中国教育

The Modern Research University:Intellectual Innovator and Cultural Bridge

Beijing Forum

Keynote Address As Prepared for Presentation
By President Hunter

November 16, 2005

It is a great honor to be present in the Great Hall of the People to address this second annual Beijing Forum. I want to thank Peking University for hosting this event, under the auspices of the Beijing Municipal Government. I want to thank Peking University and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies for serving as the event’s co-sponsors, and I want to thank President Xu Zhihong and Vice President Hao Ping for their roles in organizing and hosting the forum.

It is a measure of the stature that the Beijing Forum has achieved in its brief history that this year the forum has attracted such a distinguished international roster of participants, including from my own country, former President George H. W. Bush and former Ambassador Joseph Verner Reed, who is now Under-Secretary-General of the U.N.

I am particularly pleased to be speaking here today because Cornell University has long enjoyed strong ties with China and especially with Peking University, which in the early years of the 20th century was the intellectual home of one of Cornell’s most illustrious graduates, Hu Shih. Cornell is where Hu Shih earned his undergraduate degree in 1914, and where the Chinese literary renaissance, led by Hu Shih, was born. Within the span of only three or four years, that literary movement replaced the classical Chinese literary language with the living language -- the bei hua -- in all kinds of writing, forming a major theme of the New Culture Movement, and leading up to the Enlightenment of the May Fourth Era. In so doing, it made literature and learning accessible to large numbers of the Chinese people for the first time and positioned China to play a more prominent role on the world stage.

On the occasion of Hu Shih’s 25th Cornell reunion, in 1939, Cornell passed a resolution in his honor. Signed by the university’s president, Edmund Ezra Day, and by the president of Dr. Hu’s Cornell class, it read in part:

Master alike of the ancient wisdom of his native East and of the critical methods of Western scholars, he has led the way to the accomplishment within a single generation of a revival of learning in China. His plan for applying modern critical principles to the study of his country’s heritage of philosophy and poetry, and at the same time cultivating the spoken language of the Chinese instead of perpetuating an archaic idiom, has unlocked a treasure and created a new literature.

Today, 43 years after his death, Hu Shih remains one of Cornell’s most distinguished graduates. His contributions to literature and philosophy and on the world stage are memorialized at Cornell through the Hu Shih Professorship of Chinese History, which is currently held by Professor Sherman Cochran.

My thesis today is that there are many parallels between the China that Hu Shih knew in the first years of the 20th century, and the China that is emerging in the first years of the 21st century. In both eras, an aspiration for modernity and a desire for economic growth provided a strong impetus for building closer ties with the West. In both eras, Chinese intellectuals perceived higher education as a way to develop the talents needed to realize national goals.

But there is also a crucial difference, which I believe makes current collaborative endeavors between China and the West, and especially between Chinese universities and American universities, likely to produce even more transformative and long-lasting results. In Hu Shih’s day, to a considerable extent, the flow of knowledge was perceived to be in one direction, from West to East. Today, I believe, there is much more mutuality in the relationship, especially because of China’s achievements in the “Reform and Opening” era of the past quarter-century. We have discovered what we should have known all along: that both sides have much to teach and much to learn from each other.
Just as in Hu Shih’s day, much of the current interest in closer collaboration between China and the West revolves around science and technology – fields that are economic drivers and that confer political power. But I want to argue that there is also much to be gained from closer collaboration between China and the West in the humanities and the social sciences. These are the areas in which Hu Shih made his primary contribution in the early years of the 20th century and which contributed significantly to the transformation of China from a self-contained society into a nation able to command attention on the international stage.

The humanities and social sciences remain essential today because they help us understand the languages and cultures of the world and their interaction with each other. And, I want to argue further that today, just as in Hu Shih’s era, universities have major roles to play in creating “The Harmony and Prosperity of the Civilizations” that we all desire and that is the broad theme of this year’s Beijing Forum.

In order to highlight this theme, let me return to the extraordinary education and intellectual development of Hu Shih. Hu Shih came to Cornell in 1910, at the age of 19. He initially enrolled in Cornell’s College of Agriculture, believing that he had the responsibility to learn something immediately useful. He struggled with subjects like botany and pomology for two years, with mediocre results. Then in 1912, he transferred to Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences to major in philosophy. Finding his true intellectual home in the humanities, Hu Shih became a student of great distinction. He won major literary prizes for his essays, and he was elected to America’s most distinguished undergraduate honor society for liberal arts students, Phi Beta Kappa.

