Goals

KGSM Student Radio » Aural Fixation

“Mr. Boone, you are asked to join Professor Kwok, along with Professor Holbrook, Professor Joyce Pfaff and her Husband, and Pat and Bill this evening at 6:30 PM. Please meet them here at 6:20 to take a bus to the restaurant.” I looked up upon hearing my name—I was reading outside of the library on this particularly beautiful day, waiting for Cynthia to go to lunch—to see Jasmine standing just left of center in front of me, “Please invite Cynthia as well.” The whole scene felt like it was out of a movie where the protagonist hallucinates people who tell him to go to certain places for meetings with other hallucinations that convince him to inadvertently do awful things; I felt like I was the protagonist in that movie and this imaginary person was tricking me into going somewhere where I would spend all of my money on a really expensive dinner for 8 that I would end up eating myself. This hallucinatory feeling was made even stronger by the fact that the sun was at a perfect angle to perfectly silhouette her face, making any attempt at seeing her blindingly impossible. Once I got over the surreal effect of feeling like I was in some kind of movie I realized how much of an honor it really is to be singled out for a dinner with the president of the college, and felt, once again, like a celebrity.

Six weeks into my time here I still feel very much like a celebrity. There have been a number of odd occurences that have transpired in the last few weeks that reinforce the notion that a tall American guy my age is a rare sight around here. As an example of what I mean by this: I was out buying some things I needed a few days ago and as I was walking back to my dorm a group of high school aged kids stopped me outside of a restaurant and asked me to help them with something. I saw a camera and assumed they wanted my picture, because most of the time that’s all it is. It is still a little odd having people randomly asking for my picture around here but that is not what these kids were after. Their request was actually pretty simple they wanted me to stand there and stare at one of the girls in their group for two minutes while they recorded it on the camera. It had to have been the longest two minutes of my life. Though I can understand why they wanted a video of the only American they’ve ever seen, why they would just have me stand there, motionless, emotionless, and expressionless, is still a total mystery. On the plus side you can probably find a really awkward video of me staring at a chinese girl on the internet somewhere.

The dinner went from being at 6:30 to being at 7 and back to 6:30 again by the time we left. Cynthia and I weren’t entirely sure where we were going, except that we had a business card for the place that Bill gave us to give to the driver. We were riding in the back of a minivan, with Professor Holbrook, our translator, riding shotgun and the Professors Pfaff riding in the middle. The trip probably took a little over a half hour, landing us, finally, at a restaurant somewhere near Junco, the giant all-in-one supermarket department store, like Super Target but bigger. We stepped out of the van and into the restaurant, which looked more like a small calligraphy gallery, and made our way up the stairs to the dining room, which felt more like a conference room than a restaurant. The room was a small room, but big for a Chinese restaurant dining room, with a round table in the middle, a mahjong table behind that, a flat-screen television and a computer tucked away in the corner. It had a private bathroom, and there were various pieces of art on the wall. A window looked out over the street below, which fact could only be derived based on the geography of the building as the drapes were pulled shut, and I spent a good amount of the time we were waiting for the rest of the party to get there, and while Holbrook ordered the tea, admiring the décor of the room.

The tea was called gongfucha, which roughly translates to Kung Fu Tea (yes, like the martial arts) and is apparently a tea unique to Fuzhou and a couple other provinces. I had it once on a similar outing, and one of the fascinating aspects of drinking tea in China is that it is not just dried leaves in water. That is a significantly inaccurate and possibly disrespectful characterization of Chinese tea in general, but gongfucha in particular. Preparing tea is an art form. Gongfucha in particular has an intricate preparation process that involves pouring the tea fro ma kettle into a cup filled with tea leaves and then pouring the tea into several smaller cups, giving them a sort of “tea bath” like the kind we wash our dishes with at some of the restaurants near campus, and eventually pouring the tea, cup by cup, into a small carafe. It is served in the tiniest cups I think I’ve ever seenand each cup has a small square wooden coaster onto which the cup is placed. The tea tastes good, but I am not sure I could order it again, as its name was something like “Tea for Gazing into the August Moon,” which probably sounds a lot more elegant in Mandarin. As with many things at this restaurant, it wasn’t the taste, it was the experience that made it a great meal.

