On May 17th, at the invitation of the Department of Education, College of Education, Zhejiang University, the former president of CIES, Professor of UCLA Val Rust delivered a lecture titled World Class Universities and Getting Published in the USA in the Tian Jiabing lecture room. The lecture was chaired by Prof. Xueping Wu, Head of Education Department, and more than seventy teachers and students attended the lecture.
 

    Prof. Rust began the lecture by revealing the intensified phenomenon of global university competition, like the rise of international university rankings, cross-border quality assessment and the internationalization of universities. He believed that no country feels it can do without a world class university. However, he said it was difficult to define world class, as well as to deal with the relationship between pursuing world class status and maintaining national tradition.

    On the question of what is a world class university, Prof. Rust thought it is difficult to say. By comparing two international university rankings which were given by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2003) and London Times (2004), he told that different criteria lead to different results. But at the same time, he pointed out that there was a certain similarity about the ranking results. For example, universities like Harvard, Cambridge, and MIT always rank in the top 10, which showed their hard science orientations. Then he talked about country distribution of the rankings. He pointed out that from the perspective of absolute numbers, the US accounted for most of the top 200 universities, but its world's top 200 universities was just 2.2 percent in its total national universities, coming behind the United Kingdom which rated 4.1 percent.

    On the question of how to deal with the relationship between pursuing world class status and maintaining national tradition, he gave the example of unique German traditions Equality among Universities together with French Grande Ecole System to call for the rethinking of the necessity and operability of achieving world class universities, which is hard because of different national higher education development histories and traditions. After that, he mentioned some of the popular methods, such as doing significant research, to attract the best students, hiring star professors, spending a lot of money and giving research projects lots of wriggle room. He furthered this topic with specific illustrations of US and Chinese universities’ internationalization efforts and future development.

    Prof. Rust’s lecture was substantial in content, strongly recommended, and easy to understand, which enriched audience member’s understanding of World Class Universities. After the lecture, Prof. Rust gave some suggestions on getting published in international journals, which gave listeners a lot of useful information.

                                                                                                                            Recorded by Ph.D. student Li Wei May.17th, 2012