Memo+30

On March 16th I went to New York City to participate in a reunion for the alumni of Tsinghua University. We had dinner with the president of Tsinghua University, Mr. Gu Binglin. Before the dinner he gave a speech explaining his visit to the US and Tsinghua's preparation for celebrating its 100th anniversary. He first stated that the objective of his visit was to attract talents in American universities to work in Tsinghua. Recently, with the decline of America economy and the universal lay off or salary cut in American companies (and many universities), lots of Chinese who are studying or working in the US are considering going back to China. In the dinner, many participants were very interested about the information on faculty importing policy provided by Mr. Gu. Mr. Gu also introduced the recent situation of Tsinghua. In 2001, the 90th anniversary of Tsinghua, the school set an objective of establishing the first class university in the world by its 100th anniversary. Tsinghua University has been ranked number one in China for many years, thus the position of Tsinghua in the world academia symbolizes the academic level of China. There is remarkable attention concerning the achievements of Tsinghua from the public. Now, two years away from the examination of promise, the school has changed the term from “establish” to “join” the first class universities in the world. Mr. Gu explained that there was a research group in Tsinghua which invented a series of index for measuring a university. They compared Tsinghua with the top 60 universities in the Association of Amerian Universities (AAU) and found that the performance of Tsinghua was above the average of the top 60 in AAU. However, Mr. Gu did admit that the index was not completely convincing, especially given that Chinese are good at fulfilling quantitative index. The change of term reflects the interpretative flexibility of the objective. As the top 1 university in China, to relate itself to the “first class in the world” is somewhat a “political task”, for the aim of propaganda, they should guarantee that this task is fulfilled, even with a loose justification.