Professor Kwok and his enotourage arrived ten minutes, maybe a little more, behind us, and just after introducing himself, launched into a rich and vivid Chiense history and culture lesson that began with the art in the dining room. Behind us was a large sheet of rice paper on which was inscribed the chinese characters for metaphysics and reality—among oldest characters in the chinese lexicon these characters have a deeper meaning in this work. Metaphysics, professor Kwok told us, stands for the daoist principle of ying and the yang—the same that informs meditation and tai qi practices of balancing fullness—one circle split in two, one side dark, meaning full, and the other light, meaning empty. In the full part of the circle there is a spot of empty, and in the empty a spot of full. It communicates a life in balance, where when you are full, you still have room for emptiness, and when you are empty you have a space for fullness. The other character stood for reality, meaning that this balance, or this work towards balance is an inescapable phenomenon such that when taken together both characters formed a basis for daoist theory. He then turned to the adjacent wall where another sheet of calligraphy hung above a painting. This we were told, was a poem. It was an ancient and beautifully romantic poem about the Yangtze river, and how life is a journey taken much better with a bottle of wine. The painting below it was a beautiful mountain river scene, presumably somewhere in Fuzhou province, where the water approached the cliffs of the mountains and fisherman dotted the water with their boats. The gorges in the mountain were filled with what was either clouds or mist, and a small waterfall emptied it’s contents from the top of a cliff down to the river below. The painting was another example of this harmonization of ying and yang, with parts of the canvas painted and others empty, and its style was similar to other eastern paintings I had seen.

The thing that struck me most about the artwork in this restaurant dining room was how rhetorical it was. For full disclosure before going forward I will note that I am not, nor do I claim to be, any kind of any kind of expert on western or eastern art and linguistics; I have been exposed to both and appreciate both but have no training of any kind on either subject. The calligraphy stuck me as particularly because it was turning words into art in a visual way that has no western parallel. In part this is because there a very few words in English that can be written with two brushstrokes but also because of how English functions linguistically compared with Chinese. A single character has no meaning in English except relative to the other characters that together form words, sentences and arguments. A single word could be taken to represent an argument or an idea, but rarely does a single character possess any kind of intrinsic meaning. In Chinese words are embedded into the character and may be recalled and written in this brilliant style simply out the concentration of a lifetime of training in philosophy. Seeing the calligraphy and learning about its meaning was a powerful experience that is difficult to adequately describe. By learning to understand the meaning embedded in the character, they ceased to be words and transformed into ideas with which I could identify, albeit on a liminal level. I felt as though I were being exposed to privileged information, that I was some kind of insider to a piece of the culture that most westerners are not given access; which feeling was further strengthened when our lesson moved from the private dining room and into the museum-like main room of the restaurant. In this room there were several sculptures all carved from solid blocks of jade. Professor Kwok taught us how to evaluate the sculptures, he told us to notice whether and to what extent the stone appears wet or dry, the higher quality sculpture will look wet, he told us. It is difficult to describe in vivid detail what he meant by this, except to say that some of the sculptures appeared to be soaking wet; it was as if they had just come out of the wash, or rescued from a torrential downpour and then placed into this display case, only they were not dripping, nor were they sitting in a pool of water, but somehow the looked genuinely wet.

For dinner we had some pretty typical chinese food, I tried duck for the first time but apart from that didn’t try anything too exotic or new, but the food was not what drew us together, it was the conversation. Throughout the meal we discussed American politics, chinese history, contemporary chinese politics and in more depth than I’ve ever been able to discuss it before, the role of the party in the management of economic and political policy. This latter was another point in the night where I felt as if I were privy to elite information. The opportunities for most people my age to learn this kind of information is rare. The most I ever learned about the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, and Deng Xiaoping in high school was that Mao made them happen, and Deng was instrumental in fixing the resulting problems. Distilling Deng Xiaoping’s role in China’s modern development down to simply fixing the problems of the cultural revolution would be like saying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped a few people in the 1960’s. It doesn’t get at the essence of what he did which was transform a country away from a broken and disastrous marxist system into a quasi-capitalist system, putting China on the path to what it is today. His transformational leadership 30 years ago with the “Opening Doors Policy” set the precedent that allowed China to open a western style liberal arts college like UIC in 2008. Would Mao have ever dreamt of this kind of college in China? Definitely not. 30 years ago, would Deng Xiaoping have imagined a school like this? Probably not, but it the link between his leadership and schools like this is clear and undeniable.

