Coming To America: The Chinese Student Experience in the United States, Iowa City, Iowa, August 28, 2014

- [Janet Lyness] I want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors. The University of Iowa's international program, and the University of Iowa's honors program. They contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization. I also thank the Stanley U of I foundation support organization for their financial support. And I also thank today's financial sponsors, Mason K Braverman and Ken Hubbell. Our work is made possible by a financial support of these sponsors. Our format today is going to be our usual one, our speaker will be introduced and following her presentation at about one p.m., we will have a 15 minute question and answer period and you can use the cards that are on your table to write your questions and they will be collected at the end of her remarks and then we will submit them to her. Now, I'd like to introduce Judy Polumbaum. I'm very pleased to have her here today for our first session of the fall and I'm glad to see such large attendance. I told her she was a very popular speaker because we have so many people here today. She is a professor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She did her undergraduate work in East Asian studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She has a Master's Degree from Colombia University Graduate School of Journalism and she received her Doctorate in Communication from Stanford University. She's an affiliate faculty member in a number of international and interdisciplinary programs including the Center for Asian and Pacific studies and international studies. Her most recent publication is the book China Lake: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism based on interviews with 20 young Chinese journalists. Please join me in welcoming Judy Polumbaum. - [Judy Polumbaum] Thank you. Thanks to the fun relations council, honors program, international programs, and all those wonderful sponsors. And thanks to all of you for coming to this. My theory is, you know, you're just anxious to get going, it's fall, things are new and I'll try not to disappoint you. Of course I'm talking to a very informed audience and probably much of what I say will be already known to many of you. I'm particularly interested in your questions and comments. I'll start with a story. About 10 years ago, when I was in Beijing for a research visit, I was introduced to a young man who was a sportscaster for Central Television and as we got to talking he told me that he thought his grandpa studied in Iowa in the 30s. So, that would've been before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. And I said, well, you know, Iowa has several state universities but when I go home I'll look into it. And so, I went to University Special Collections in the library, to the university archives, and I went through semester after semester of graduation programs, looking for my friend's grandfather's name and I found it and he had come to Iowa and spent three years getting a master's in what was then called the College of Commerce and University of Iowa was then called the State University of Iowa and he had graduated, he had gone back to his hometown of Nanjing. He came from an industrial family and he managed factories and then when the People's Republic of China was founded, he became a manager of state owned factories. And so, I made inquiries with the register and they pulled out his original registration document which was a cardboard card like this and on one side was a mugshot and on the other side were his grades which were not really good. I also called up his thesis which was about factory management from Special Collections and made a copy of it for his grandson and I was able to, the Registers Office says we don't need the original, you can give the original to his grandson of the registration card. So, I was able to give that to the grandson as well as the thesis and it was just very cool. Like, out of nowhere this Iowa connection and not only Iowa but my university in Iowa. And, in fact, there were, I haven't done the research and added up the numbers but there were quite a few Chinese young men who studied management and engineering at the University of Iowa in the 20s and 30s and Iowa was particularly known then as it still is for hydrology and so som very important water engineers were educated here. What I want to do today is, given the upsurge in international and primarily mainland Chinese students at the University of Iowa, it's very visible for anyone who walks around the streets here, to kind of set a historical and national context with some stories and some statistics and then offer a few, some information and a few observations on the situation here at the University of Iowa. Of course, the history of Chinese students coming to America or the US is embedded in the histories of both countries and the history of US-China relations and I don't have time to go into all of that but I'll try to make illusions to key events when appropriate. So, up to the Korean War, actually, a few years after the Korean War, when the US imposed a ban on Chinese students returning to mainland China because, presumably, whatever they learned in the US would become the property of the communists. So, between, from the 20s up to about 1954, 22,000 Chinese studied in the United States, approximately, and we can divide this into various phases but the first phase began under the last Imperial Dynasty which had various movements to try to modernize and become as strong as the Western powers. It's generally said that the first Chinese to be educated in a US university was a man named Yung Wing who's also known as Róng Hóng, who lived from 1828 to 1912, he was from Guangdong, a province in southern China, where he had attended missionary schools and that's, his English was very good. He graduated from Yale College in 1854. Upon his return to China, he worked as an interpreter for missionaries and then he began to work for the government, he was sent back