A Group of Returnee Scientists Wants to Build a Research University Outside the System — How Will It Actually Be Different?

Westlake University, "Everything about it is rather delicate."

By now people generally accept that whether a university is excellent cannot be separated from the system it runs under. The only disagreement is over which system. Some believe every higher-education system in the world is badly flawed, above all an academic apparatus that chases quantity and makes universities look like "chicken farms."

A chicken farm, of course, cannot be held responsible for excellence. Its only job is to lay eggs in bulk. Others believe America's "first-rate universities" have built a sound system for teaching and research, and that the problem will solve itself the moment China resolves to copy them.

The biologist Shi Yigong and his friends belong to the second camp. They are optimists: they criticize because they believe things can get better, not to vent.

"In universities, which ought to be the most intellectually active and creative places of all, education today is managed with a one-size-fits-all approach that badly obstructs the cultivation of students' creativity." "There is a big difference between universities at home and abroad: abroad, the administration serves scholarship and professors have a strong voice; at home, the administration controls academic affairs far too much."

The man who said these things now hopes to solve the problem through an institution called Westlake University, and his title today is president of Westlake University.

He got there through an election, and the mechanism itself is uncommon. At universities in mainland China, presidents are usually folded into the government's hierarchy of officials, selected and appointed by the state. Westlake University runs a president-responsibility system under the leadership of a board of trustees, and a board that decides whether a president stays or goes is a rare thing here. If anything else looked "distinctive," it was that Shi Yigong was the only candidate.

The election took place on April 16, 2018, when the 21 members of the board met behind closed doors. As for why there was only one candidate, the guess people offered was simple: "No one would run against him."

Unlike the usual applicant for a presidency, Shi Yigong was the one who set the founding of this university in motion, and for the past three years he has been its chief organizer. In 2015, he and six close friends — Chen Shiyi, Pan Jianwei, Rao Yi, Qian Yingyi, Zhang Hui and Wang Jian — submitted a "Proposal on Piloting the Creation of a New Type of Private Research University." Counting Shi Yigong, four of the founders are academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and six have studied or taught in the United States.

Shi Yigong knew from the start that pulling this off meant finding like-minded friends. "They are outstanding scientists, but they have to form a cluster effect," said Cao Cong, a professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and an author of China's Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent, speaking to The New York Times in 2010 about scientists returning to China.

Westlake University describes itself as "a new type of research institute — high-starting-point, small and refined, distinctive." That is not what people traditionally picture when they hear the word university.

Just as unorthodox was the decision to name a university carrying such a heavy mission after West Lake. The lake is beautiful, but as a school name it carries no grandeur. It is also the name of the place the school sits in, Xihu District in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Naming a university after a district is rare; that is normally how primary and secondary schools are named.

In October 2016, the Zhejiang Westlake Institute for Advanced Study was set up first, with four research institutes under it. On February 14, 2018, Westlake University was formally approved by the Ministry of Education.

The closed-door meeting on April 16 was also the founding board's first. Board members were likewise said to have been produced by nomination and election. The chairman, Qian Yingyi, held a faculty post in the United States for 28 years, is dean of Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, and was one of the co-authors of the 2015 proposal.

He handed Shi Yigong his framed certificate of appointment and offered three propositions: "Run the university on institutions and by rules; give the president the widest possible room to run the school; give the faculty the widest possible freedom in scholarship." But Qian Yingyi's tone was modest. He said only that he was "putting three suggestions to the trustees for discussion."

Another trustee, Chen Yueguang, told QDaily by phone that because Westlake University is privately run, it does not have to weigh educational equity the way public universities do. It has one mission only: to pursue excellence and world-class standing. He said it with such certainty that it was easy to believe this really was the urgent thing.

1

At a September 2014 gathering of the Western Returned Scholars Association, also known as the China Overseas-Educated Scholars Association, Shi Yigong gave a speech that became famous.

"When all the elites in this country want to move into finance, I think something has gone badly wrong with this country," he said. Employment, he argued, should never be discussed inside a university.

The speech drew plenty of criticism. Opponents answered that without going all the way through a postdoc it was hard to find a job at all, and that the field with the problem was Professor Shi Yigong's own biology.

