Rising at 3.30am, it was clearly going to be a tough day.
With perhaps 900 people waiting at the airport hotel to get on the next flight to Lhasa, it was decided that we should hire our own buses to get us to check-in in advance. An effective tactic considering the mayhem that ensued. However, Linda's competence shone through and we bundled ourselves into the departure lounge.
As we approached Tibet, isolated peaks of the Himalayas poked through the landscape of puffy cloud. "Stupid mountain," said Simona, and was told to apologise. Don't mess with the mountains.
The aircraft touched down to a surreal smell of fish and the sound of 'Rule Brittania' played over the PA system. The air palpably but not uncomfortably thinner, we were met by the guide, Samuel and driven the 90 km to Lhasa itself.
Despite a hairy moment squeezing the bus into a three metre opening into the fenced off street the journay was uneventful. This being an acclimatisation day, we were told to rest. This did not stop Simona, who insisted on taking a browse around the markets. Already my head was beginning to ache and I was only too glad to lie down again. She didn't buy anything/
Thank heaven for the aeroplane. Jet travel has made the world a smaller place; in the last few decades it has brought nations and people closer together than ever before.
Just a shame it's still subject to the occasional balls up.
For a few blissful hours all was going smoothly. We arrived at Chengdu relatively on time with a fairly narrow but comfortable margin with with to catch the connecting flight. On arriving at the check-in we found a short girl with a board embellished with the tour company's logo, enabling us to meet up with the rest of the group. So far so good.
Upon reaching the front of the queue, on the other hand, we were told that the flight had been cancelled. "Sandstorms in Lhasa," sighed the airline staff. Inexplicably the tour company representative had known this all along but chose not to inform us.
After a couple of hours of negotiation and counter negotation, one of the group emerged as a leader (Linda, herself in the travel business). We ditched the board girl and eventually were taken to a shabby airport hotel complete with honeymoon suite, or at least a bed with a wooden heart above the pillows.
Here we remained, day one of the holiday down the squatee.
Every important question should be tackled from two sides. I have two perspectives on internationalisation: one as a foreigner teaching abroad; the other as a former student of an internationalising university.
And, as always, there are two sides to the answer, both positive and negative.
To cut a long story short, while I was a student at Oxford, my college ran into financial problems. The college (Pembroke) had spent GBP 3,000,000 on a new hall of residence (dormitory building) but had unwisely chosen to construct it on contaminated ground.
The building was worthless; the accounts no longer balanced. So the college turned to America.
When I first started at the college in 1993, there were a handful of carefully selected foreign students, perhaps three out of 100 freshmen. All were highly successful students; for example, one of them, Michelle Peluso, is now CEO of Travelocity, a major international dot com company.
However, bringing in 30 US students, as the college did in 1995, was not a great success. It certainly brought in a large cash injection, but the students failed to integrate with the college. They did not perform as well at their studies and were unable or unwilling to socialise with the other students.
Finally, their frustrations boiled over and they made their point by badly damaging a dormitory common room.
While this may be an isolated case, I make the example to illustrate the idea that too much internationalisation is not necessarily a good thing. Having 3% foreign students worked well academically; 30% did not.
In the UK, internationalisation is on the increase. It's estimated that there are over 125,000 foreign students in the UK now and of these 32,000 are Chinese.
That's twice as many as students as from the US (a rich, English speaking nation with close ties to the UK) and three times more than the Indians (the only country with a population comparable to China, but with far more tangible historical links to Britain and widespread English language).
British universities are certainly benefiting to the tune of GBP 875 million per year; GBP 250 million from the Chinese. Foreign students altogether provide 26.2% of UK universities' income.
This is set to increase even more dramatically in the next few years. (However, wiith tight visa restrictions after 11 September, US universities are actually decreasing the number of foreign students they take.)
So the financial gains are obvious, but what of the students themselves? The Guardian and The Independent newspapers have recently filed reports on foreign students in the UK and they make interesting reading.