Years later, Dr. Hu described his conversion to humanistic studies this way:

When I first arrived in this country, plowing and sowing were my ambition. Literature was an insignificant skill, useless to the cause of national salvation. One by one I gave away the many books I had brought with me. Often I dreamed of planting vegetables and trees. Time passed, and suddenly I smiled at my own foolishness. Many things are necessary for the salvation of the nation, and which of them ought not be undertaken? But I am by nature suited for only one or two things. He who rebels against nature and denies his own endowments will accomplish little. From that time forward I changed my occupation, and again argued points of scholarship and politics…. In order to solve the difficulties of the times, study must be appropriate to the times. Who at present can question the appropriateness of an age of flourishing literature?

I want to emphasize Hu Shih’s last point very strongly: He highlighted the need to be true to your own nature as well as the deep significance of literary and philosophical studies.

Hu Shih appreciated the influence that American education exerted on more scientific-minded Chinese students. In his lecture on “Intellectual Life, Past and Present,” given during his term as Haskell Lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1933, Dr. Hu wrote:

The thorough training they received abroad enabled them, on their return to China, to become leaders of the new sciences, builders of modern laboratories, and founders of new institutes of scientific research. The Science Society of China, which now has a membership of a thousand, was founded in 1914 by a group of undergraduate students at Cornell University, and the first scientific monthly, the organ of that society, was edited in the rooms of one of the private boarding houses in Ithaca, NY…. And one of the founders of the national Academia Sinica, the most comprehensive organization for corporate research with nine research institutes, was Mr. Yang Chuan, a graduate of Cornell.”

Yet Hu Shih’s own contribution to China’s advance, by literally opening literature and learning to the masses, has turned out to be even more far-reaching. In 1915, while still at Cornell and beginning his graduate work, Hu Shih and some of his fellow Chinese students took up the cause of reforming the Chinese language, but their initial articles on the subject produced little response.

Although his Chinese friends in American were skeptical of his efforts, the idea struck a chord in China, and within three or four years, with the advocacy of students at Peking University, the move toward adopting bei hua had ushered in what is commonly described as the Chinese literary renaissance.

Looking back on that time, Dr. Hu observed:

The Renaissance movement of the last two decades differs from all the early movements in being a fully conscious and studied movement. Its leaders know what they want, and they know what they must destroy in order to achieve what they want. They want a new language, a new literature, a new outlook on life and society, and a new scholarship. They want a new language, not only as an effective instrumentality for popular education, but also as the effective medium for the development of the literature of a new China. They want a literature that shall be written in the living tongue of a living people and shall be capable of expressing the real feelings, thoughts, inspirations, and aspirations of a growing nation. They want to instill into the people a new outlook on life which shall free them from the shackles of tradition and make them feel at home in the new world and its new civilization.

Today, China is again experiencing a new awakening, which is playing out in the realm of economic expansion and educational, scientific and technological investment. Here in Beijing, which is gearing up for the 2008 Olympics, and throughout China, the signs of development are hard to miss. By some estimates, China is likely to be the world’s largest economy, surpassing that of the U.S. by 2050.

Today, as in Hu Shih’s day, higher education is playing a significant role in China’s aspirations for the future, and the scale of the endeavor has expanded exponentially. In 1910, Hu Shih was one of 70 Chinese students to come to the United States on a scholarship. Today approximately 20,000 Chinese students enter American colleges and universities each year.

China is investing heavily in its own colleges and universities, striving for both excellence and access. In the 1980s, only 2-3 percent of Chinese school-leavers went on to a university. In 2003, the figure was 17 percent. The watershed year was 1999, when university enrollment jumped by half. And the number of new doctoral students jumped from 14,500 to 48,700 in just five years between 1998 and 2003. This great expansion of higher education in China is ushering in a second Chinese Renaissance.

