Internationalisation of Higher Education and Building World-class universities in Mainland : a Case of Qi Wang qimwang@sjtu.edu.cn of Education A world-class university, commonly referred to research university, is regarded as a central part of any academic system and an imperative to develop a nation’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. A world-class university is characterised as an institution with a high concentration of talent, abundance of resources and autonomous governance. It carries out international-standard education and research in a wide range of disciplines, recognised by international community, and makes great efforts to serve both national needs and international public good. Mainland ’s higher education has been progressing immensely in the past two decades; however, it still lags behind other developed countries and will have a long road ahead in building world-class universities. One way to transform into such as institution is to employ internationalisation strategies effectively. Some theoretical points on internationalisation of higher education Internationalisation of higher education is a contested notion. Scholars find it difficult to pin down this multi-dimensional concept. Here is a well-established characterisation by Knight (2003): ‘[internationalisation] is defined as the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of the institutions.’ How can internationalisation strategies contribute to building world-class universities? What specific plans and actions can be implemented? I would like to share SJTU’s experience with you here.
At the postgraduate level, the university encourages students to visit and study at world-class universities in order to engage in cutting-edge research, to enhance their research capacity and to improve their international competitiveness. Selected students will be granted financial support. So far, 15% of its doctoral students have had such experience. Bilingual education has been advocated in SJTU since 1998. It is intended to improve students’ English language skills as well as their Chinese language skills. From 1998 to 205, about 135 bilingual courses were offered. These courses represented approximately 10% of all the disciplinary courses offered by SJTU. This proportion is expected to increase to 15% by the year 2010. In addition, the students are required to take a minimum of 16 credits of English language courses. Faculty Different measures have been implemented in SJTU to improve the faculty quality. Apart from raising the requirements and criteria for selecting faculty members, the university has implemented a new professorship promotion scheme, which opens up the competition to both internal and external applicants, at home and abroad. SJTU is actively engaged in attracting academic talents and experts and developing global recruitment. By 2008, among all the teaching staff, 61.5% hold PhD degrees, with 12% obtained their degrees from overseas universities. The university encouraged teaching staff to collaborate with overseas universities and to attend international conferences. In addition, the university invites more than 200 visiting scholars every year since 2004, to teach and research in SJTU. Research SJTU encourages its faculty to conduct research at an international level. The university strives to integrate research achievements with the development of key enterprises (such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, HP, Samsung, , etc), to work closely in the development of future industries and to aid in the construction of an innovation system in . The university also has proposed policies and regulations to encourage and improve the quality of international publications. Those policies adopted include rewarding papers indexed in SCI, SSCI and EI, encouraging postgraduate students to publicise their work. A new reward and evaluation system has been introduced to improve the quality of the publications in 2007, which differentiates the reward for papers with