(see The Guardian for general articles, some on Chinese students, and also The Independent)
Its certainly beneficial for students to live and learn from different cultures; it's also beneficial for the 'home' students to meet and likewise learn from them. It certainly improves language skills. But styles of education are vastly different, and some might say incompatible.
It's well known among Chinese students that in other countries 'critical thinking' is more highly valued. There's less emphasis on learning knowledge and more on analysis and thinking skills.
I hope the JUP students will forgive me for saying this, but there is not one of them who would be able to cope linguistically or academically with the one-on-one tutorial system used at Oxford and Cambridge.
However, not all UK universities are Oxford or Cambridge. Whereas some of them do offer world-class teaching and research support, others do not.
At worst British universities are regarded as playgrounds; there can be minimal academic pressure. I know people who have obtained UK degrees with almost no effort at all, and who have subsequently turned out to have no knowledge either. Is this really value for money for a foreign student?
On the other hand, Western perceptions of Asian education are not favourable either. Westerners see Asian schools as places for 'rote-learning' and memorising vast quantities of information with little obvious benefit.
It's believed that just repeating back information without critical thinking is not really learning at all. The Western perception is that learning means understanding and that is something that few foreign teachers are confident occurs in Asian education.
When students have to learn so much to get that all-important grade, are they really learning or will they forget it the next day?
Thus, for universities like SHUFE to attract foreign students, it might have to undergo a vigorous marketing and public relations effort to assuage these fears.
Asian teaching methods are simply not attractive to foreign students. Few foreign students are going to want to sit in Chinese classes and learn the contents of textbooks and lectures. They expect to have input into their education. And the PR campaign may need to be done side-by-side with some fundamental reforms of the education system as a whole.
In my view, a true education lies somewhere in between the Western and the Asian systems; a combination of critical thinking and understanding with the teaching of real knowledge. Its also important for universities not to regard foreign students as 'easy money' but to ensure that they are provided with a valuable and appropriate education and 'cultural experience'.
To conclude, for further internationalisation to take place, there has to be compromise. I would point to my former journalism college in Cardiff where courses specifically designed for foreign students (eg MA International Journalism) have proved very effective.
Academic life must also be balanced with cultural life, and it is the responsibility of universities to ensure that foreign students are able to integrate with home students so as to gain in their cultural experience too.
Universities everywhere should avoid the temptation to take huge numbers of foreign students just to make money. They must also adjust their academic programmes to be international too, so as to provide the best they can offer in a format that foreign students can actually benefit from.
Philip Sen
Pembroke College, Oxford University 1993-1996
Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff University 1999-2000
Foreign Expert, SHUFE, 2003-2004
Written on request of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics for paper on 'Internationalisation'
Dear Jean,
On behalf of the group, I'm writing to request a meeting with all respected members present to provide clarification and answer questions related to the so-called "Mid-Term Teaching Evaluation" Memo dated April 21, 2004. At this meeting, could a copy of "school regulations [on] evaluation of teaching" which we have never received be presented to prepare ourselves appropriately for such an evaluation.
In the Western university, it is customary for the so-called "evaluator" to introduce himself or herself and have a working relationship with the person being evaluated prior to the time of evaluation. As such, we request an opportunity to meet our "supervisor" at this meeting as many of us have never met this person in accordance with professional and respectful practice.
Thank you for taking the time to meet our request.
Sincerely,
So-called "foreign experts"
Is it normal to be assessed with a week's notice on your teaching skills even if literally the only instruction and guidance you have ever received has been a timetable of when you are supposed to teach? (This itself was only acquired after I made a special request).
Just asking, any thoughts out there very welcome.
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Both have a somewhat crazed look in their eyes but I assure you that the dog is merely playacting. The milky fluid dripping from the knife is in fact dishwater.
Click on the pictures to enlarge.
Publication of my article on Qufu in That's Shanghai and That's Beijing. Click on the links to view.
Curiously, the feature appears almost exactly as I wrote it in That's Beijing, but has clearly been edited in That's Shanghai. This is true of the online version at least .
I'm particularly pleased with the high res scan on the pictures though: click on the photo here to enlarge.