REFORMING CHINESE UNIVERSITIES

WHEN QINGSHI ZHU became president of the University of Science & Technology of China in 1998, his goal was simple: to improve the quality of education at the university. And as a distinguished physical chemist who had visited and worked in some of the best universities in the world, he already knew how he wanted to do this. He took a handful of the university’s top brass on a tour of 12 U.S. universities, where they learned about the schools’ curricula and from where they shipped bagfuls of textbooks and other materials back to China. Zhu was to find that improving the quality of education at Chinese universities was much more difficult than he had expected. His mission would take him from his position as head of one of the country’s leading universities to that of president of a tiny, unaccredited university. It would also make him the face of higher education reform in China. ...