The critics disagreed with him, but they did not misread him. One thing in Shi Yigong's thinking about how to run a school is clear: he believes the influence of elites is enormous, and he wants to train a small number of them. From the beginning, Westlake University's public materials said it is "committed to frontier basic science research and the training of doctoral students."

"Elite" here means, specifically, outstanding researchers in the natural sciences. The scientists may hold a strongly scientistic position, but that is not the whole context. The Chinese government has long promoted "rejuvenating the nation through science and education," and talent programs, whether unofficial or official, carry the same bias toward the natural sciences. The Ministry of Education's Cheung Kong Scholars Program, funded by the Li Ka-shing Foundation from 1998, at first declared it would appoint more social scientists; in the end it appointed far more natural scientists than social scientists.

Rao Yi, another of the Westlake reformers, takes a similar view. At one forum he called Hupan University a "money-making training camp." "If in the course of this we don't promote the direction Shi Yigong stands for and hold back the direction Jack Ma stands for, then even after developing to a certain point we'll still crash the car."

The new kind of university Shi Yigong and his colleagues mean to build is modeled on Caltech and Rockefeller University in the United States. Neither is a comprehensive university like Harvard or Princeton, and neither is as well known. But Rockefeller has 24 Nobel laureates among its serving professors, and Caltech, with only about 300 professors, counts 37 alumni who have won 38 Nobel Prizes in its history. The fever for the Nobel Prize started in the 1990s and shows no sign of cooling.

The most influential people in a few disciplines were gathered first, and by good luck all of them had an appetite for reform. Shi Yigong, the neurobiologist Rao Yi, the physicist Pan Jianwei and the physicist Chen Shiyi became the heads of the four research institutes under the Westlake Institute for Advanced Study.

The reformers set out a series of stages in multiples of five: in five years, the research of Westlake University's faculty would be "first-rate in Asia"; in 15 years, it would "match Caltech on every measure and become one of the best universities in the world." Numbers like these have long turned up in government work plans.

But at the board meeting on April 16, no one mentioned the five-year plan or the fifteen-year plan again. Qian Yingyi, the chairman, said he hoped Westlake University would "take the long view, measuring itself in decades and centuries, rather than chasing quick results."

2

After graduating from Tsinghua University in 1989, Shi Yigong left for the United States in 1990, lived there for the next 18 years and took American citizenship. By any measure he was a beneficiary of the American system for science and technology and its grant-review process.

In early 1998 he set up his own independent laboratory at Princeton University. In 2007, at 40, he was made a tenured chaired professor in Princeton's Department of Molecular Biology. His lab there took up a whole floor and had a budget of $2 million a year.

China's Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent, by Denis Fred Simon and Cao Cong explains why first-rate scholars were unwilling to come home. The reasons they gave: China's society of personal connections shapes the research resources a scholar gets after returning; the academic environment at home is wildly irregular; the people who run institutions envy talent. Social scientists also have to worry about tight controls on their research, something natural scientists usually do not run into. Even so, natural scientists sometimes grumble at academic conferences that they wish the internet were more open, since that would help their work.

But scholars living overseas often "contribute to the motherland in other ways," the book's Chinese edition notes. Like migratory birds, they come back at the same time each year to work, run a lab, or teach and supervise students. Rao Yi and Qian Yingyi did exactly this before they moved back for good, in 2007 and 2005 respectively.

Rao Yi announced he was giving up his American citizenship. When the U.S. embassy asked him why, he wrote on a piece of scratch paper that America had lost its moral leadership after 9/11 while Americans remained pleased with themselves.

Since the previous administration, China has shown a steadily stronger determination, and more generosity, in inviting first-rate scientists home and settling their worries. Some of the officials dealing with these scientists may also have shown real nerve for reform. Not every scientist believed what he was told, but some were genuinely moved by feeling for country and home, as their predecessor Ding Wenjiang was 80 years before them.

In 2008, Shi Yigong formally moved back to China. He gave a great many interviews after returning, and they circled around his hometown of Zhumadian, his dead father, and his fierce wish to "work in good health for the country for 30 years." "I felt I could do more after coming back," he said, and "there is still a great deal in China that badly needs improving."