to the US with the mission of buying equipment capable of producing heavy weapons but he was able, he very much valued his US education and he actually had become a naturalized US citizen while studying at Yale. He persuaded the Qing Court to send a group of young Chinese to the US to study western science and engineering. So, China's first study abroad program dispatched 120 Chinese boys, average age 12 and a half, to study in New England beginning in 1872. They had an enthusiastic welcome, homes for the first group of 30, a request for homes, drew responses from 122 families in Connecticut and Massachusets. They attended schools, mostly private preparatory schools subsidized by the Qing Government, the Qing Court, in preparation to enter college. One account of this, as they progress swiftly in their Americanization. They change to American clothing, took up sports, and some even cut their queue, a symbol of a male's loyalty to the Manchu Emperor. In the homes of their hosts they were treated as members of the family, not boarders. They were also popular socially. Yung Wing ended up back in the United States, he was in Hong Kong for awhile, because he'd become a fugitive in China for participation in a failed reform movement and then for awhile he couldn't go back to the US either because the Chinese, the US government had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and if you were here, you could stay, but if you had left, you couldn't go back. But he did make it back and is buried in Hartford, Connecticut. Anyway, that's the first Chinese student. But the Qing dynasty canceled this project after sending a total of 120 boys in the 1880s, largely in response to the passage of the US-Chinese Exclusion Act. At that point, two of the boys had graduated from Yale and 20 others were studying at Yale, Fort Colombia, seven at MIT, few more, and about 60 others were still in prep school. 10 stayed permanently in the US, all the rest went back, not until almost 30 years later, after China's defeat by Japan in 1894 and Beijing's occupation by an eight country force in 1900, following the Boxer Rebellion did the Qing Court again sent students to America. What enabled China to send students again to America was the United States decision to remit part of an indemnity for damages caused against US persons and property during the Boxer Uprising for educational purposes. A treaty of 1901, which ended that occupation by foreign powers, set the indemnity owed to China by the eight powers involved at 334 million in those days or more than twice that with a crude interest to be repaid over four decades. The American share was almost 25 million. At the urging of the Qing Court's minister to Washington, Congress authorized a remission of about half of that, in other words, over time, the US would actually pay back half the money because it was judged to be in excess of actual damages. Now, this minister in Washington had come with this first group of 120 boys. He'd been educated at Phillips Andover Academy. He'd hoped to attend Yale or Amherst but his hopes for that were dashed when he was recalled with the other boys but he did get back and he also, in the meantime, managed to introduce his passion for baseball to China. Though it hasn't gone real far. It's, you know, in Taiwan, it's really taken off. So, it was he who really prodded the US government to return part of the boxer indemnity. So, China began sending students to the US for the second time with funding assured for a number of decades. The first group of 50 students began studying in the US in 1909. Two years later the Qing dynasty was toppled and the Republic of China was founded. But the student dispatches continued and before the Qing fell, a total of about 180 students had been sent to America. After the founding of the Republic of China, up to 1925, from 1912 to 1925, about 850 students were sent, including 43 women. Now, one criteria for the women was that they have natural feet rather than bound feet, so these were fairly modern women. Foot binding had been eliminated in parts of China but it still was, in some parts, it was still pervasive. These were already well-educated, often missionary educated, young women. Other funding avenues began to open and wealthy families started to send children on their own but this indemnity remission fund continued to attract some of the brightest students in China to US study. One of them, Qian Xuesen, became a prominent rocket scientist at Caltech in the late 1940s. During the McCarthy period, he was arrested and eventually deported to China on charges of being a member of a communist cell at Caltech. You know, can sure, can imagine how he felt about the US government at that point. Before World War II, and particularly before China entered The War of Resistance against Japan, which is what they call their part of World War II. In 1936, about a thousand Chinese students went to the US to study. During the war years, the number dropped to fewer than 100 a year. After 1949, the flow of students from mainland China to America stopped completely. But some were still there studying. After the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the US banned Chinese students in the country from returning to China. And also, enticed those who were here to stay by liberally dispensing permanent resident status. Some persisted in their demands to return to China were imprisoned. The ban was not lifted until 1955. My advisor in college who actually was not from the US, he was from Canada, was studying at Harvard for a doctorate in economics when the People's Republic of China was founded and he and his wife had to slip away without alerting the American authorities to where they were ultimately destined because he decided he wanted to go to the motherland, he had grown up in Canada in British Columbia and he spent about 10 years in China and luckily came back before the start of the cultural revolution or he would've been in big trouble. It's worth recalling that only in 1965 did US immigration law eliminate exclusionary