International Journal of Chinese Education

Universities worldwide are being challenged to be more focused, efficient and effective to meet the demands of a globally situated, technologically enabled, higher education market place. Governments are increasingly applying the rhetoric of markets to higher education public policy as they seek to enhance research and higher education as essential platforms for a knowledge economy. For their part, universities are engaging a business enterprise focus to ensure survival in the context of resource scarcity and frequent change in their operating environment. The key challenge for universities is to retain their academic integrity and their institutional, other-regarding, nature, including their accountability to the community, while maintaining their financial sustainability. To do this, those charged with leadership, governance and management of universities must negotiate inherent tensions within universities while operating in a dynamic environment. This paper draws on the experience of James Cook University in Australia to explore these inherent tensions and identifies the value of institutional distinctiveness and clarity of institutional vision in meeting the demands of change.

Effective and efficient strategy is central to university internationalization. This study focused on 50 top research universities worldwide to compare their international endeavors through in-depth analysis of their publicly stated international strategies. The study conducted a typological analysis of those world-class research universities at macro, meso and micro levels. The findings point to a set of generic strategies across the universities, as well as various specific strategies at individual universities. We provide a conceptual framework to describe, explain and evaluate university international strategies.

This paper describes developments in the rise and implementation of teaching focused positions in universities. We note that such development is not without challenge given the research priority of many universities, and we note that teaching focused academics need to be across developments in the disciplinary knowledge of their field and able to integrate these into their teaching practice. We argue that teaching scholars must be different but equal to those engaged in research and/or research and teaching, we note the Importance of Ernest Boyer and we highlight the role of scholarship in teaching focussed positions. We provide examples of universities that have implemented teaching focused positions and identify implications for Chinese universities.

In 2004, The University of Nottingham was the first Sino-Foreign University to open a campus in mainland China. Today, the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China (unnc) campus holds approximately 6,600 students and 500 staff from 40 different countries. Science and Engineering subjects are relatively new on the campus, but are all based on the long standing pedigree at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. In 2012, a new msc course in Engineering Surveying and Geodesy started at unnc, which was the same as the course in the uk. All the courses at unnc are the same in learning outcomes as those on the uk campus, all the teaching is carried out in the medium of English and undergo the same stringent Quality Assurance. The University of Nottingham also has a campus in Malaysia, which makes the university truly global. Students attending any of these campuses have the opportunities of exchange at any of the other two, as well as many other international universities.

unnc aspires to grow to 8,000 students by 2020, consisting of 20% international students and 15-20% postgraduate students, approximately 40% of which will be within the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

This paper details the model used by the University of Nottingham in establishing and operating the msc course and research activities in Engineering Surveying and Geodesy at unnc, and gives a case study of this parallel course.

Issues of university governance, at both international and national levels have become a popular discussion topic in the last few decades. The paper presents a general picture of modes of university governance in China’s public higher education institutions. The paper also focuses on discussing the China way of shifting the modes from conventional paradigm to emerging paradigm in terms of power structure, roles and duties, challenges and reality and future development.

Corporate governance models are becoming more prevalent in many universities, despite concerns over the effects of corporate practices on the identity of universities as a unique institutional field. In Westminster university systems, governance practices have become highly professionalized along corporate lines, not least to ensure a good fit with the necessary regulatory regimes for a marketized university system. Examples of Australian practices are provided to illustrate the governance dynamics, as both Western and Chinese corporate governance practices will affect the culture of Chinese universities, despite the continuance of deeply-inscribed State influence. Professionalization of governance in Australia has brought benefits but also generated some ‘blind spots’ to sustaining the longer-term features of successful universities. Stronger academic governance could provide a counterweight, yet the relationship between corporate governance and academic governance is not yet as well-defined as it needs to become.