junior, or even senior year in college. 

China is attempting to experiment with some of that. A few universities are allowing some of their students in special liberal arts colleges or programs to delay declaring a major, but generally they are only given until the end of their first year—still better than having to choose before they actually even get into the schools. Depending on students’ scores on the entrance exam, they are usually assigned to a particular major when they enter. 

But of course, the U.S. is quite unusual in allowing college students so much latitude. In England, if you're going to Oxford or Cambridge or another university, you declare what you want to study in advance and there’s also tracking from a very early age in the UK that’s very different from the American model. I like the American approach which is much more democratic in the sense that people have greater opportunity to study what they want to as they grow into it and develop new interests and skills over time, rather than being stuck in a particular kind of track because that’s all you understood when you were at a young age or because that's the niche you've been brought up in. I hope China will become more open in this respect, but as long as it has this national examination system, it’s difficult to do so because the examination system is pegged to different disciplines and toward allocating students to different universities in these different disciplines. It’s all part of a kind of central plan and it would require a really dramatic restructuring of Chinese higher education to incorporate American-style flexibility in their universities.

Peking University, Sun Yat Sen University, Fudan University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed programs modelled after the American liberal arts model. How do such programs compare with American liberal arts colleges?

I think it's too early to say. Yuanpei College at Peking University has only been underway for a few years so we don't yet have a track record on what happens to these students once they've graduated, how successful they might be and the like. There are some others; Boya College at Sun Yat Sen; Zhejiang University has a new one; Fudan University has had one for quite a while that was patterned after Yale University. Fudan is interesting because unlike Sun Yat Sen or Peking, the Fudan model requires all undergraduates to do liberal arts and to live in colleges like Yale. In contrast, at Sun Yat Sen or Peking, it is a small minority of the students that are experiencing a liberal arts education. Frankly, it is just too early to know how it will all turn out. 

There are of course differences between the Chinese and American models of liberal arts. Chinese liberal arts, not surprisingly and appropriately, involves studying the Chinese classics more than the Western classics. It is not just a matter of which texts are read but how they are read, and whether they are subject to multiple interpretations, that opens students’ minds to more creativity and innovation, which is after all the purpose of liberal arts. It’s hard to know whether they will fulfill that mission when these programs are being set up by the government, when they have government funding behind them, and when their goal is to improve China's economic competitiveness. So if the mission is geared toward national interest rather than the individual awakening of the students, it’s an open question as to how it will really work; we just don't know the answer yet.

Chinese universities have certain strengths.  Which ones do you think American universities and colleges should emulate?

One strength, particularly since 2008, has been a strong culture of volunteerism on Chinese university campuses. My sense is that in the United States, before students enter university, many engage in volunteerism because they know it’s important for getting into university. But many of them, once they enter university, are less apt to continue such service. On the other hand, in China, due in part to the Communist Youth League and to various NGOs and GONGOs that have university connections, there’s quite a bit of volunteerism on the part of both faculty and students. They go into the interior of China to provide free teaching for students in impoverished parts of the country and so forth. That spirit of volunteerism is great and I think we can learn from it. It’s wonderful to have professors and their students jointly engaged in volunteer efforts. There has been a push for such service from the Chinese government, partly to relieve the government of some of its welfare expenses by having faculty and students do the work. Still, on balance, I think it’s a positive thing and something that we might emulate.

Then there is simply the fact that students in Chinese universities study Chinese classics, which we should include in our own curricula as well. We should be envisioning a liberal arts education that does more to incorporate the wisdom of cultures and civilizations outside of the West. Naturally, in America there’s going to be a strong emphasis on America’s own literary and historical tradition and the Western roots from which it derived. That makes perfect sense. But shouldn't Americans learn about Confucius along with Plato? It’s to the credit of most of the Chinese liberal arts programs that they are teaching Western as well as Chinese classics.  That’s a level of cosmopolitan liberal arts to which Americans should also aspire.