Bringing out the best in each other

The growing prominence of Chinese universities has raised concerns in the United States over yet another potential arena for competition between the economic giants, but an alternative view envisages institutions in both countries working together in an effort to help solve shared problems.

"The US-China relations broadly conceived today are coloring our academic relations in a very unhappy way," William Kirby, a professor of China studies at Harvard University, told a recent webinar hosted by Stanford University.

Kirby's comments came as he discussed his new book, Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.

What worries him about the dynamic between the US and China is the belief that one or the other has to dominate, he said.

"Can Chinese universities lead in the 21st century? Absolutely. But they cannot lead alone. They have grown up as part of an international system of higher education, and that's the system they want to grow in and compete in at the end of the day to lead but not alone."

He offers the cover of his book as an example. It shows a photo of a building of China's Nanjing University, which was built in 1919 and designed by a US architect working in China who was enthralled by Chinese architectural styles. Other buildings designed by foreign architects can be found at Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

"The intellectual foundations of every major Chinese university are international in origin. It is being part of learning from, learning with, and in the future, ideally, surpassing the great universities of Europe and North America," Kirby said.

He dismissed the notion that Chinese universities will lead in engineering but will be weak in liberal arts education.

"We visited almost every major Chinese university that was experimenting with a liberal arts program or a general education program," he said.

"There isn't a leading Chinese university today that believes that a purely technical education is sufficient to prepare their students to be leaders of the future.

"It certainly could be sufficient to prepare people to be expert in the best generation of engineering education, but that's not what they aspire to."

Kirby visited ShanghaiTech University just before the pandemic. He said he was struck by the investment made by the university in the humanities, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences.

In contrast, Kirby said he saw "the great tragedy at the moment of American public universities", which is the disinvesting in public higher education.

For instance, the University of California, Berkeley, which he called "the flagship of the greatest system of public higher education in the world", has suffered "a dramatic decline" in public funding in California, one of the richest US states.

Solving common issues

Forty-four out of 50 states in the US are reducing funding for public higher education, Kirby said.

"The Americans are at the moment more than a little bit paranoid by their loss of prestige in the world, by the sense that we're no longer leaders.

"It's precisely at moments like this when political relations are so fraught that universities can find ways of working together on areas to solve common problems and issues."

There are extraordinary areas of collaboration in universities, he said. At Duke and Harvard universities, for instance, 90 percent of the faculty members want to do research in China and with Chinese colleagues, Kirby said.

"They're in school of public health, in school of education. They're in every different area that you can think of in the natural social sciences and humanities, but not necessarily in China studies."