I believe that China, as it moves forward to claim its place in the knowledge economy, can benefit from the experiences of other nations and that it can also provide perspectives that will be valuable elsewhere, including at universities in the United States. Earlier this fall, The Economist, a British publication, carried a special survey on what it termed “The Brains Business.” It posed the following dilemma for policy makers seeking to increase the ability of their countries to participate in the global knowledge economy: “The problem for policymakers is how to create a system of higher education that balances the twin demands of excellence and mass access, that makes room for global elite universities while also catering for large numbers of average students, that exploits the opportunities provided by new technology while also recognizing that education requires a human touch.” And it cited American universities as having come the closest to getting the balance right.

What is it about American universities that has produced such global leadership? And what lessons might they hold for China’s own aspirations?

One of the key attributes of America’s “system” of higher education is that it is really not a system at all. It includes many different types of institutions, funded from many different sources. It includes some 2,300 four-year colleges and universities, and more than 1,800 two-year institutions. Of those 4,100 colleges and universities, only perhaps 100 qualify as “research universities.” And among those 100 research universities an even smaller subset of universities – including Cornell, some of its counterparts in the Ivy League, and a few distinguished public institutions like the Universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin – have reputations and reach that are truly global. Nonetheless, even the less well-known American universities offer the means of education and the promise of social and economic mobility to their students.

As The Economist noted approvingly, “America does not have a central plan for its universities. It does not treat its academics as civil servants, as do France and Germany. Instead universities have a wide range of patrons, from state governments to religious bodies, from fee-paying students to generous philanthropists.”

My own university was established in 1865 through a combination of public and private funds. Its namesake, Ezra Cornell, provided a founding endowment gift of $500,000, which in 1865 was a very significant sum, and private philanthropy continues to be very important to the university’s financial health today. Cornell also receives funding from both the state and federal government, and, in fact, operates four colleges on our main campus under contract with the State of New York. It also derives support from business and industry through an array of cooperative arrangements and licensing agreements.

Its large and diverse system of higher education gives the United States one of the highest college participation rates in the world. About a third of college-aged people in the United States earn college degrees, and a third of those college graduates go on for advanced degrees. In addition, American higher education has turned out to be particularly welcoming to women students, to students from minority groups and low-income backgrounds, and to students who are older, who are already in the workforce or raising families, or who need to pursue their studies part-time.

A second characteristic of America’s universities is that they generally embrace a wide range of studies, ranging from the theoretical to very applied and immediately useful fields. Cornell University, in the second half of the 19th century, pioneered this approach to knowledge by intentionally including in its curriculum both traditional classical studies and applied disciplines like agriculture, modern languages and literature, and science and engineering. Cornell’s universality in its approach to knowledge earned it the distinction of being called the first truly American university. It was that mix of disciplines that allowed Hu Shih to make such a radical transition from agriculture to philosophy, literature and public policy, with such remarkable results.

Cornell remains today a university with a strong commitment to the arts, the humanities and the social sciences, and also a university that is at the forefront of knowledge in such high technology fields as nanoscience, computing and information science, and the broad spectrum of fields in the new life sciences that are exploiting the promise of the genomics revolution. The model it pioneered 140 years ago has now been widely adopted elsewhere.

A third quality of world-class higher education in America is its emphasis not simply on learning a body of material, but also on developing critical thinking skills. That is why the best universities emphasize research, along with teaching, and why even in the age of the Internet and distance learning technologies, which are very useful in conveying information, it remains important to maintain a “community of scholars,” who are able pose questions and challenge assumptions in order to move knowledge forward.

A tremendous amount of “give-and-take” occurs between professors and students in the best American classrooms. In university research laboratories there is an emphasis on challenging the conventional wisdom, looking for the unusual insight, and taking intellectual risks. This approach to learning is sometimes difficult for students who received their initial training in more passive learning environments, where it is considered bad form to draw undue attention to oneself, and yet it has produced world-changing results.

In its commitment to build one of the world’s great systems of higher education, China can learn from the approaches and experiences that have been successful in higher education elsewhere. But knowledge exchange is a two-way street, and I believe there is much that other nations can learn from China.

China already graduates far more engineers at the undergraduate level, for example, than does the United States. In the year 2000, China graduated approximately 300,000 engineers, compared to less than 100,000 engineering and computer science graduates that year in the United States. It is quite possible that the United States could learn from China’s experience in its own attempts to increase the number of students, and especially of women and members of minority groups, in science and engineering fields.