restrictions against Chinese providing an annual quota of, immigration quota of 20,000 and at this point number of students from Taiwan began to grow as did the number of people who stayed to become immigrants from Taiwan but students from the mainland would not start coming again for another 15 years or so. Of the 22,000 or so Chinese students thought to have studied in the US between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. Scholars estimate that, at various times, 10 to 20% became US citizens. So, a good proportion went back. For those who went back, what were the repercussions of a US education? Well, the rationale for bringing the Chinese to the US to study went both ways, of course. From the Western perspective, beginning with the missionary spirit of the latter half of the 19th century, educating the Chinese was the least expensive and most efficient way to Christianize them. Western education also was thought to be civilizing to inculcate Chinese with attributes of altruism, courage, sincerity, patriotism, and intellectual heft. On the Chinese side, the reasoning actually was to protect and strengthen Chinese culture through the acquisition of technical knowhow. The ambition of building strong battleships and powerful cannons that could compete with those of the western powers. But protecting tradition was also a reason not to send students abroad and opponents of study abroad believed that US education eroded China's cultural ideals. Critics of that very first program thought the boys had become too Americanized, playing baseball, dating American girls, some converting to Christianity, showing less and less respect for their supervisors, and some purportedly even forgetting their Chinese, although that maybe apocryphal. Nevertheless, many of those teenage boys who returned to China in 1881, with the abrupt termination of their US studies, later made their mark in many fields, engineering, industry, banking, the military, civil services. Interestingly, only one of that group of 120 became a revolutionary against the Qing regime. By contrast, many of the students who went to Japan at the turn of the century, their numbers exceeding 12,000 by 1906, returned to China to participate in overthrowing the Qing dynasty. Similarly, many went to France in the decade around World War I would come back to become prominent communist revolutionaries, among them Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Subsequent contingence of Chinese studying in the US up to the second World War produced widespread achievements as well, they were statesmen ambassadors, university presidents, supreme court justices, philosophers, scientists, writers, editors, and musicians, artists, and so on and so forth. For the most part, throughout the period, up til the founding of the People's Republic, US education was a privilege of the rich and also monopolized by students from the costal provinces from where more than half and some years up to 80% of the Chinese students came from but many of the return scholars from that subsequent period during the Republican government came to hold important offices in the central government. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, Chinese students with a US education who had returned or anyone with western ties for that matter, were dubbed cultural compradores of western imperialism, they were automatically suspect, they were usually subject to abuse during political campaigns and they were particularly maltreated during the cultural revolution decade. But from the mid 1980s onward, well, early 1980s onward, as China became more open and reform minded, official and unofficial views began to change dramatically at the same time as views remained ambivalent about Chinese going abroad. Those who were now able to start studying abroad were patriotic pioneers in China's modernization but they also could become turn cults and stay abroad and then perhaps return to China as foreign citizen visitors who were called fake overseas Chinese. As plans for normalization of Sino-US relations took place in 1978, you may remember they were normalized and our liaison office upgraded to a full embassy as of January 1st 1979, so did negotiations on student exchanges. It started as part of a larger discussion of science and technology exchange. The American's involved in these early negotiations had not come prepared with a program for student exchange but floated the idea and the Chinese readily embraced it. The American delegation asked the Chinese how many students they wished to send and the Chinese reportedly replied, how about 500? The number was reduced to 50 to start. The 80s and 90s saw that first influx and these were almost entirely graduate students, Chinese government funded or supported by US government programs and US university fellowships and scholarships. By 1981, very early, about 6500 mainlanders were studying in the US, most in pretty prestigious universities. Approximately half were Chinese government sponsored exchange students and scholars, usually older, married university graduates, male, and 85% in science technology, engineering, math. Those who managed to come independently with funding from this side primarily were generally younger, unmarried, and often female and majored in more diverse fields. So, those of you who befriended Chinese graduate students in the 80s and early 90s, got to know some of these students. Enormous obstacles faced those who sought permission to study abroad without going through government testing. Upon arrival, of course, they had all sorts of adaptations to make to different pedagogy to social and cultural life, language issues, cultural misunderstandings, and many grappled with whether to stay in the US or return home. Yet this early generation had some incredible strengths forged largely through political ferment in China. Many had experience with manual labor in farms and factories, many had lived in the countryside, they had good knowledge of their society, they had traveled widely as red guards, for instance, they had been