For a while the Shi Yigong of media accounts was extremely busy, apparently responsible for every side of higher-education reform: he planned to recruit 110 to 130 independent lab heads for Tsinghua and raise its research standards; he wanted to overhaul the personnel system and build a tenure-evaluation system in line with international practice. And because universities at home cared more and more about internationalization, most of his duties after he became a vice president of Tsinghua involved receiving foreign visitors, mainly the presidents of overseas universities and the heads of technology companies.

What was left that Shi Yigong could do only as president of a newly created university?

3

After the board elected Shi Yigong president of Westlake University, Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, wrote a commentary suggesting that while he served as president Shi Yigong should give up academic research and put everything into running the school. "That is also what a modern university asks of its president," Xiong Bingqi wrote, and then quoted the view of the former Yale president Richard C. Levin, from his book The Work of the University:

Being a university president is a job that demands full attention, single-minded focus and everything a person has; there is no time and no energy left for anything else. If a university president still has the time and energy to supervise graduate students and produce research results, that runs flatly against the president's own work, and nothing comes of it but running oneself ragged with no clear sense of what the job is.

Shi Yigong had a choice to make. Soon after he came home, in an interview with Southern People Weekly, he was asked which he valued more — power, responsibility or personal freedom — and answered: "In China, a good politician has more impact on the country than a scientist does. But over the long run, and across a wider geography, the impact of a truly good scientist lasts far longer than a politician's — Newton, for instance, or Einstein."

Westlake University has not made much of "de-administratization," even though the slogan has a special pull in the reform of Chinese higher education. It set up a Chinese Communist Party committee for the university straight away, and the party secretary will take part in decisions on the university's major affairs. On the Westlake Institute for Advanced Study's website, "Party and Mass Affairs" also sits in a prominent spot.

As for the board, the highest decision-making body, its 21 members include government representatives: Dong Qingyuan, deputy director of the Zhijiang Management Committee in Xihu District, and Guo Heyang, director of the Hangzhou Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.

Interviewed by QDaily in early April this year, Cao Cong said: "They hope to make something different outside the system. But the question is exactly how they will be different."

"Everything about it is rather delicate," Cao Cong said. He was not sure either whether Shi Yigong and Rao Yi intended to stop doing research at Westlake University and "just do a good job of running a university."

4

Two examples come up again and again in discussions of Chinese university reform.

One is the Southern University of Science and Technology. When it appointed Zhu Qingshi as its first president in 2009, it too meant to "rapidly build an internationalized, high-level research university" and "explore innovative models for training talent."

On June 22, 2011, Southern Weekly published, with permission, an article titled "Reform, Not Slogans." Its authors were three Hong Kong University of Science and Technology professors — Li Xiaoyuan, Li Zexiang and Li Jianshu — who had been invited to help set the new university up and were now preparing to end their collaboration with president Zhu Qingshi. In the article they argued for telling the difference between slogans meant to grab attention and a workable university system.

"Building a modern research university is already a systems project complex and challenging enough on its own. Under any system, a project like this is beyond any one person alone, whatever halo that person wears," they also warned.

The second is the "Peking University reform" led in 2003 by Zhang Weiying, an economics professor who had graduated from Oxford. It aimed mainly at how PKU hired and promoted its faculty, and included an American-style tenure-track promotion system and reserving at least half of all posts for candidates recruited from abroad. PKU faculty were expected to be able to teach in English.

The reform drew heavy fire inside and outside PKU. Opponents charged that reforming Peking University this way would turn it into "a prep school for American universities for all time." The administration later tried to narrow and revise the proposal, but it was never carried through. Xu Zhihong, PKU's president at the time, later said on CCTV's "Dialogue" program that, as a scientist, he had never believed in radical change.

Whether Westlake University can steer around the mines its predecessors stepped on is far too early to judge. But it does not appear to threaten anyone's interests, and it has an "advantage" the earlier reformers lacked.

Inside Tsinghua, no one has heard of Shi Yigong having determined opponents. The official account is that he was invited back by Chen Xi, then Tsinghua's party secretary, when he returned in May 2006 for the annual meeting of the Chinese Biophysical Society.