Hearing this lesson on Chinese history and culture told from Professor Kwok’s perspective—someone who lived through the great leap forward, the cultural revolution and is a participant in China’s emergence to world prominence over the last thirty years, and someone who cares deeply about China past, present and future—carried with it an intensely personal feeling; as if he is opening up to us exclusively, as if we were now part of an elect few who had access to this knowledge, armed with this knowledge apart from the rest of the world, in a league of our own.

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Hearing someone like the president of a college speak is always an interesting experience, especially for an insider to the college. One of the requirements for a President is to have a clear sense of the institution and a strong enthusiasm for its goals. Listening to Professor Kwok speak about the school was like listening to the school itself speak. He spoke about the schools problems, like working with both the local administrative government and the central government, as well as the school’s academic potential as a premier institution in China, which he articulated almost as if it were a dream being realized at long last. Professor Kwok believes in UIC, he believes in the idea of having a premier liberal arts institution in South China and I got the feeling sitting there with him that he believes UIC is a living manifestation of the future of Chinese higher education. It took 30 years for China to transform it’s education away from the ruins of the cultural revolution to what it is today, and it may take another 30 years to go from it’s present state to a system where UIC is the norm. Considering the rapid rate of cultural change in China, however, it is not only possible, but entirely believable that the education system will get to that point sooner than anyone can anticipate. In the mean time, UIC and the education system more generally, has a long way to go before the idea is perfect in practice.

Break for Music

One of the themes in this series so far is time: everything from massive construction projects to unexpected meetings and the rapid growth of the UIC campus, time continues to challenge me here. Part of the time factor is due to how new the school is. The school opened three years ago, and it’s first class will graduate in spring 2010. The school started with a handful of students, around forty I think, and has grown to a school slightly larger than Gustavus in the last three years. This is the same growth that spured the massive dormitory construction project. It’s arguable that this kind of growth for this kind of institution is good: it’s a good for China to have students going to colleges like this, and this college is a thriving model of the future of Chinese higher education. But a similar argument could be made that this college is, like so many other parts of China, growing too fast. It seems like a good number of decisions around here are made in a haphazard fashion, and that the administrative departments and parts of the academic program have not been able to appropriately mature to meet the needs required of their goals and their constituents. In general it seems like the college has a lack of a clear, singular, institutional vocation—the college’s purpose—and therefore is unable to approach these questions in a more orderly fashion. It seems like some teachers have a different idea of what the course work is supposed to be like than others and some parts of the college have a different understanding of what it means to be an “international college.” Many of the professors seem to have a different sense of the college’s goals, and the students are stretched absurdly thin between eighteen hours of classes, hours of mentor and tutorial work and other commitments around campus, and are almost constantly tied up with homework as a result.

Dr. Michael Fitzhenry is the professor of my Aesthetics of Film class which compares with the Video Art course at Gustavus, but with an emphasis on theory and no film production. He’s been teaching in China for the last three and a half years, but before that he was a professor at the Sydney University and did a significant potion of his graduate work in Japan, making his time in the far east pretty significant. I spoke with him about his perspective on the fast paced world that is United International College. “There’s a lot of rhetoric about the pioneering nature of UIC, but in actual fact it really is pioneering. It pioneers an international environment that you can’t get in any other institution, especially an institution in china. It’s also pioneering to the extent that it’s growing on the liberal arts tradition. That’s quite foreign to China, foreign to Asia, I never saw anything like that in Japan.”

