Text: Wang Huiyao in dialogue with William Kirby
October 21 , 2024▲ William Kirby & Henry Huiyao Wang on the future of university education against geopolitics
On October 21, Professor William Kirby joined the latest session of CCG Global Dialogues, delivering a keynote speech and engaging in a discussion with Henry Huiyao Wang, President of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG). They explored the qualities that define a successful university, faculty, and student, drawing insights from Professor Kirby’s latest book, Empires of Ideas, Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.
Prof. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai.
The transcripts of CCG Global Dialogue：
Mabel Lu Miao, Secretary-General of CCG
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, dear Professor William Kirby, good afternoon and good morning. Welcome to CCG Global Dialogues, “The Modern University and the China-U.S. Education Exchange.” Since its launch in 2021, CCG has initiated the CCG Global Dialogues Series project in which CCG President Wang Huiyao has engaged in rational, objective, and in-depth conversation with dozens of international thought leaders.
The viewpoints shared by these dialogues are invaluable for comprehending the evolving trends in global development. The distinguished dialogue guests include Graham Allison, Joseph Nye, Kishore Mahbubani, Angus Deaton, John Thornton, Pascal Lamy, among others. It is believed that by understanding the insights of those dialogues, comparing and constructing those perspectives, a deeper understanding of critical topics such as globalization, global governance, U.S-China relations and multilateralism, the world economy and transnational threats faced by humanity, of course, including today’s topic, higher education.
As we know, the modern university was born in Germany in the 19th century. In the 20th century, the U.S. became the global leader in higher education. What is the landscape for higher education in the 21st century? And what is China’s role in this landscape? To answer this question, we will dig deep into Empires of Ideas, Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China, to explore the rise and fall of major universities and what it takes to become a world-class educational institution. We will also identify the challenges and threats we currently face, and how we can strengthen global exchange, especially between the U.S. and China in the field of higher education. Today, we are honored to have the author of Empires of Ideas, Professor William Kirby at CCG headquarters. Welcome, Professor Kirby!
Professor Kirby is former Dean of Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and currently serves as T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He’s also Chairman of the Harvard China Fund, the University’s academic venture fund for China, and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai, Harvard’s first University-wide center located outside the United States.
Professor Kirby is a historian of modern China and his work examines contemporary China’s business, economic, and political development in an international context. He writes and teaches on the growth of modern companies in China, Chinese corporate law and company structure, business relations across Greater China, and China’s relations with the United States and Europe.
Today, we are so honored to have Professor Kirby deliver his remarks and have a dialogue with Dr. Wang Huiyao. So right now, the floor is yours, professor.
William Kirby
Thank you very much, Mabel, and thank you very much, Henry, for inviting me to this wonderful space to continue a conversation that you and I started at Harvard about how universities rise and fall, how systems rise and fall.
The central question of that book, Empires of Ideas, is if Germany defined the modern university, which it absolutely did the 19th century, an altogether new definition of what a university is—and if the United States had a very good 20th century, particularly the second half of the 20th century—what are the prospects that China will be the leading system of higher education or set standards for the world in the 21st century? Because no system of higher education has risen more, both in quality as well as quantity than the system in China over the last 20 to 25 years.
As I think of this question, I think that it is not simply a matter of one winning and one losing. At the moment, today, if you read the newspapers, you see many people in the United States worrying about the end of American supremacy, and some people in China might call it American hedgemony. But in fact, the world of universities is not one in which there has to be one dominant player. In fact, the history of the modern university is how we have all learned one from another.
As you all know, universities are very old, or at least institutions that are called universities are very old, going back more than one thousand years. But the modern university is only 214 years old this year, with the founding of the University of Berlin in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia, a determination on the part of Prussia to build up intellectual strength in what they had lost in physical strength.
