NEWS/EVENTS 2008

• May 8-June 5, 2008: All four team members have been in China during May and early June, to complete case studies of six of our twelve universities (the other six were done last year). Ruth Hayhoe and Qiang Zha spent a week at Peking University (News), followed by a week at

  The project team, Prof. Ruth Hayhoe, Prof. Jing Lin and Dr. Jun Li, meeting with President Wang Xiaojia (right) and Vice-President Song Naichang (middle) of Southwest University, Chongqing, June 31, 2008.

  Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University in Yangling near Xi’An. Meanwhile Jing Ling and Jun Li went to Yanji in Northeast China, near the Korean border, to study Yanbian University, the one minority university in our project. We changed partners in late May, and Jun joined Ruth in Wuhan to do field work at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (News 1; News 2), while Qiang and Jing Lin did a study of Blue Sky University in the Southeastern city of Nanchang (News), Jiangxi province. The final case study was Southwest University in Chongqing (News), where Jing Lin and Jun Li have discovered an interesting recent merger between a normal university and a university of agriculture. So far, we have finished the field trips for all the 12 case study universities, and a number of articles have been submitted to refereed journals from our research project.

 

• 	Dr. Jun Li at the 52nd CIES Annual Meeting held in Teachers College, New York, Mar. 18, 2008.

  May 8, 2008: Dr. Jun Li has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He will take up his position on December 1, 2008, exactly two years after he joined OISE/U of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow working for our SSHRCC Project on China’s Move to Mass Higher Education. In addition to coordinating many aspects of our project work, Dr. Li shared with Prof. Ruth Hayhoe in the teaching of “Comparative Education Theory and Methodology” in the autumn of 2007, and has been leading a doctoral thesis proposal development group from September of 2007 up to the present. He has written a book chapter, two encyclopedia pieces, and two articles for refereed journals over the past year and a half, as well as carrying out a survey of over 2300 undergraduate students in our case study universities in all regions of China, and coordinating all the communication involved in field work at each university. Before his departure for Hong Kong in December, he plans to complete the writing of four chapters for our upcoming book, “China’s Universities in the Move to Mass Higher Education”.

 

• March 20, 2008: The project team made a panel presentation chaired by Dr. Jun Li at the 52nd CIES Annual Conference 2008 in Teachers College, Columbia University, New York.

  The project team responding to questions at the 52nd CIES Annual Meeting, Teachers College, New York, Mar. 20, 2008.

  The theme of the panel discussion was entitled: "China's Move to Mass Higher Education: National Policy, Institutional Responses and Civil Society". Topics included "Three Contrasting Cases of Chinese universities in the Expansion to Mass Higher Education" by Prof. Ruth Hayhoe, "China’s Move to Mass Higher Education: The Policy Process" by Prof. Qiang Zha and Jing Lin, "China’s Move to Mass Higher Education and the Growth of Civil Society: Perspectives from College Students" by Dr. Jun Li, "Massification and equality of access in Chinese higher education" by Ji'an Liu and "A Chinese Civil Society in the Making: Perceptions from Chinese University Students" by Yuxin Tu. Most of PPTs presented at the CIES Annual Meeting are downloadable under the title "REPORTS".

 

• March 20, 2008: The fifth plenary project meeting was held after the panel presentations at Teachers College to further discuss project conference and pulications, travel plans to China in May. Prof. Piao Taizhu, our collaborator from Yanbian University, joined in the project meeting as he was also attending the CIES annual meeting in New York.

 

• January 25, 2008: The project team were summoned for the fourth plenary project meeting at the University of Maryland at College Park, after the Symposium on the Contemporary Significance of Confucianism. Led by Prof. Ruth Hayhoe and participated by Prof. Jing Lin, Qiang Zha, Jun Li and Julia Pan, the meeting mainly discussed the renewal of ethics review protocol, the writing plan of the book chapters, the publishing plan, the plan for the second round field work in May of 2008, and the plan for project conference in 2009.

  Prof. Ruth Hayhoe was speaking on the Contemporary Significance of Confucianism, togehter with Prof. Tu Weiming from Harvard, at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Jan. 24, 2008.

• January 24-25, 2008: Prof. Ruth Hayhoe was invited as one of the two keynote speakers, together with Prof. Tu Weiming, to give two refreshing and stimulating speeches on Confucianism in the Lives of Contemporary Chinese Educators and on the East-West Dialogues in Knowledge and Higher Education at the Symposium on the Contemporary Significance of Confucianism: Implications for Harmonious Society, Sustainable Development, and World Peace. The other two keynote speeches were given by Prof. Tu Weiming, an influential figure in the studies of Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture from Harvard University, on a ‘Dialogical Civilization’: The Confucian Analects as an Exemplification and on New Confucianism Reexamined, respectively. Dr. Jing Lin also gave a speech on Scholars as Public Intellectuals at the Symposium, using the empirical data collected by the SSHRC project. The two-day event was hosted and sponsored by the Asian Division of the U.S. Library of Congress and the Confucius Institute of the University of Maryland at College Park. The themes and programs of the Symposium can be found here at the Library of Congress or here at the University of Maryland.

• Dr. Christina Pinna finished her paper recently, entitled "EU-China Relations in Higher Education – The Internationalisation Process and Chinese Higher Education: Building Bridges in Global Cultural Dialogue". The study concludes: "…strengthening academic relations could be seen as building cultural bridges, crucial for a deeper understanding among different partners; projects of cooperations could be seen as valid instruments in pursuing a more equal comparison in the international context. For these reasons, I think, a cooperative project such as the ESCP could be seen as a positive example in pursuing these goals." Click here for details.

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