Chinese university leaders visit Yale

Leaders of 12 of China’s most prestigious universities spent two weeks at Yale in August, including one day at the medical school. The purpose of their visit, the first of its kind sponsored by China’s Ministry of Education outside the country, was to study Yale’s structure, organization and administrative practices.

At the medical school Dean Robert J. Alpern, M.D., and others described medical education at Yale and in the United States. (In China students go straight from secondary school to medical school.) The visitors also toured research laboratories and teaching laboratories and classrooms for histology and anatomy.

Yale began a series of educational exchanges with Chinese universities in 1996, and earlier this year Yale concluded an agreement with Fudan University in Shanghai to promote exchanges among scholars in history, East Asian languages and literature, genetics, biology, law, medicine and management.

“Will this visit cause changes to be made?” asked Tian Xu, Ph.D. ’90, professor and vice chair of genetics at Yale and special advisor to President Richard C. Levin on science and higher education in China. “Definitely. It’s a question of how much and how fast.”