And that university defined what a university is,
▶ that it should be, as the great universities in China are today, devoted to not simply the transmission of knowledge, but the creation of knowledge, with faculty and students working together in seminars and laboratories to create knowledge;
▶ that the students should have Lernfreiheit—the freedom to learn—in different disciplines and the faculty should have Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach—something that we sometimes too simply summarize as academic freedom or academic autonomy.
▶ Third, that the institution should have institutional autonomy to make its decisions for itself—what to research, what not to research, whom to hire, whom not to hire, even if like the University of Berlin, the first such university, is entirely funded by the state.
▶ And forth, at the center of it—and this is something that is dear to my heart as the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard—the center of any great university. A university may have wonderful professional schools, but the cente of it is what they called in Germany the philosophical faculty. What we call it in Harvard, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the place where undergraduates learn not only skills but also how to think, how to ask questions, how to become critical thinkers with the understanding that their first job is not going to be their best; how do you educate people rather than simply train people.
And all of that is there in principle in 1810. What I can tell you today is that no university anywhere has perfectly achieved all these goals. There are constraints on what is called “academic freedom” in almost every society at one point or another. As you may have read in the newspapers, there were enormous disputes in the United States during the past year of what people are allowed to say or what people are not allowed to say in public discourse or in classrooms at American universities.
So the great University of Berlin, which became the best university in the world for 100 years, created the idea that there was such a thing as a university, free to do research, teaching, learning, unencumbered by the government. That university’s reputation was such that when Stanford University was founded, Stanford University chose a motto in German, “Die Luft der Freiheit weht,” the wind of freedom blows.
But even after 100 years, the great sociologist Max Weber, when asked about academic freedom at the University of Berlin, he said, yes, we have academic freedom within the bounds of political and ecclesiastical, that is, Church orthodoxy; outside of that, no, we don’t. So there are great limits, even in this greatest moment of the rise of the modern research university on what one can and cannot do. And then, of course, the capacity of the university to simply function at all is destroyed by the Nazis and by the Second World War.
Today, if you look at the rise and fall of systems and of universities, if we had the kind of rankings that we have today of global universities, as late as 1913 or maybe even into the 1920s, probably 8 of the top 10 universities in the world would have been German. The other two would have been British, the Oxford and Cambridge. No American university comes close to these. Today, and I say this with apologies to my German friends, it’s very rare when even one German university gets into the top 50 in the world. Time’s changed. And the great University of Berlin, now called the Humboldt University, is no longer the best in the world. It’s no longer the best in Germany. It’s not even the best in Berlin. Nothing lasts forever. This is something that I try to remind my colleagues at Harvard. We think we’re doing very well now, but look, unless you reinvent yourself and unless you continue to think of how you will improve, you will go backward.
And one of the ways in which American universities in the second half of the 20th century and Chinese universities today have improved remarkably, is being open to talent and to ideas from around the world. The history of Chinese-American academic cooperation is one in which both sides have benefited the other extraordinarily.
We’re here in Beijing and we’re not very far removed from the campus of Tsinghua University, which was founded as a preparatory school to send young Chinese to the United States. And its first campus is a beautiful campus modeled on an American Midwestern campus, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It became the greatest research university in China by the 1930s with its President, who was an American-educated scientist named 梅贻琦 Mei Yiqi, still known today as “清华大学永远的校长” the enternal President of Tsinghua University. He had come as a Boxer Indemnity student to the United States to Worcester Polytechnic not far from us in Boston. In this period of the 1930s and then during the war, he defended the values of academic integrity of learning, of questioning, even in a period of the greatest danger for the Chinese nation. And that’s why he is venerated today by Tsinghua alumni, both here in Beijing and by the 国立清华大学 National Tsing Hua University that exists in Hsinchu, Taiwan today, which he founded after 1949.
Tsinghua, of course, became great also by learning from others and working with others—with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the 1950s and on. And today, this great university, founded as a prep school to send young Chinese to the United States, still does that happily. We still have wonderful graduate students coming from Tsinghua. But today, Tsinghua University also is bringing the best in the brightest from around the world to China and to be here in Beijing.
