Jeffrey S. Lehman: a key contributor to China’s educational reform

NYU Shanghai is a witness to the opening up of China’s higher education. According to Mr. Lehman, one of the visions of NYU Shanghai is to nurture within all students a cosmopolitan spirit, which embraces all of the world's cultures and civilizations at the level of the very best universities in the world. “We have half our students coming from china, the other half from the rest of the world. That's unique. So every Chinese student is assigned to a foreign roommate. Every non-Chinese student is assigned to a Chinese roommate. So every day they are spending time talking with someone who grew up in a different culture and sees the world from a slightly different perspective.”

(Mr. Lehman has an interview with Eastday.com.[Photo/Liu Xiaojing])

In the context of China’s opening up and globalization, there has been a boom of Sino-foreign cooperative educational programs of various forms. At present, there are 9 Sino-foreign joint universities with independent legal entity in China (NYU Shanghai, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Duke Kunshan University, Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Wenzhou-Kean University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen, Beijing Normal University-HongKong Baptist University United International College, and Shenzhen MSU-BIT University), while the number of Sino-foreign joint universities without independent legal entity has exceeded 140.