Educating the Pearl Sea
This is a picture from my window of the student dorms (the completed buildings) and continuing construction at the Beijing Normal University Zhuhai campus.
The whole idea is kind of amazing to me.
In Zhuhai, there’s a branch of BNU that’s about 8 times bigger than the one in Beijing, a huge campus set aside for Beijing’s Li Gong university (unfortunately they’re short of money, so there’s a ghost town of half-finished buildings), a beautiful branch of Guangzhou’s Zhongshan/Sun Yatsen university, a Peking University Science High School, and a number of others.
The campus of BNU-Zhuhai is quite attractive, although this picture really doesn’t do it justice. I meant to take some more pictures, but this is the view from my room. There is a different feeling, too, noticeable in the newer looking bikes that are much more casually locked than in Beijing. The campus and school are very much under construction, and the general shortage of faculty and trained people is really exacerbated here. Most of the faculty seem to be short-term visitors from BNU or retired faculty. My sense is that they haven’t yet found their voice—- what it is about them that will make them unique. I was also a bit surprised, given the high tech nature of China and in particular this area of China, that they hadn’t set up satellite conferencing or other information technology to try to bridge the distance between them and their home campus.
It’s really an audacious enterprise, and one I hope to follow. When I first came to Illinois, I read an interesting book about the school’s history and that of Land Grant schools in general. Two nuggets from the book (whose name I forgot) are 1) initially it was unclear whether they would give degrees or not. The idea was that these would be places where students would come and learn something useful and then go back to the farm or factory and practice it, rather than getting a degree that would cause them to leave their previous life. 2) The first faculty member to get a patent was fired because of it, because people felt it was wrong to patent the results of state-supported research. Things have changed a bit sense then, but the point is that UIUC had a mission that shaped its early years, and the U of I at Chicago has a mission that differs from ours and informs what it tries to do. In practice it may be hard to distinguish the schools, but I think having a mission is important, particularly in the early years of an institution. I’m not sure what BNU-Zhuhai’s mission is, but it’s in a very interesting place and I’ll be curious to see what it turns into.