As Henry knows, I was one of the chief advisors to Stephen Schwarzman and the remarkable President of Tsinghua University, President 陈吉宁 Chen Jining for the establishment of 苏世民书院, Schwarzman College, a place that has been remarkably successful over the last decade in bringing talent to China from all corners of the world. It is aspirationally going to be, it wants to be the Rhodes Scholarship of the 21st century. And when you think of this, you just have to think of the incredible ambition of this university, a place born to send young Chinese way, bringing the best now.
Young people in this audience today, you should not want to go to take a Rhodes Scholarship. You should not want to go to Oxford. I know of Oxford, but you shouldn’t want to there. You should go or your children should go and study at Schwarzman College. Why would you want to go to a cold, rainy, foggy, self-isolating island off the coast of Europe when you can be part of the rise of all-global education here in China? Anyway, I’m a bit of a propagandist about that program, so I apologize.
But when I think of the ways in which flows of talents have worked between China and the United States, I’m thinking also of my own education. My teacher is a great professor named John Fairbank, 费正清教授. I was his last student. I think when he met me, he said, oh, I have to retire, time to go. But I was very fortunate to have been taught by Professor Fairbank in his final years on the faculty. But he learned his Chinese history here in Beijing at Tsinghua University, educated by a great historian, Professor 蒋廷黻 Tsiang Ting-fu, who himself had been a Boxer Indemnity scholar who had gone to Oberlin and then Columbia and came back to lead the History Department at Tsinghua University, which was the leading history department in China and one of the leading ones, arguably, in the world in the 1930s. They were friends for the rest of their lives.
Today, American universities, if they remain strong, are strong to the degree that they are open to talent from around the world. We have benefited enormously in the early 20th century through the Boxer Indemnity Program and other periods of Chinese migration to United States by the talent that has come to our universities. For people who studies there, some will stay in the US, many will return to China. Today, happily, we still have some 300,000 Chinese students in American universities.
Quite frankly, any research university that is not open to international talent, and particularly, in my view, to the great talent that comes out of China’s universities—so people coming to do doctoral degrees—any university that is not open to talent from around the world is not going to be competitive. It’s just the way it is. You have to be open to the absolute best in graduate education. Undergraduate education tends to be serving students in your own country. Graduate education, if it is to be world-leading, has to be open to talent from around the world. And any political pressures to decouple, to bifurcate, to keep people out either from the United States or from China, is to our mutual detriment. It is something that I am personally committed to fighting against, both in the United States and beyond.
The reason that I’m here in Beijing this week and was recently in Hong Kong and in Taiwan is to promote the idea that my university, Harvard, is not retreating from its engagement with China, but wants it to deepen its engagement with China. And I know that in talking to the university presidents here in Mainland of China and in Hong Kong and Taiwan, this is a mutually shared goal. It is something in which sometimes we have to fight against political winds in order to persevere.
One important lesson in this book and in the history of universities is that you have to play the long game. You have to work not for the next 5 years, but for the next 50 or the next 100 years. Universities ourlast governments. You know, Harvard University was founded in 明朝末年, the end of the Ming Dynasty. Nobody at Harvard knew that, of course, but we have outlasted in the United States, of course, the early colony of Massachusetts, the British colonial rule, the American Revolution, and so on, multiple different American administrations. The great Chinese universities, most of them found in the 1890s or early 1900s, have seen enormous political upheaval, revolutions, repressions, times of great investment such as the present, but they have endured. And their history of enduring and commitment to their mission is, I think, something that should be a model for all of us. So let me just stop here and thank you all very much for your attention and look forward to a conversation with you, Henry.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Great, Bill, it’s really nice to see you again here in Beijing at CCG head office. Actually, as you just mentioned, we had the last dialogue at the Widener Library. It was really memorable. You gave a very comprehensive discussion about the Empire of Ideas, this book that you have of the best universities outlasting governments and for many centuries.
