The vice chancellor of New York University Shanghai talks to China.org.cn about its first graduates and their future plans in Shanghai.

Jeffrey S. Lehman, vice chancellor of New York University Shanghai, speaks to China.org.cn in his office in Shanghai, Nov. 17, 2017. [Photo/ China.org.cn]





Jeffrey S. Lehman, former president of Cornell University and dean of the University of Michigan Law School, currently spends 90 percent of his time in Shanghai as the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai.

Jointly established by New York University and East China Normal University, NYU Shanghai is the institution’s third degree-granting campus in NYU's global network, joining NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU's campus in New York City. It is also the first Sino-US joint venture university approved by the Ministry of Education of China. In April 2012, it was announced that Lehman would be steering the new institution jointly with Yu Lizhong, former president of NYU's local partner, East China Normal University.

Displayed in Lehman's office are various awards and a photo with President Xi Jinping. He considers Xi to be sophisticated national leader with a deep understanding regarding the effective exercising of power in a large and complicated society. This is important, as China is one of a handful of countries whose actions have global implications.

This spring, the first class of NYC Shanghai graduated with over 260 students from 33 countries. When asked what he was most proud of in the past four years, Lehman said it was the students.

"I'm so proud of our students, because they were brave to be a part of a new experiment, and also because they believed in the value of taking risks," Lehman said.

He continued,"They have to take chances, they have to speak authentically and honestly, say things that might mean disagreeing with their teachers, disagreeing with their classmates, while making arguments to justify their own beliefs. They have to be willing to change their minds; they have to do all these things in front of their classmates. I'm proud of them because when they took chances, they grew, they developed, and they became more creative, and they have succeeded."

He added that 40 percent of the Class of 2017 went to graduate schools such as Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford,"which is a very high percentage for the top universities," he said, the other 60 percent got fine jobs, working in places like Google and international organizations.

The chancellor says their students gain three competencies after they graduated from the NYU Shanghai,"First, they are completely comfortable in working in any language and in any culture, Chinese students are immersed in an English environment here and are completely at ease with being themselves and being international."

"The students also gain the creativity to give birth to new ideas, the capacity to test those ideas with critical thinking, and the courage to know that it is beneficial to put such ideas forward even if they ultimately turn out to be unsound," he said.

The recruitment for NYU Shanghai, hidden in a tower building among Shanghai's skyscrapers, is growing every year. Lehman said they plan to have 400 - 450 students next year.

"The worst part of my job is that we have to turn away the most incredible students," he said."I mean, they’ve done everything right, they study really hard, they have great grades, they invent things and some of them are concert violinist, but we don't have room for all of them. Adding more students means we have to add more high-quality faculties, so we can't go too fast."

But the good news is that the district of Pudong in Shanghai is very supportive of them, and they are going to build a larger campus within four years."We feel very grateful for all they do. It's possible to have more majors in the new campus from time to time in the future," Lehman said.

Currently most students are taking a business major, but the number is decreasing year by year."In the first year, a lot of parents told their children to major in business, but I told parents,'you want your children to make money by choosing business? Then they should not major in business, they should major in something else and get master in business later.'"

"I said to them,'go and look at Fortune 500 companies, look at the CEOs, and see what they majored in and you will not find business. You'll find history, you'll find physics, you'll find engineering, you'll find math, and most of them get a master of business later.”

But NYU Shanghai doesn't just teach,"Our faculty are very small but we publish very high-quality articles in journals as well as publishing books. They are not doing easy research, they are not simply trying to apply someone else's suggestions, they are finding problems, and then they are finding possible answers. We have seven joint research institutes with East China Normal University, and they are greatly productive."

Another great future project for NYU Shanghai is to initiate online courses for anyone who wishes to learn."NYU is a global university, and has more than 2,000 professors, a large number of them are truly distinguished leaders in their fields," Lehman explained."We have now designed a concept, a new kind of program, which will not produce degrees for NYU, offer no credentials and no certificates, but is just an opportunity to learn and it's free."

"We will have online courses," he exclusively announced to China.org.cn."Great teachers from New York will produce a set of instructional interactive videos; we will translate them into Chinese, with high-quality Chinese subtitles."

He added,"It may be possible in the future to obtain certificates for the online courses, but that will not be free. The university will have to examine the students' performances by testing or so, in order to maintain the university's reputation."