Duke University’s decision to build a campus in Kunshan, China, has run into a snag, as a small, but growing number of Duke academics are raising questions about how the venture will be carried out.
In the student newspaper, academic forums, and in e-mails to the administration, they are demanding more details about how the university will finance the project on the heels of tough budget cuts, how it will recruit professors to teach overseas, and how it will navigate the limits of academic freedom under the country’s authoritarian rule.
At the heart of their concerns is that Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, has not done enough to solicit faculty input and has provided them with a constantly changing view of what the branch campus will be.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Brodhead says that he has kept faculty representatives in the loop and that any appearance that he has painted an inconsistent picture of the project stems from negotiating a complex deal in a foreign country, which requires a great degree of flexibility.
“Anyone who has wanted to stay tuned to the channel has understood that each of these changes is part of the working through of the process of coming to a tenable agreement,” he says.
Such statements have not quieted the critics however. They point out that only now, as the campus is being built, is the faculty of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, which is expected to spearhead Kunshan’s academic programs, getting an opportunity to closely examine the proposed China curriculum.
“There’s widespread concern about the viability of the project,” says E. Allan Lind, a professor in the business school, who has supported a campaign to halt the Kunshan project until a more-thorough review of its finances and educational offerings can be conducted. “It’s unfortunate they didn’t consult us.”
Since 2007, Mr. Brodhead has championed an aggressive global strategy for Duke, saying that for the university to continue to be a top-tier institution, it needs to strengthen its international presence. As laid out in a planning guide developed by the office of the provost, the administration sees the future of Duke as a “globally networked university” in which its main campus in Durham, N.C., is one of several key locations around the world. Duke’s China campus, about 40 miles west of Shanghai, will be a “node” in the network.
Duke’s worldwide goals resemble those of another elite higher-education institution, New York University, which opened an Abu Dhabi campus last year and announced in January that it had received approval from China’s Ministry of Education to open a branch campus in Shanghai.
While NYU is starting with undergraduate education, Duke is taking what it sees as a more cautious approach. Eventually Duke Kunshan University, as it is known, will be a comprehensive research university providing both undergraduate and graduate courses. But its initial offering will be a master’s degree in management studies starting in 2012, and Duke will add an executive M.B.A. program and other courses in subsequent years. With China’s economy booming, government and business leaders there are keen on Western-style business education, says the Duke planning document, and the management course would attract college graduates with little or no work experience.
But the viability of the degree is under scrutiny, raising questions about the whole endeavor and its planning.
Skepticism Abroad
A confidential consultant’s report commissioned by Duke, which was made widely available online by a professor critical of the Kunshan effort, says that Chinese students value a Duke education, but believe the real value is in studying in America and receiving a cross-cultural experience. The perception is that foreign universities water down their academic programs abroad.
In interviews with 50 Chinese students at elite universities in China, 40 percent said they would consider the degree if it were offered in Durham, while 16 percent would consider enrolling in China—and that’s only if the tuition were significantly lower than what it would cost at Duke’s main campus. The percentage of interested students grows if Duke were to offer a significant part of the course in America, an idea the administration is considering.
The report fueled questions about how Duke will pay for the project, which depends in part on revenue generated by tuition. While Duke administrators say that a “price point” has not been set, the planning document assumes significant cash flow from tuition. In the 2016-17 academic year, when the university plans to be offering a variety of academic programs in China, Duke expects to generate some $24.5-million from an estimated 600 students.
To be sure, under the deal, the Municipality of Kunshan is carrying the heaviest financial load. The city is providing 200 acres of land (with the campus leased to Duke for 10 years at no cost), and it is paying for the construction. Duke will share operational costs with Kunshan for six years, after which the joint commitment may be renewed. (A third partner, Wuhan University, will play a governance and educational role, but has no financial stake in the venture.)
In all, Duke’s investment is estimated at $42.5-million from 2011 to 2017. Part of that amount comes from reallocating existing budget expenditures, and part of it will be paid for by $10-million the university expects to raise from donors. (Mr. Brodhead says a significant portion of that amount has been collected already.) An estimated $14.6-million will come from Duke’s strategic funds, which technically could go to support other programs on its main campus.
While such expenses are relatively small for an institution of Duke’s wealth, many professors on campus are sensitive about where the university’s money is going after sharp budget cuts and a two-year freeze in faculty salaries, says Craig S. Henriquez, a biomedical-engineering professor who steps down as chairman of the university’s Academic Council in June.
