While spending about a week in China in June representing banking and investment firm Goldman Sachs, President Ruth Simmons also found time to conduct University business. Simmons, who serves on the Goldman Sachs board of directors, told The Herald she plans to return to China in October as part of a Brown delegation. The trip will be part of a new effort to bolster the University's international visibility.
"One of my concerns is that we don't necessarily have the profile of a global university," she said. "We began talking about this last year with the intention that we would begin a planning process that would consider where we should focus in the future under an international rubric."
Though her initial focus will be on China, Simmons said she wants to develop a strategy for increasing Brown's presence in countries around the world.
"I'm all worked up because I've just come back from our cabinet retreat, and we've spent two days talking about our international efforts. We've been talking about what we can bring to our students that will help them become globally literate so that they can feel confident in their ability to move around the world," Simmons told The Herald.
Simmons said her cabinet met this past week with Barbara Stallings, the new director of the Watson Institute for International Studies, as well as Dean of Admission Jim Miller '73. This meeting addressed ways in which Brown can raise its international profile by recruiting the best scholars and students from around the world.
Simmons' cabinet also heard presentations from representatives of international programs at Duke and Yale universities. Though Simmons said some of these specific efforts might not make sense for Brown, she called the presentations "very instructive."
Simmons in ChinaAccording to a June 13 interview with Simmons in People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, the president arrived June 15 in Shanghai, where she spent a couple of days before continuing to Beijing and Xi'an. Neither the president's office nor Goldman Sachs officials would divulge the details of Simmons' schedule there.
Simmons said she had fruitful meetings during the trip, which she described as exploratory. During her second trip in October, she said she will attempt to form a council of alums, parents, faculty and other friends of the University that can "establish a presence there and answer questions."
How exactly Brown will collaborate with Chinese institutions remains unclear, but according to Professor of Anthropology William Simmons '60, there are opportunities to partner with universities abroad. William Simmons served as the University's provost from 1998 to 1999 and now teaches UC 170: "Transformation of the Research University."
"Faculty often spend time in the same department with the same people, and a faculty exchange would be great for their growth and would give them the opportunity to bring back new perspectives," he told The Herald in early July. "This is also great for students. You get something out of going to a different institution, even if you take the same courses. It's intellectually broadening."
President Simmons also said Brown stands to benefit from increased involvement in China, particularly in light of the country's growing economic power.
"Not to say China doesn't have its problems, because it does, but there are many cultural values from which we can learn," she said. "We have an opportunity to observe close at hand the development of a societal juggernaut - the rise of China that we won't have a chance to observe at a later point in time. I think I had not understood until I saw for myself what a phenomenally unusual moment this is."
Simmons continued: "I'm very concerned about xenophobia we see in our country. I'm doubly concerned that we may not be doing enough to understand the value, the depth and the complexity of other cultures. What Chinese culture offers us is a chance to understand how our culture is just one of many very interesting and well-developed societies."
For some time, other Ivy League universities have been working hard to establish themselves in China. This is especially true at Yale, where Chinese President Hu Jintao made his only campus visit on a trip to the United States in April. President Richard Levin has made enhancing the school's ties with China a priority. His efforts have already yielded results: the number of Yale students studying in China has increased more than five-fold in the past eight years, according to the Yale Daily News.
Yale enjoys strong name recognition in the world's most populous nation and has a long history of supporting everything from hospitals to middle schools there.
Beyond faculty and student exchanges and research partnerships, more than 700 foreign academic programs have been started in China, according to a Feb. 17 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. These academic programs - 36 percent of which are for master's degrees in business administration - bring Chinese students into Chinese classrooms with foreign professors and ultimately issue foreign degrees.
In her June interview with People's Daily, Simmons acknowledged Brown is playing catch-up with its Ivy peers, saying the University would not lag in cooperating with Chinese universities for too long.
The Office of the Vice President for Research was unable to say if any Brown professors are currently collaborating with Chinese academics, though Simmons told People's Daily that individual partnerships have already been formed. Simmons also told the newspaper that last year there were 142 Brown students from China, and all but 18 were enrolled in the Graduate School.
Brown's past links to China
Xue Di, who has twice won Human Rights Watch's Hellman/Hammett Award, wrote in a July 13 e-mail to The Herald, "The dark side of China's progress ... has not been portrayed that much in the Western media. ... My wish is that Brown University will pursue ties with China's intellectual academies."
Xue Di wrote that the University should remain cognizant of its values in building any sort of relationship. "I also wish that Brown University will keep the issue of human rights in mind as it initiates a relationship with the Chinese government."
"In the long run things will hopefully open up, but the U.S. is an extreme in terms of academic freedom," William Simmons said. "It's a recognized cultural and societal value to a degree that you don't find in other places, so it would be very difficult if American scholars abroad were restrained. And if that happened, I think Brown would have to reconsider its relationship with any place that would restrain people."
President Simmons indicated she hopes to set in motion relationships that will last long after her time as Brown's president.
"When the next president goes to China, he or she won't have to ask questions about who might be sympathetic to Brown or what we can be doing in China. Instead, the plan is for the next leader to be received by an active network already busy with a plan for what can develop for us in China. And it will be a very different reality for that person," she said.