I’m glad you’ve come to China again. So we would like to continue our dialogue that we left about two years ago. We can also take this into a series of dialogues we have conducted over the past four years for almost 100 global opinion leaders at different schools. We really welcome you again.
So Bill, you mentioned the importance of education in nation-building, bridge-building, communication, and also knowledge transfer. I think now in current times, we’re getting more geopolicitcal tensions. We’re getting probably more misunderstandings from outside and across the world. We are facing more challenges. So it could be important now for us to have more exchanges.
You mentioned a number of historical stories, like how Tsinghua University originated, the Boxer Indemnity scholars, and you as an advisor to Schwarzman College. You and I are also on the board of Duke Kunshan University in China. There are also John Hopkins Nanjing Center and NYU in Shanghai. So there are a number of U.S.-China education exchanges. In the current situation, how do you think we can strengthen these U.S.-China education exchanges? You have been the champion, the pioneer, one of the most advanced scholars in terms of bridging the education gap between the two countries. You must have a lot of thoughts as well, on top of this book.
Given how important education exchanges, student exchanges, and people-to-people exchanges are today—you also mentioned talent and how we can facilitate talent flow, which are the still on people’s mind these days, particularly in China—how can we continue to sustain that? Perhaps you could give us your further thoughts.
William Kirby
I would be very happy to, Henry, thank you. It’s a great and difficult question because, you know, one of the things that Professor Fairbank once told me was that his biggest disappointment in his work on China was the cutting-off of academic relations with China from the early 1950s really to the late 1970s; no contact with his friends, mentors, and teachers back in China and no contact the other way around, mutually self-isolating. And this turned out to be actually quite bad for both countries.
When we have engaged cooperatively in the building of institutions—one can think of some of these newer ones like Kunshan Duke University, NYU Shanghai or Schwarzman College—they’re building on a tradition that dates back to, say, the Yanjing University, the current campus of Peking University or Jinling University. This building (on my book cover) at Nanjing University, 北大楼 North Building, was built for Jinling University, a Chinese-American joint venture. The architect was actually an American who is an ancestor of one of my colleagues on the Harvard faculty, Professor Dwight Perkins. We share so much in common.
And as you know, at Harvard, on our campus, one of the most prominent educational memorials on Harvard’s campus is the stele given by Dr. 胡适 Hu Shih of Peking University in 1936, where he was given an honourary degree on Harvard’s 300th anniversary. Hu Shih wrote about how central education was to the culture of a nation, and to the strength of a nation. He once said—this isn’t what’s written in that stele—for a nation, not to have an army or a navy is no shame, but for a nation, not to have a university or a library, this is a cause for shame. Now, I don’t think a lot of people in that period of time agreed with them.
Universities, of course, have their differences in different countries. There are different cultures of teaching. There are different expectations, different job markets. At the same time, the modern research university, whether in Europe or North America or China, is much more similar than they are different. This is why the leaders of Chinese, American, British, and Australian universities could agree in the year 2013 on what the fundamental principles of a modern research university are. The values of the leaders of China’s leading universities and those of American leading universities are actually much more similar than they are different.
The challenge that they both face today, and here I can speak, you will know the Chinese situation better than I. But in the United States, you have political pressures on people to do less regarding China. At Harvard, happily, not that case. But we do see it in some instances, the various states forcing the closure of the Confucius Institutes, which I think is a shame personally, or the Trump Administration canceling our Fulbright Program with China, an extraordinary program that has benefited both sides for decades.