“The big concern is how quickly those costs could rise if certain things don’t come to fruition as anticipated,” he says. “What happens if philanthropy doesn’t come through as imagined? What happens if the tuition assumptions are not what they expect?”
The council established a Global Priorities Committee last fall to more closely examine Kunshan and other international projects.
Mixed Views Among Faculty
Mr. Henriquez says the administration has kept the Academic Council and its various committees well informed of the developments in China. However, he would like to hear more from faculty members who are excited to pioneer education in Kunshan.
Duke’s provost, Peter Lange, says there is a growing number of Duke faculty interested in the academic opportunities at Duke Kunshan University. Last month 65 to 70 professors met with him to discuss teaching and research there, he says, and he is forming a new council of professors and administrators to coordinate China academic activities. “We focused quite intently on getting the administrative pieces in place, and now that those are in sight, we’ve really cranked up the faculty-engagement piece,” he says.
Other administrators echo the provost.
“Just about everyone I talk to here is enthusiastic,” says Michael H. Merson, director of Duke’s Global Health Institute, which is expected to open a research center in Kunshan and develop both undergraduate and graduate courses.
But other faculty members are more reticent about the project.
Thomas Pfau, a Duke professor of English and German who has perhaps been the most vocal faculty critic of Kunshan, sees a “high-handedness” in the administration’s handling of the project. Mr. Pfau first began publicly challenging the project after an April 7 editorial in the student newspaper urged Duke faculty to get “on board” with the international effort. In 30 minutes, he dashed off a letter criticizing the editorial—"I just had one of those fits faculty occasionally get"—and when his response was published, he began receiving dozens of e-mails from colleagues who had similar questions about the Kunshan venture. “It turned out I hit a raw nerve.”
With the help of another humanities professor, he expanded his original letter into a lengthy online editorial that called for the administration and Duke trustees to put a hold on the Kunshan endeavor. He provided links to the Duke planning document and the confidential China Market Research Group report, which Mr. Pfau says he received from a colleague in the business school whom he declined to identify.
While he is concerned about the finances and the ability of Duke professors to conduct politically sensitive research and teaching in China, Mr. Pfau has more fundamental questions about why Duke needs to construct a facility in Kunshan at all. He argues that the global plan laid out by Mr. Brodhead and the administration offers little evidence of the educational value of establishing a big Chinese presence, and he derides their global network as a “Burger King franchise” model of higher education. “It has the feel of an initiative that is driven mostly by a kind of irrational craving for visibility,” he says, “but there is no intellectual substance or gain for us.”
Mr. Pfau says he is not an “isolationist” and points to his own background as a German who came to the United States for its academic prowess. He would like Duke to pursue stronger international ties, he says, but through increased faculty and student exchanges and joint programs with foreign institutions that don’t require building a campus.
Mr. Brodhead counters that a deep engagement with China is crucial to the future of American education.
He says that a large overseas investment like the one in Kunshan is bound to trigger some “unease” on the Duke campus and that part of the challenge of giving the faculty members a definitive picture of Kunshan is that the project remains very much a work in progress even now.
“A crucial phrase with our agreements with the Municipality of Kunshan is: step-by-step. You’ll take one step and see what that taught you, and then you’ll be in a better position to take the second step.”
He acknowledges there have been some course corrections along the way. For example, originally Duke was to work with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, but it pulled out and Duke was forced to look for a new educational partner.
And he says Duke will in a sense need to test the market to see if its tuition and student-enrollment figures match its estimates. “Of course there are uncertainties in our numbers, and there will be until experience corrects them,” he says. “However we have studied the possibilities of this as or more carefully than any program we’ve ever launched.”
Next month will be a significant test for the Kunshan project. The Fuqua School of Business has formed committees to outline the proposed curriculum at Kunshan, and on June 20 about 95 faculty members from the business school will vote whether to approve the courses.
Duke administrators are confident they will have enough faculty support to move the project forward.
Mr. Lind, the business-school professor who has called for greater scrutiny of the China effort, says he is waiting to see what the faculty committees produce before he decides how he’ll vote. Yet he remains skeptical of the campus’s feasibility.
“In my view, with the justification for the Duke Kunshan campus, a number of assumptions were made,” he says. “I don’t see the data for it.”
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