raised in times when most people had very little, and they knew how to fend for themselves, they knew how to make a life with very few resources. And, of course, this contrast greatly with students who are coming today, were often accused of being spoiled, I don't think they're more spoiled than our domestic students, frankly, but, you know, they have to learn to do their laundry, they have to learn to cook, they have to learn to get around, all of our undergraduates do. In our day, of course, it was different. For many of the Chinese graduate students who came early on the decision to stay was sort of made for them following the crackdown on the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations. In the US, Congress passed the Student Protection Act in 1992 which allowed any Chinese student or visiting scholar to remain in the US and more than 57,000 chose to file within the year they were given for this privilege, some out of sympathies and even activism around the demonstrations in China, others out of self-interest because they decided that they would rather be in the United States. They hadn't necessarily been political activists but they were benefiting from that law. By then after the Tiananmen demonstrations and kind of a chill period, student exchanges picked up again and began to accelerate but still primarily graduate students. By the early 2000s, more than half a million Chinese students had gone abroad to study, most of them coming to the US. In the year 2002 alone, about 65,000 Chinese students were enrolled in US universities and by then they accounted for the highest percentage of international students on many American campuses and nationwide. And then by about the mid to late 2000, nots, oughts, the influx of undergraduates began. This was very new. And there were many reasons for this. It was partly a baby boomlet. It was partly the rise of China's middle class and the ability of, usually educated parents to pay for the education of their youngsters. It was partly the single child policy where parents wanted what was best for their children and there was increasing criticism of the Chinese education system. There also was very intensive recruiting by universities like ours that not only wanted to be increasingly global universities, which is a most-worthy goal, but wanted to survive financially, which is another worthy goal, and international students are out-of-state students and pay out-of-state tuition, basically twice what Iowa students pay. So, if you hear Chinese students occasionally grumbling about being looked at as cash cows, you know, there's a little, we don't really look at them like that but that was part of the impetus for going after them. As, let's see, by 2012, there were nearly 200,000 Chinese students in the US. By 2013, about 235,000. And as of January this year, according to the latest figures from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Chinese students holding active US student visas numbered almost 290,000, so, as you can see, it's going up and up and up and up. More than Europe, South America, Africa, Australia, Canada combined as a source of international students. Chinese students now account for about 30% of foreign students studying in the US. China sends more than twice as many students to the US as does the second largest source country, India, with South Korea right behind India. So, what are the Iowa figures? Well, as of fall 2013, and I guess we will soon get the fall 2014 figures, there were just over 4,000 international students and scholars at Iowa and that figure, I'm pretty sure, Donna, you can correct me if I'm wrong, includes visiting scholars, post-docs, medical residents, and so forth. And of that, 4,049, 2,266 were from mainland China, the People's Republic of China. Of that 2266, 1673 were undergraduates and this is from virtually zilch as of the mid-2000s, 2000 oughts, you know, but early 2000s. And then another 428 were graduate and professional students and the rest are post-docs and scholars and so forth. Mainland Chinese students are 10% of our undergraduate enrollment now, they are 20% of the undergraduate majors in the College of Business, and my good friend Jennifer Blair is here and she works with them and does a really wonderful job which is auspicious for the university as a whole because Lon Moeller who was dean of undergraduate programs at Tippie College of Business is now Associate Provost for undergraduates for the whole university, so we'll see what he does. So, of course, Iowa's ties to China, and most of you I'm sure have them, have been strengthened over the years by graduate students who stay here to teach and work, Chinese adoptions, native Iowanians who travel across the Pacific to live, work, and study and some of you have done that and some of you have kids who have done or are doing that. One of my kids is a jazz musician in Beijing, believe it or not. Xi Jinping's visit to Iowa last year, of course, highlights the longstanding political, cultural, economic interactions between Iowa and China. And we could go on and on and on and on. But on the students side, as I said, reception of Chinese students goes back to the 1920s and 30s when people came here for technical and managerial study. Another source of more recent interaction is the international writing program founded by Chinese writer Nieh Hua-ling Engle and her husband Paul Engle which has brought scores and scores of famous Chinese authors to Iowa and many of them have written about Iowa and Iowa City and the University of Iowa upon their return, so there are people in China who know about this North American university city and the famous international writing program and the Midwest Farmland and the Miandering Iowa River and so on, you know, this beautiful idyllic place. The most recent student arrivals, of course, differ from their predecessors. They are younger, they have totally different backgrounds and ambitions, they have different family backgrounds, most of them, although not all, don't have siblings. They are coming in greater numbers. They