But the good news is that many universities are also pushing back against this. Our Chinese enrollments at Harvard continue to be strong. This last summer, we opened a new Harvard Summer School in Shanghai together with Fudan University, extraordinarily successful—a small program to start, but I hope the seeds of something much larger. We opened a new language program in Taipei. I don’t have the exact number, but somewhere between two and three hundred Harvard undergraduates came to China last summer, some of them as part of a student organization to teach in Chinese high schools. About 150 of them did that. We also had 130 Harvard business school students come and visit China. I have started a series of grants through our Harvard China Fund, called “(Re)engage with China Grant” to our faculty so that they can reengage with their academic partners here in China.
I think it’s important to note that I have many close friends in Chinese univerisities including many close friends here at Nanjing University in this picture. But the majority of American professors who have research work in China, together with Chinese colleagues are scientists, engineers, people in public health, medicine, in all other areas of endeavor, because they share the same passions and they are addressing many of the same problems. And we have to encourage them to work together.
In 2019, Harvard President Bacow met with President Xi Jinping. They both agreed that universities need to cooperate even when governments have difficulty doing so. President Xi was very clear about his view that this was a positive thing, as was President Bacow. And I know our current president, Alan Garber, strongly feels the same way.
But if we think about it, it isn’t geopolitics that we’re facing now. The Covid years really set so much back. The zero-Covid policy made it impossible for foreign students to study here, or foreign scholars to do that. The end of that, of course, is very welcome, but then you have to recover from three years of absence to build programs back up. I believe we will, but I think it will take time and determination to do so. It will take, again, a long view, because Chinese-American political relations may not get better tomorrow, but universities will need and want to cooperate.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Great. Thank you, Bill, for your outline of all those importances. I know that you’re the Chair of the Harvard China Fund. It’s great news to hear that you have sponsored two or three hundred Harvard students to come to China in the summer and that this trend will continue. I know that China also earnestly wants to welcome more American students because right now, even though the number droppped a little bit from the peak of 370,000, currently 290,000, still, China is the largest source of international students studying in the U.S., so we hope that continues as well.
I know U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns also is a former Harvard faculty member. He is very keen to promote more academic exchanges. I also hope that, as you said, there’s a 3-year pandemic that’s significantly reduced American students coming to China. Also, there could be some tensions or mistrust among American parents. Maybe they feel it is not a suitable time to come.
Here at CCG, we are also promoting mutual understanding. For example, not too long ago, we issued a report on how to welcome 50,000 American youngsters to come to China in five years time. We could get it done through the alumni networks, scholar exchanges, all those associations and the linkage of universities. I think the number of U.S. students coming to China has probably gone up quite a lot now, maybe over 1,000 and even 2,000. But we hope there will be more.
So what’s your ideas and suggestions on how we can have more American students to come? Of course, lifting travel ban could be one of them, but China could also do more to help. One of the suggestions I would like to make is that China has issued free-visa travel policy to 18 Enropean countries, let’s give all U.S. citizens free visas so their parents can come to see if it’s safe and sound, and then their kids can follow. U.S. faculty members can also easily come.
William Kirby
That would be an incredibly welcome move. Actually, we work with the Chinese consulate in New York, which has been an incredible support of our students and faculty getting visas relatively quickly, and actually more quickly often than our Chinese counterparts can get here, although under the Biden administration, our embassy here in Beijing has also worked overtime to make sure that students who want to come to the United States are able to come.
So in both sides, we have to work against not just the political headwinds from people who are worried. Sometimes people in the United States are worried about nefarious Chinese plans to do X or Y; there are people who are convinced that TikTok is a mortal danger for the American public. Frankly, I think that’s quite laughable, but these people actually believe it. It is a sign of not happy times when the two leading powers in the world are having a dispute over a teenage video app. It’s a little crazy when you think about it. So it leads people to be much more cautious.
The great programs, for example, China studies in the United States by people like Professor Fairbank, were developed because these—Fairbank in particular was a remarkable academic entrepreneur. His mission in life was such that, he couldn’t be engaged China directly during the Cold War, but he did educate and place in American universities a whole several generations of scholars who would teach young people about China, and we are still benefiting from that today.
