From October 28 to November 26, 2018, Professor Wu De, Vice President of our University, participated in the the 13th Workshop of “Overseas Training Program for 1000 Presidents of Central and Western Universities”, which is organized by the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Affairs Office of the Ministry of Education, and funded by the Lee Shau Kee Foundation and Peihua Education Foundation. The program is divided into three parts: domestic pre-training, training abroad, and summary after returning. The theme of the training is “Construction of Double First-class Colleges and Universities”.
Wu De visited 13 universities in the Boston and Chicago areas, including 8 private universities: Harvard University, Tufts University, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Dominic University, and three public universities: University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Illinois-Champaign, and a community college: Elgin Community College, basically covers different levels and types of universities in the United States. He also visited the New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC), Confucius Institute of Tufts University, McGovern Brain Science Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and other research and service institutions.
Wu De attended 70 seminars in total, and more than 100 heads of colleges and universities, experts, scholars, government officials, heads of industry association, and student representatives of the United States introduced the situation. Among them, there were 9 lectures on the development of higher education in different regions of the United States, 9 on “University Governance and First-class Undergraduate Education”, and 27 on “Research, Discipline, and Student Management Services”, 7 on “University Resource Allocation”, 7 on “Teacher Training” and “Evaluation System” Construction.
Through the training, Wu De said, he has a comprehensive understanding of the differentiated development of the first-class universities in the United States and the characteristics of different levels of universities, and is aware that the governance of first-class universities is embodied in the precision of top-level design, the rigor of management, the independence of college development, and the intersection of discipline construction. He realizes that the core of the first-class undergraduate education in the United States lies in the perfect teaching system, innovative teaching methods and strict teaching evaluation, and deeply realizes the importance of high-efficiency allocation of resources and high-quality service management in the first-class universities.