Fitzhenry is motivated by the school’s foundational beliefs, and he sees some unique opportunities he’s glad to be part of the faculty here, but thinks that the school may be moving too quickly to keep up with its own goals:

It’s not that I have a high opinion of it, its more that I’m enthusiastically engaging with it, and if I didn’t have that kind of enthusiasm it really wouldn’t make it worth my while teaching here. I would be looking to move. From my perspective, I’m the first program coordinator, and…the facilities in it are the things we are developing and the opportunity to do that from scratch that is quite attrctive…. Build a TV studio for example…I could live my entire career in a Film department and never be involved in questions concerning the very detailed development of facility. It’s good. And also, I was the first staff member employed in the program,which meant that everyone else in the program was employed with my participation, which is good because I had an idea about all the other staff which means that everyone else was employed with my participation. That’s quite rare as well, it’s not essential, and its not necessary, it’s not that I knew the people before they came here, but the particular skills we can put together and create kind of a local flavor in the CTV program, that’s a good thing, about it being so new. Those are all things that are very attractive, but there are huge challenges, and some of the institutional goals are a bit awry. There are too many tentacles out, I think some of them will be lopped.

That sort of happens when any organization starts from an idea and just explodes very rapidly, there are so many ideas emanating out of it and so many things trying to happen that some things just can’t be done.

I guess if there’s a complaint to be made it’s that there’s not quite enough forethought. So, OK, all of the ideas are definitely worth trying, but whether there is enough planning involved in it is questionable in some of the things that I’ve seen. Even with the programs themselves; they’re handpicked, these programs not those programs, but whether or not we can develop quickly enough to develop our own syllabus, is in question. It’s a huge financial outlay to build the kind of facilities we need and the reason why we need them is because we are teaching particular kinds of subjects…we’re just recently being asked to look at our curriculum, develop our curriculum. One of the implications of developing our curriculum might be to make the programs a bit more cost effective. The curriculum aims toward a level of professional professionalism, producing graduates that are almost entry level professionals in the film and lighting industry. In order to do that you have to have professional equipment, if you drop that as a design feature of the curriculum, to produce that professionalism, if you redesign the curriculum you could soften all of that, and produce people who are knowledgeable about, and to some extent able to make bits of media but without being professionals. This is a much cheaper option.

And more in line with a traditional liberal arts tradition too?

It’s what most major universities do, its only specialist film schools that produce on a major level. At some point that aim to be a liberal arts college was articulated but not before. There are good reasons to have a film school in south China, there isn’t one. But there are enough people around here, and enough people interested in film , certainly enough TV stations and there are a couple of film studios operating down here, and to do things with Macau and Hong Kong is always a possibility when we’re so close to them, geographically proximate. To run something on that professional level is a good idea if you can afford it. The question now, at least in the short term, is can we afford it. It’s not a good idea not to be optimistic. I’ve seen some people lose their enthusiasm. When this happens they basically move on.

Another manifestation of this is in the students’ schedules. A full-time, degree seeking student takes six courses for a total of 18 hours each week, plus mandatory tutorial sessions and an entire Wednesday afternoon of mentorship through the whole person education office.

Absolutely, and that’s another aspect of that curriculum development and also the tentacles. Those ideas, so the idea of whole person education as its articulated through particular kinds of programs that the students are required to engage in throughout the whole four years of their study, adds something into the curriculum that takes away…the thing it’s traded off for is independent study. The ability for independent work, the ability for them to produce something independently from an early stage, or even through out their whole undergraduate study, is dimished because they are caught up all kinds of activities related to whole person education or the general education ethos.

We’re still adjusting there. That big load…is common in china. We have our mentor carrying programs and whole person education; in China they have a whole level of also required civic kinds of courses: political science courses or things geared toward the party, the communist party, that are equally time consuming, and then the programs that they do are just as top heavy in terms of contact hours, and independent research goes out the window there as well. Where it meets with the idea of the tentacles is: you have to question, is whole person education as its currently articulated, a tentacle that’s going to get lopped in five year’s time? Or is it something it is going to grow from strength to strength. It appears it has benefits, it has benefits in terms of institutional branding, and because it’s unique in china. That whole person education draws on some rather archaic western university traditions, such as the high table. Again theres that kind of analysis that has to go on, and I’m not the one that’s doing that analysis. I rue the fact that my students don’t have the opportunity to explore independently.