I think our faculty are not more than willing to be engaged. Sometimes, unhappily, not at Harvard, but at some universities I do know, administrators are more cautious. There’s a wonderful Chinese phrase which you will understand, true of administrators here in China, is 怕麻烦 (fear of trouble). You know, let’s not do that. That might get us in trouble. You never know what might get you in trouble. That’s true, both in China and the United States. But if you don’t try, you absolutely won’t succeed. And if you don’t try, then both countries will become more parochial, more self-isolated.
You have people in the United States worried about, oh, you’re going to China? Aren’t you worried? And I make it very clear why I am not worried and why our students are not. You get that on occasion. And you have also in China sometimes fear that I’ve seen expressed, that there’s too much exposure to so-called “Western ideas.” Now I don’t actually know what a Western idea is. Is the university a Western idea? Marxism is a Western idea. It’s a pretty powerful Western idea.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yes, absolutely. I think you had a vivid example. First of all, the Harvard China Fund has spent so much on Harvard students to come. Also, I can remember a number of Harvard professors who came. You are one of the most active. I had Graham Allison here, Joseph Nye, Tony Saich, and many more. A lot of Harvard professors set good examples for this communication, which is really important.
William Kirby
I would say that at our university, there are more than 300 faculty members who regularly before Covid did research with Chinese colleagues in different parts of the university. And we often never knew when they were in China because there’s no reason to tell me or to tell the university. They’re faculty, they can do what they want. But I always kind of wish we had put a GPS chip in their neck, so that we would be able to just identify—just kidding—where our exchanges are successful and how we could help deepen those exchanges for the alumni.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Absolutely. So we would love to promote your books. As a matter of fact, we have also done a book for Graham Allison and Joseph Nye, which I’ll give you later. They are exactly the leading professors who set good examples for this kind of exchanges. We visited you in Harvard this summer. Also, we were in Washington D.C. together at the Duke University’s New Global Universities Summit.
So on global university innovation, you have already given some suggestions on how to be a best university in the Empire of Ideas, but we’d like to hear more. What is the best diversity that we should have?You mentioned one of their traits should be attracting talents from all the world. After that, we will also raise a question interesting to the parents about how to become a good student who can get into a good university. So first, how to be a good university and second, how to be good applicants.
William Kirby
There’s no one way to be a good or a great university, and there are many ways to fail in doing this. But one of the things that we learned in this Duke conference in Washington was that this is a world of extraordinary experimentation and innovation in higher education, and not just in the research university, in undergraduate colleges and the world over.
As you know, Noah Pickus at Duke is a co-author of a book on new universities. I co-edited a volume of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences journal, Dædalus, on innovation and experimentation in higher education. Because all over the world, in Asia, sometimes China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and to some degree North America—but not as much in North America as elsewhere—are all kinds of new educational models. Some of them more virtual, like the Minerva Project in California. But some of them are truly heroic, like the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, one of the most ambitious programs to educate Muslim women from all over South Asia in the arts and sciences in a rigorous way, in a not easy city to educate people. If the United States and China continue on the direction of disengaging from each other and of actually to be more self-isolated, then we both lose out. Chinese and American universities need to study what else is going on in the world.
I can tell you that American universities became great in part by taking lessons from others, from the British on undergraduate education, from the Germans on graduate and research-focused education, and so on. But today, it is very rare for American universities to look abroad for new ideas. We are very parochial in this regard. Chinese universities still do this, but they too, as they have gotten better and as they become more prestigious, all tended, in innovation, to look more to what each of them is doing than what is happening, for example, in Japan or Southeast Asia or elsewhere. And I think both of us need to have what the great President of Peking University 蔡元培 Cai Yuanpei once called a “世界观的教育”—be focused on an education with a worldview and maintain a truly global view of global education.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Absolutely, the global view and worldview are very important qualifications. My second question was on the student. We have a lot of Chinese students who want to study continuously in the U.S. and other countries for advanced learning. These days, if you are recruiting student, what good qualities are you looking at? Is there any recommendation you can give on how to be a best student?
