Beijing is suffering dog heat of mid-summer recently. But the
climate in Huairou, a county in the suburb of the city, is
comfortable because it is greatly cooled by lavishly planted trees
on the mountains and surrounding lakes. This is the venue for the
Chinese-Foreign University Presidents Forum, held from July 22 to
the end of the month, at which over 100 headmasters and education
experts worldwide gather to exchange views on management of
universities.
Sponsored by the Ministry of Education of People's Republic of
China, the forum is regarded as an important event in the country's
educational field. China is accelerating its pace in education
reform and the Chinese organs of higher learning are eagerly
seeking views and experiences from advanced foreign academia.
Monday's opening saw headmasters from 82 Chinese universities
including the prestigious Peking University, Tshinghua University
and Fudan University, who were shaking hands and talking with the
headmasters from 16 foreign universities including Oxford,
Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford.
Chen Zhili, Chinese minister of education, addressed the opening
ceremony. She said that universities of worldwide are faced with
challenges of the new era, which they have to meet by changing and
reforming themselves. Modern universities should adopt the modern
ways of management and principals are taking the leading role in
this regard. Therefore, headmasters may take advantage of this
opportunity to share information and exchange views.
Minister Chen told the conference that China's educational field is
also facing challenges caused by the country's rapid economic
reform and the entry of WTO. That may be the reason why many
Chinese university principals came to the meeting with a bag of
questions, to which they wanted to find solution from their foreign
colleagues. "It is expected that the Chinese university principals
will back home with some fresh ideas which help improve their
school's management and even the development strategy," she
said.
The 11-day meeting will be devoted to the discussion of several
topics: how to set up the development goals of university, how to
set up the development strategy to meet the changing world, how to
develop a new system of fostering more talents, how to maintain a
legion of high-quality teachers, how to build a more reasonable
mechanism for teaching and scientific studies, and so forth.
(china.org.cn, by staff reporter Feng Shu, July 23, 2002)