As a consequence of this rapid growth, the college has a wide variety of teaching styles, and with teachings coming from both academic and professional backgrounds, a variety of different kinds of teachers that handle their classrooms in a variety of different ways. Fitzhenry comes from an academic tradition, and approaches his classroom the way he thinks his students should expect him to:

I have an idea engrained about academic standards. And we are offering undergraduate degrees and, in fact, soon to be offering graduate studies as well. So academic standards is one reason, but the other thing, and it’s the main thing, and I think there is an expectation on the student, when they come to an institution such as UIC, and in any case that when they are taught by foreign faculty…that they are entering a foreign classroom, and I think that it would be dishonest to present them with anything but an English language classroom, because a lot of them have selected, at Zhong Shan, or they’re enrolled, here at UIC, in my courses, because they require the English classroom as a kind of training for their ambition, which for many of them is to go abroad to study. We don’t have such stringent entry requirement, as they would have to enter an American institution or a British one, but if we cheated them also on the English language classroom, by the time they turned up to the other institutions they really wouldn’t be prepared.

We aren’t a preparatory school, we’re not preparing, it’s not our rationale to prepare our students for an English language institution—that would be like a foundationary study or some type like this and there are plenty of programs that have that as their mission—but I’m quite mindful of it, and it’s an expectation that I’m quite prepared to live up to. It just fits well with my..I’m from a tradition, in fact I represent a tradition in China—it’s not the American one, it’s the British one—and if I didn’t do that properly, I wouldn’t be the academic I’m supposed to be.

He says that if he were to dumb down the material, or have lower expectations it would be cheating the students in a way that parallels with how the professors are meant to discourage their students from cheating. He doesn’t believe in it, and believes it is academically important to pitch the lesson to the top of the class:

I just don’t believe that dumbing down classes is a good approach, I think it’s a cheat, in all the senses of that word its a cheat, the thing that we don’t want our students to do. So if they see their professors cheating then it’s a bit rough to pull them off for cheating as well. Anyway, I try, and I think it’s worth trying, worth purusing….
Syndney university is actually a very prestigious university, it’s a world renowned university, it’s an elite university, and one of the implications of it is that it pitches everything to the top student. Of course you can breeze through and pass course at Sydney University just as you can everywhere else, but it’s not where everything is pitched to, most things are pitched to the top 10% of the class. You have to have something for very bright students, otherwise the course is pap. If there’s nothing there, then you are pandering to the students who, and this is true of any institution, may be otherwise motivated.

In some ways this may sound harsh. It is very likely that in some cases the students are simply struggling; it’s not that they aren’t trying to be successful, it’s more that they are genuinely interested, but simply having a difficult time with the material. But if you listen to his statement carefully, there is a sense that those student in fact are the top 10%. They are the ones who will ask the questions and seek help outside of class, and they are the ones who will inevitably make the effort to do well in the course. This certainly seems to be the most effective model for running a higher education classroom. Not every professor here relies on this model. It’s hard to say whether they are dumbing down their material, but they do have lowered expectations for the Chinese students in terms of their English ability. Assignments here are expected to be done in English, but the thought of having a second year student writing anything longer than a couple pages is right out for most of the professors.

It is difficult to call this a premier international higher education institution when so many professors have such low expectations for their student’s abilities. The college must begin thinking more critically about its goals: adjusting the curriculum and loping off some tentacles to really figure out what its place is, what its purpose is, and what of all the things they are currently doing are important for achieving those goals in order to maintain its relevancy to international education programs in China and around the world. This is something every college in the world that’s worth its salt will struggle with, and it’s something every college needs to struggle with, and I am quite honestly not at all surprised by the struggles facing UIC at this time. It was something I anticipated I would struggle with coming to a school so new, and growing so quickly. I share Dr. Kwok’s belief in UIC, and I share Dr. Fitzhenry’s enthusiasm, and I have no doubt that UIC will someday overcome these struggles.