William Kirby
Anyone who is listening to this and thinking as a parent or a student of applying to Harvard as an undergraduate, there is no one path. We don’t have an absolute profile of the talent that we wish for. We want to have a highly diverse student body, diverse in talents as well as in backgrounds, international as well domestic. We don’t have a 高考 gaokao [college entrance examination in China], as you know. We do have these other tests, but they’re not as definitive as gaokao. We’re really looking at the individual and their own capacities, and we try to interview as many as possible personally by alumni here in China. That became more difficult during COVID. I’m always asked, how do you get into Harvard? And I have a one-word answer, apply. Because if you don’t apply, you absolutely can’t get it. That I can guarantee.
What’s different about graduate education compared to undergraduate education? We have one committee that admits everyone to Harvard College, a very large committe that works very hard. But in graduate education, it’s not one committee for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Every department chooses their new PhD students. They have no criteria except excellence. They are not saying we need this many Americans or this many Chinese. They go for the best in the world. And this is what has made Harvard and some of the other graduate schools in the United States among the best in the world, because they look for talent wherever it comes from. And they all get the same amount of funding, which is total funding from us, and true of our competitors in US, irrespective of their background, irrespective of their income. I think anything that endangers that really does endanger the capacity of American universities to continue to do well.
But there’s no one way. If you’re gonna apply to the math department, you have a different set of skills than if you’re applying to the history department or others. But I hope and that the number of Chinese applications to American graduate education rebounds to its earlier level, because even though, of course, you could now get an extraordinary graduate education here in China, in a way that you could not 40 years ago or even 30 years ago, and even though it could be a launchpad to a good academic career, it’s important for the best people to test themselves against the best in the world, to continue to go abroad, to learn what others are doing, and to make friendships that will last a lifetime and will be very important either in your life as an academic or your life in business or whatever else you go on to do. You know, I would not be sitting here talking to you if I had not, as an undergraduate, studied abroad in Germany, and then, after college, studied in Germany. I would never have had the courage to then go on and learn Chinese and then come here.
Henry Huiyao Wang
I have a final question before I open up for one or two questions. I want to come back to this book. You have overseen this edition that is already published in Taiwan. A Chinese mainland edition is also coming up soon.
For the traditional Chinese edition, it’s called 顶尖大学的条件, What It Takes to Become Top Universities. So maybe you can give us one or two factors that make a top university? I’m a big fan of university history. One of my ancestors was the Dean of Yuelu Academy in Hunan. That was a long time ago. During his tenure there, Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang were among his graduates. So we would like to see how we can carry on the great tradition of top universities in China.
William Kirby
Here I will take a page out of one of my predecessors’ book, Professor Henry Rosovsky, who was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences before me. He had several lessons about how universities become and remain great. He wrote a book called The University: An Owner’s Manual, really remarkable book.
And he said that one of the most important things for a great university in terms of its success or failure is governance. How is it governance? In the case of many American universities, it means boards of trustees or boards of regents of public universities. In Harvard’s case, it means the Harvard Corporation. When there is good governance at a university—governance that allows the institution to do its job, to do research unimpeded, to allow teaching without constraint, to allow students to learn across the curriculum—when you have that and that is protected by good governance and reinforced by good governance, you are very likely to have a successful university.
But we have seen this break down just in the American context in the 1950s during the McCarthyite period, where the anti-communist scare in the American university led to the purging of faculty and the interrogation of students who have been active politically. This happened at Harvard just as it happened in many other American universities. And at the same moment, the same thing happened in a actually greater degree in Chinese universities in that period, to our mutual detriment once again.