Closeness to the top leadership is one such "advantage." In May 2008, Shi Yigong and Rao Yi were invited to Zhongnanhai to discuss the future of Chinese science and technology with then Vice President Xi Jinping and other senior officials. Days before that meeting, the two had published an article in Guangming Daily titled "Building World-Class Universities Is a Necessary Precondition for China's Full Rise."

That discussion is regarded as the origin of the Thousand Talents Plan. The state launched the plan to deal with the loss of talent and to draw people back — usually experts and scholars holding professor-level posts at well-known foreign universities and research institutes, along with entrepreneurs and business people, most of them with doctorates earned abroad. But some critics believe it sharpened the friction between scholars trained overseas and scholars trained at home.

"I think if the Thousand Talents Plan hadn't come out then, or if it had come out under another name, there would have been much less friction," Cao Cong told QDaily.

The friction was there before that. In his first year home, Shi Yigong failed to be elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. That same year, some questioned whether his application to the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (foreign-national category) followed the rules, and whether he was really working in China full time. Some scientists said in public that these returnee scientists could not be trusted, that they might well be spies.

They soon got out of that awkward spot. The Thousand Talents Plan went through smoothly. Shi Yigong was elected an academician and became a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; Pan Jianwei and Qian Yingyi are members of it too.

A person with knowledge of the matter told QDaily that the 2015 "Proposal on Piloting the Creation of a New Type of Private Research University" was handed directly to Xi Jinping, which is why things moved so quickly and so smoothly.

Less than two months after the proposal went in, in June 2015, the "returnee scientists' club" — the national Thousand Talents Plan Experts Association — signed a "Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement on Preparing to Establish Westlake University" with the Hangzhou municipal government.

5

Some scholars think that to judge whether founding "Westlake University" is a high-flown slogan detached from reality or an education and research reform worth waiting for, all you have to do is watch how much it is given.

The Westlake Education Foundation is Westlake University's sponsoring body and the main vehicle for raising its endowment. Set up four months after the proposal was submitted — the first piece to be put in place — it is responsible for raising most of the university's funding and will carry its operating costs, including all faculty salaries and benefits, pensions, and a support program for faculty children's education.

Most of the founding donors are Chinese private entrepreneurs: Pony Ma, chairman and chief executive of Tencent, for instance, and Wang Donghui, chairman of Beijing Teamsun Technology. Several of them are also state-designated Thousand Talents Plan experts.

The government has supplied some support as well. The 100,000-square-meter Yunqi campus that the Westlake Institute for Advanced Study opened last March was provided by the Xihu District government in Hangzhou, and the first 400 million yuan of research funding came from the Hangzhou municipal and Xihu District governments.

But the Westlake Education Foundation is not yet willing to say how much it has raised. The figures that come through unofficial channels do not agree. In early April, a person close to Westlake University told QDaily that as he understood it the foundation had raised only 1 billion yuan. By mid-April, a report in The Intellectual put the total at 2.5 billion yuan. Rao Yi, one of Westlake University's founders, is that outlet's editor-in-chief, and it is one of the few unofficial channels through which news of the university appears.

People have already pointed out that in frontier science 2.5 billion yuan does not go far at all. "In practice, 2.5 billion yuan is only enough to hire 15 top-tier professors for five years." If the money also has to cover building the campus and buying equipment, it goes even less far.

They can still win competitive funding through research projects and grant applications, or get state money through talent-recruitment policies like the Thousand Talents Plan. For a research institution the rough rule is that better research brings more money, and more money brings better research.

The same source also said that Westlake University's founders had a thought like this at the outset: "If these students no longer need to go abroad to study, or if the odds of them going abroad drop, that shows our school really has become world-class."

Westlake University may want to push reform in education and research, but it also wants to give returning researchers an academic environment more or less like the one they had at universities abroad.

Shi Yigong wrote on the Westlake Institute for Advanced Study's website: "The Zhejiang Westlake Institute for Advanced Study is an institute that carries the dreams of the 3 million students who went abroad after reform and opening-up and the 1.4 million people of talent who have returned."

That makes this new private university look like part of the state's plan to stop losing its talent. Perhaps what these scientists back from overseas most want to happen is this: that after all the effort, researchers can stay in China and forget about America.

Cover image by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash. The long banner image shows Ding Wenjiang, from the Jiangsu Geological Society.