know a lot more about the global environment, global culture. They come wearing brand name fashion, right? They aren't necessarily coming to fulfill the American dream like prior generations of immigrants nor are they necessarily coming as proud representatives of the motherland seeking to contribute to modernization. Although, they're proud of their country but many of them are not sure what they want to do and many of them have a lot of parental pressure to just come home and make a comfortable life for themselves which was not the case for these first influxes of graduate students who could not expect to have a comfortable life on going back. China wasn't yet prosperous enough. Many simply wish to learn at our universities, perhaps land a job in the US and gain a few years experience then return home. I don't know how seriously they take Xi Jinping Chinese dream, you know, which is both extolled and mocked but that may actually be their own dreams are what's on their mind. When Chinese students come here, they encounter a lot of challenges and I would refer you to an article written by a student of ours named Shen Liu that was published in something called Iowawatch. Do any of you know about Iowawatch? Okay, I'm going to give a plug for Iowawatch and when you get back to your computer, you must look for Iowawatch.com. It is the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, it is part of a network of what is now a couple of hundred, mostly locally based, public affairs and investigative journalism organizations in the country that are largely grant supported and donation supported but also seeking new ways of funding, not advertising, and the Iowawatch, Iowa's version, makes it's content available to all media in the state and tries to do stories that aren't being covered. So, couple of months ago, they published a story on the difficulties Chinese students face when they come here and presented actually a kind of challenge to the university to create conditions that would be more likely to ensure that Chinese students have a successful experience. It's a very, very complicated situation. One of the major complications stems from the fact that probably the majority of the Chinese undergraduates who come here have applied through agents in China, they are not dealing directly with the university and so, communications from the university are not necessarily making it back to them. The agents have also helped them with the preparation of essays, reference letters, pulling everything together, filling out forms, and so even though students are required to take the test of English as a second language, there is no way of ensuring that they actually have authored or finalized everything the university is getting from them and, as a result, students who are not prepared are accepted to Iowa, even students who do well on the TOEFL. They have studied to the test, they have not studied in English unless they've gone to a school that really, high school that has a big emphasis on English or in other ways have developed a facility with the language. And so, through no fault of its own, the university ends up with unprepared students and then students come and have to take English language and they're disgruntled and the ESL program, although it's getting increasing resources, is battling for the same wonderful ESL teachers that campuses across the country want and actually has problems recruiting for the expertise it needs. So, part of it stems from this agent issue. But other problems stem from the lack of a sort of infrastructure and organizational system to help Chinese students, not necessarily integrate and become American because they don't necessarily want to do that but to be greeted and integrated and treated like domestic students and similarly, domestic students have not been explicitly prepared to welcome international students. So, you might say it's an individual matter that these kids have to learn to get along and make friends and see the benefits of being at a global university. But it's also an institutional matter because the University of Iowa has to create those conditions and the university has started to wake up as of, you know, a year or two ago. It stated to realize, ooh, there are lots of young Chinese here and they're not all happy. And faculty and staff started to mumble, you know, mumble and grumble that we weren't doing enough for them. And so, a lot is happening now. For instance, used to be if you arrived at the Cedar Rapids airport from China to go to school here, sometimes a Chinese student organization would send someone to pick you up, sometimes you might have a friend who would pick you up or a friend of a friend, sometimes the Chinese Church in North Liberty would pick you up and help you get settled and hope you open a bank account and help you get furniture. Now the university is starting to meet students at the airport which, to me, is like wow, yes. From very simple things like that to the much more complicated issues of helping undergraduates learn to learn from each other in the classroom. So, I think we're at a point where a lot is happening and I could blather on and on and on but instead I'll end by just reading a little bit from the memoir of a Chinese student who came to the US in the 20s. He was from Hunan province, his name was Chun Chur and he studied mining engineering at several universities, took summer jobs, cutting up fish, picking seaweed and chopping wood in California. He later would join the communist party, he would fight in the Spanish Civil War and return to China but he recalls in a reminiscence published in 1925 that he'd lived with six other Chinese students which is another issue here, Chinese students tend to stick to Chinese students. They did their own cooking, it took time to adjust to the US classroom, taking lecture notes was a challenge, but in six months time, he wrote, I became a full-fledged American college student so far as studies were concerned. I could even see the jokes the Profs used to pull in classrooms so that I could