There is no one model for good governance. When you don’t have to think about it, then you probably do have good governance. It was in the 1960s when Harvard and many other American universities almost came apart out of conflicts over the Vietnam War, there was great disputation about how best to govern a university to keep it focused on its academic mission. In the last year in the United States, with so much contestation over the Israel-Gaza operation, you see different boards of trustees and our own Harvard Corporation going one way one week ago and another way in the next week—not leading to confidence, quite frankly.
So universities are complicated things to govern. In the United States, it’s very difficult to be a university president because you have so many constituents, so many jobs to do, and the average tenure of an American university president these days is shorter than that of an undergraduate in college. Undergraduates take longer than you think, Henry, but it’s only about five point something years.
Now turn it over to China, it’s difficult to be president of any great university in China, too, and even more difficult when you also have another co-president, the party secretary. Often, they work together extremely well to the betterment of the university, but sometimes not. Very difficult minds of communication and structures. This is a Soviet model that has been maintained in China, and China has extraordinary university presidents and many extraordinary party secretaries. But it’s just automatically a more complicated model than what we have in the United States or what exists in Western Europe. So the challenge of good governance is even greater. When it works as it is working, for example, like 清华 Tsinghua University or 北大 Peking University in recent days, then it’s a marvelous thing.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yes, it’s trying to work. Western univerisities, particuarly those in the United States, have a board of governors, whereas in China, the government funded all the universities so they have a government representative who does all the supervision and advisory.
William Kirby
The basic job of government, in my view, is to support and protect the universities from external pressures, to allow students to learn, faculty to teach, research to be pursued, and not to be too in the weeds. We see many examples in China of this in recent years about what student should learn and what the faculty should teach. But you see this in the United States, too. In the State of Florida, the governor has allowed for the banning of certain books or certain disciplines such as sociology are removed from general education curriculum. It’s not far removed from the worst forms of government interference.
Henry Huiyao Wang
That’s true. Providing funding is important for the government to support universities to flourish. And of course, in certain environment, the government is also playing an important role in organizing things. Now, maybe we’ll have one question. I have Frances. She’s an alumni of Harvard.
Frances Sun, former Director for Asia at Harvard Alumni Association
Thank you, Professor Kirby. Every time I listen, I learn. I have a question: now there are a variety of lists called 大学排行榜 university rankings, trying to evaluate who are the best universities. What do you think? What’s the accuracy of whether they can evaluate who’s the best, who’s next, or who’s not that bad?
William Kirby
We at Harvard never pay any attention to these rankings unless we’re not number one. In the Shanghai ranking, which is a very scientific ranking of certain types of research publications, actually, we come up very well in that. Some of the American ones focus on other issues. In the Times Higher Education, somehow or other, Oxford and Cambridge do remarkably well. Anyway, I’m kidding. Basically, you end up with the same groupings of universities over time.
But again, times can change and you’ll see a shift now. More American universities used to be in the top 50 ten years ago than are today. Chinese universities are in the top 50 than there were 10 years ago when there were none. Maybe two years ago, in the QS ranking, Tsinghua University and Peking University outranked all but two of the American Ivy League universities. Happily, Harvard and Princeton have stayed ahead of them again just by a little bit. But they tell you where things are moving, where universities are rising or falling or where systems of higher education are rising or falling.
But they don’t tell you how students learn. They don’t tell you how teachers teach. They don’t tell you who has been inspired to do something altogether different because of their education. So on many basic levels of education, they don’t tell you what you really want to know. Do these universities turn out people who become extraordinary citizens? Do they turn out people who become innovators in industry or in science? Just focusing only and largely on the research of faculty is an important thing, but it is only one part of the universities. But these rankings almost exclusively focus on that. So I think we have to take them with a grain of salt and not worry if your university has gone from No. 32 to No. 35 and somehow the sky is falling—it actually makes no difference. We, again, are never worried about it as long as we’re No. 1.
Note: The above text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. It is posted as a reference for the discussion.