America also has much to learn from China in other areas. Last year, for example, Cornell government professor Allen Carlson, one of the leading experts in Chinese foreign policy and Asian security, was at Peking University’s School of International Studies as a Fulbright Hays Fellow to deepen his knowledge and to learn from his Chinese colleagues. His time in Beijing helped inform his soon-to-be released book, Unifying China, Integrating with the World, and it is also enriching the courses he teaches at Cornell on China’s foreign relations, Asian security, Chinese nationalism, globalization and international relations theory.

In describing the earlier Chinese renaissance that he did so much to bring about, Hu Shih observed, “Contact with strange civilizations brings new standards of value with which the native culture is re-examined and re-evaluated, and conscious reformation and regeneration are the natural outcome of such transvaluation of values.” That remains true today, for America as much as for China.

Americans are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages, and we tend to be ignorant of the traditions of other countries where we now do business. At present Chinese students know much more about America than American students know about China. We have much to learn from China and that is precisely why I am here leading a Cornell University delegation to Beijing and Shanghai. Cornell University, as strong and respected as it is among the world’s global research universities, needs to learn about Chinese culture, history, language, and values, and about how China views its place in the world.
Yesterday, at Peking University, I signed an agreement on behalf of Cornell with President Xu Zhihong that will enable Cornell University students to spend a semester at Peking University, taking regular classes along with Chinese students as part of Cornell’s new China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program. This new undergraduate major at Cornell combines intensive language study with courses on Chinese history, government and foreign policy, and it provides opportunities to study and work with China experts in both Washington, D.C. and here in Beijing. We look forward to expanding our partnership in ways that will enable Peking University to make full use of Cornell’s intellectual resources – an objective that will require a serious investment in bilingual teaching materials to make exchanges happen in a serious, rigorous and language-based way.

Tomorrow, at Tsinghua University, I will be meeting with President Gu Binglin and helping to launch a scientific collaboration between Tsinghua and Cornell, with workshops on information science and computer engineering that will involve faculty experts from both universities. Cornell’s partnership with Tsinghua strengthens research and teaching in engineering and related fields, broadening the international experiences of faculty and students in both institutions. President Gu visited Cornell in August 2005 to consult with Cornell faculty members and to present a talk on higher education in China, which was of great interest to scholars and students at Cornell. We look forward to a growing partnership that will benefit both universities.

Cornell is also part of a consortium of universities and scientific academies, from both China and the United States, that is developing recirculating aquaculture technology for fish farming, and our faculty members have active collaborations with Chinese universities in several other areas ranging from genetically engineered rice to the study of China’s emerging free enterprise economy.

A key feature of all these partnerships is that we expect the flow of information and the benefits of collaboration to flow in both directions. I see ahead many more opportunities for collaboration, in science and technology and also in cultural studies, resource studies, and in studies of history and government.

There is already underway a major effort involving the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive and the U.S. State Department's Historians Office to translate declassified documents from the archives of both countries that shed light on the Chinese-American rapprochement and the process leading to President Nixon's visit to China in 1972. The documents will be edited and published in both languages.

A second joint project, between the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., involves translating and publishing declassified Chinese documents on the Geneva Conference of 1954, where China made its “diplomatic debut” on the international scene. A workshop on the Geneva Conference is scheduled for Washington, D.C. in late February 2006.

These two projects are important not only because of their scholarly value but also because they demonstrate China’s growing willingness to participate in two-way exchanges across multiple fields. I am pleased that Cornell faculty members have played an important role in helping shape both these projects.

I believe that a pattern of two-way exchange of information and people is in the best interests of Chinese universities and American universities. And in a larger sense, it is also in the interests of promoting peace, prosperity and harmony in an increasingly interconnected world.

Those Western universities that aspire to be members of the “super-league” of global universities will have much to teach and much to learn from the current renaissance that is occurring here in China. Like Hu Shih, who developed his optimistic view of the world while a student in America, I am optimistic about the prospects that greater cooperation hold for China, for the United States and for the great universities of an ever more interconnected world.