laugh as heartedly as the natives whereas in the beginning, when there were roars of laughter, I only sat in my seat looking like a jackass. He also went back to describing his arrival on a steamboat landing in San Francisco. A small group of us were especially glad because our plans and destinations were settled and there was nothing more about which to worry. But it never dawned upon me or anyone else that it was all blind optimism, that we were running into a peril, the peril of cutting ourselves off from the historic culture, exclusively our own, and that we might be giving up something beautiful and deep to make room for business and jingoism. Now I wonder, after a few years of American college life, how many of us think of all this while we are working, attending classes, or visiting ice cream parlors? Today, by the way, it's football and frozen yogurt but I'm sure Chinese students who have come for their college educations here are reflecting on the same sorts of things. That's all. - [Janet Lyness] Are the Chinese undergraduate students at the U of I less well prepared than our American students considering not only English language skills? - [Judy Polumbaum] Of course you can't generalize about either Chinese students or US students and there's tremendous fear in the United States of this, you know, educational attainment in other countries of overtaking US educational attainment and periodic reports showing that. Students in Shanghai, high school students in Shanghai, score much better on everything than high school students in the US. What these reports fail to say is that Shanghai is not representative of China and there are tremendous inequities in education throughout China but I think for the most part, Chinese students who come here as undergraduates are strongly prepared in math and often in some of the sciences, many of them gravitate toward business, engineering, fewer go into humanity, social sciences, and the arts, and the, I've been told by students in the College of Business that Chinese students are looked upon as a sort of stat-wizes, the number wizes and for group projects, it's assumed that they're going to do that part of the project. A kind of pigeonholing which the Chinese students don't appreciate, you know? They, too, want to be creative. So, I think, really, English language and overcoming residents to interact with domestic students and domestic students, you know, having more opportunities and prodding and education in reaching out to Chinese students is the answer. I mean, I think there are, you know, there are enough equivalences ultimately so that all these under graduates are coming unprepared, let's it face, that's why we've got to teach 'em. - [Janet Lyness] With more Chinese students in the College of Business, is the financial incentive for the College of Business administration to admit Chinese students or is there an incentive for them to do that? And then does the college share in the non-resident tuition or does this goes to the university's general fund? And I do have a note that somewhere else says it's actually three times the amount of the instate students not twice as much for the-- - [Judy Polumbaum] Oh, okay. Can I see that? - [Janet Lyness] Yes. - [Judy Polumbaum] This is a complicated one. Well, I'm not privy to all the ins and outs of the university's finances. Maybe Jennifer you can help me, it's my understanding that College of Business students have to meet a certain threshold in GPA and certain kinds of classes. Right. So, given that 10% of the undergraduate student body, approximately, as of last year, it may be a little higher this year, I'm not sure, are international students and 20% of Tippie College undergraduates are international students and nowadays when we say international students, we're usually referring to Chinese students although there is a sprinkling from other countries. You know, it seems, Chinese students are disproportionately prepared to pass the qualifications to be business majors, so, I don't think it's the College of Business actively recruiting them, I think it's their own predisposition or, in some cases, their parents urging that they study a major in business. And then, non-resident tuition, again, I mean, I assume the college shares. They're very complicated funding formulas and the college, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences may not share as in exactly the same proportions as other colleges, I just don't know. Is there anyone who can address that better? You know, it's in the interest of the financial people that keep all of this as opaque as possible, right? - [Janet Lyness] Okay, I'm going to put several of these together because they're somewhat related. Okay, so, what is the University of Iowa doing to prepare domestic faculty, staff, and students for welcoming international and Chinese students? And similarly, what can Iowans and the University do to integrate in national foreign students into domestic students social cultures? And is there a particular US college or university that's doing the best job in welcoming Chinese students and why and what is it that they're doing? - [Judy Polumbaum] Okay, well, I, again, would go back to the College of Business and also the College of Engineering which have people tasked specifically to address the experience of international students. And the College of Liberal Arts is the biggest, the College of Liberal Arts gets them all, in any case, so it needs to be the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that's doing it. It's being done in smaller ways in some of the smaller colleges that rely a great deal on Liberal Arts and Sciences for their curriculum both general education requirements and some of the other requirements. So, you know, I would like to see a university ZAR appointed who's someone like Jennifer Blair and I would nominate her as a matter of fact, I've told her this. To take responsibility for pulling together all the different things that effect the international undergraduate student experience. Well, maybe Lon Moeller