UW declines invitation to create campus in China

After six months of quietly examining the possibility of creating a campus in China, University of Washington officials have decided not to pursue the plan, despite being heavily courted by Chinese officials.

The proposed 10,000-student campus would have been the first built by an American university and was to be located in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, north of Shanghai.

But after examining the financial and administrative viability of the proposal, the university told Chinese officials earlier this month that an agreement wasn't feasible in the time they were given and it would not pursue it.

"It would take an enormous amount of time and energy to launch something like that, and we've got plenty of needs in Seattle and in the state of Washington," said UW President Mark Emmert.

The university's long history of offering Asian studies as well as its faculty and student exchanges with China fueled Chinese interest, as did Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Seattle in April. The Chinese offered use of land and a $100 million loan to build the campus, with half the students to come from China and half from the United States, UW officials said.

"We didn't have enough time to work through the issues; some of it was financial, but we also needed more time to develop something as significant as setting up a campus in another country," said Susan Jeffords, the university's vice provost for global affairs. "And they were under their own time pressures."

The news that the university has passed on the offer disappointed many who supported the proposal, which had circulated for months within the university community.

"Based on what I know, it's too early to shelve this idea," said Craig Gannett, chairman of the 14-member Visiting Committee that advises the UW's Jackson School for International Studies. "This idea has great potential for the university and the state, and I'm surprised and disappointed that the university has reached a conclusion based on preliminary discussions with the Chinese."

Former Washington Gov. Gary Locke — who built ties with China while governor and is a member of the committee — said a branch campus in China would benefit Washington.

"I hope that someday soon the university can establish a campus in China," Locke said. "It would be enormously beneficial to UW students and faculty."

The UW was approached in late December and, after initial talks, a Chinese delegation from Nanjing visited in May and met with top administrators and faculty members. UW officials made it clear that the proposal would not be funded by Washington taxpayers and said at least half the students would have to come from Washington state. They also sought assurances that there wouldn't be censorship of teaching and learning.

Faculty members who met with the delegation were excited that a Nanjing base for UW could serve as a major educational hub for Asia, which could mean students teleconferencing with each other across the Pacific Ocean and creating relationships with Asia's top professors, researchers and leaders.

But the question of how to pay administrative costs and faculty salaries as well as how to develop a curriculum within the Chinese time span dogged university officials.

"There were all sorts of legal and policy and financial issues," Jeffords said. "We have two still relatively new campuses [in Tacoma and Bothell] in the state of Washington that are growing, and we want to make sure that they are successful."

Jeffords said the Chinese delegation is exploring the proposal with other American universities.

The UW is more focused on developing partnerships and student-faculty travel in China than it is in establishing a campus there, Emmert said.

This week, Emmert returned from a nine-day visit to China — his first since 1989 — where he met with government officials and educators. "It was absolutely stunning in every way, in terms of the quality of their facilities and the sophistication of the education process," Emmert said. "It was as if it were a different nation."

In the past few years, China has focused on raising the quality of its universities to international standards. Part of that effort includes attracting well-known foreign universities to set up shop in China, said UW professor Donald Hellmann, director of the university's Institute for International Policy.

With only 2,000 institutions of higher learning in China enrolling 23 million students, many foreign universities are looking at China as a huge market for education. Earlier this month, 9 million students took the national college entrance examination for only 2.5 million spots.

Last year, the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom became the first Western university to open a campus in China, in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. Kean University in New Jersey signed an agreement last month to open the first campus operated by an American university, in Wenzhou, also in Zhejiang. Other American universities have had long partnerships with China, such as Johns Hopkins, which operates the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies with Nanjing University.

"Every university wants a piece of the action in China," Hellmann said. "We could have been the first major international research university to have undertaken such an endeavor, but it obviously would involve significant cost and risk."

The university still may look at establishing a research center in China, Jeffords said.

Despite the university's decision, Anand Yang, director of the Jackson School, said he would like to see a more tangible UW presence in China.

"There needs to be more sustained interaction with other parts of the world, more than just two or three months' study abroad," Yang said. "Imagine a campus where every day there are local students in China going to classes with local students from the state of Washington, and this is not just about learning Chinese but about studying engineering, or business, or looking at environmental studies and doing it all in a different environment."

The discussions have led to one fruitful result, Hellmann said: The university now has greater experience with and understanding of education in China.

"When people look at the first half of the 21st century, there are three fundamental forces driving the future: one of them is the information revolution, the second is the biotechnology revolution and the third is the rise of Asia to the center of the global political economy," Hellmann said. "Seattle stands as a convergence point of all three, and the university is in a position to serve as a leader."

Lisa Chiu: 206-464-3347 or lchiu@seattletimes.com