will bring you into the, who knows. Lon Moeller hired her for Tippie, so maybe he will hire her for the university. I mean, I think that would be fantastic 'cause there are a lot of things going on and they're all desperate and they're taking place in different places and people are very attune to the issues now but they're not coordinated and Joel Brown, who's sitting here, took the initiative to organize and get university sponsorship for an international student welcome this year. Welcome! You know, we're happy you're here. Not just orientation, you must do this and this is how you register and take these courses but let's have fun, you're here. And it was a huge hit, apparently, and the university has bought into it and it's going to do it every year and you ask yourself, does it really take, does it really take students begging for things or going out and doing it on their own before the institution says yeah, that's a good idea? I mean, the institutions work slower than our students, obviously, but in some cases, we have to figure out how the institution maybe can start getting ahead of some things. So, there are a lot of programs. I mean, simply going to the airport to pick people up, that's a huge deal. Having more domestic students involved in international activities. Because if you just have international activities for international students, it further ghettoizes the international students. What do faculty and staff learn? Well, we have a tremendous proportion of faculty and staff at Iowa who are very welcoming and hospitable to international students. I think a big problem for many faculty is they are trying to cram so much content into their courses that they don't have time to reflect upon and adopt exercises, activities, that would recognize that they have a diversity of students there in their classes and that sometimes these students need a little bit of prodding to notice each other and to appreciate each other. But, for sure, if instead of just using buzzwords like diversity and global university, we could start introducing even small ways that faculty can use the classroom setting to get students interacting better. I think that would be great. But, you know, there's a whole lot that could be done that needs to be done and that is being done too. - [Janet Lyness] This is a little change of topic and we're running out of time, unfortunately, but could you talk a bit about the Bureau of Chinese government responsible for overseeing Chinese students citizens, Chinese citizens abroad, especially with regard to oversight of students? - [Judy Polumbaum] Well, let's talk first about the American government entities responsible for overseeing American students abroad. One of the most astonishing educational experiences of my life, or experiences of my educational career was when I came back from 10 months of field work in China and was getting ready to put together my dissertation and I got a phone call in my student apartment at Stanford where I lived with my husband and two little boys from the FBI office in San Francisco. They said oh, we hear that you've been in China and this was 1988. I went yeah. Oh, well, we're interested in people who go to interesting places and we'd like to talk to you. I said uh, anything I have to share with the world will be in my publications, thank you very much. Goodbye. You know but it's surprising. So, of course our governments monitor us. I mean, the Chinese government monitors it's students, the US government monitors it's students, the Chinese government may be more practiced and organized about it but it happens. The Chinese Ministry of Education, technically, is the organization that would be overseeing or looking into students abroad although because they're not increasingly, these students in the US are not sent by the Chinese government and their coming here has nothing to do with government programs. So, the government cannot control where they go and what they do and the government is not paying for them. But there are educational, you know, vice consuls at all the Chinese consulates who try to keep track of who's here and what's here and you can be sure if there's, you know, an anti-communist party of China demonstration at the University of Iowa, there will be people from the Chicago consulate who are, you know, looking into it. It happens but, essentially, and I guess Chinese students who are here can correct me if I'm wrong but it's not my impression that the Chinese government is actively tracking you and keeping in touch. There maybe spies among you, you know, that the Taiwanese government was notorious for sending spies among students from Taiwan who studied in the US. It's up to you to figure out who they are. But it's my impression that it's not like a heavy presence on the Chinese students here if that answers the question at all. - [Janet Lyness] Okay, thank you. The time has come to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City for Relations Council, I'd like to again thank Judy Polumbaum for her presentation on Coming to America: The Chinese Student Experience in the United States. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa international programs, the University of Iowa's honors program, and the Stanley U of I foundation support organization for their generous support. And again would like to thank today's financial sponsors, Mason K Braverman and Ken Hubbell. Now, Judy, as a small token of our appreciation, we would like to present you with a very coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug and we thank you very much for joining us today, so. - [Judy Polumbaum] And they're last question, I'm happy to talk to people afterwards. - [Janet Lyness] As a reminder, if you wish to renew your membership or purchase a new prepaid meal plan for 2014, 2015, you may do so at the back of the room or you may call us at 319-335-0351 or write to us at the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council 1120 University Capital Center, Iowa City, 52242. And thank you again for joining us and we are adjourned.