UACA Friends Society

Dear Members and Friends:

Our next club event is Thursday, November 3^rd, at 6:30 pm at the China Garden Restaurant. Our speaker is Robert Daly, Director since 2007 of the Maryland China Initiative at the University of Maryland and previouslyAmerican Director of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China (2001-07).

Mr. Daly’s talk, titled “U.S. China Academic Cooperation: An Advocate’s Cautionary Note, ”addresses some troubling aspects of the great surge in recent years of academic engagement between U.S. campuses and China.As many know, this engagement is reflected in the admission of record number of mostly full tuition-paying Chinese undergraduates by U.S. universities and blossoming of China area studies course offerings and cooperative programs between U.S. and Chinese educational institutions.While acknowledging the important contribution of such engagement to intellectual enrichment and bilateral understanding, Mr. Daly observes that the desire by U.S. educational institutions to reap monetary advantage from many of these activities may come at the expense of academic values.As Mr. Daly previews:

American universities seem to be in thrall to China. The number of Chinese undergraduates on American campuses may soon eclipse the number of graduate students, Chinese-born scholars are being hired as tenure-track faculty members across the disciplines, Chinese-language programs are seeing record enrollments, and the need for interdisciplinary Chinese area studies is being re-discovered… American campuses—faculty, students, and university coffers—all stand to benefit from these developments.But there is reason to worry that this new rediscovery of China is motivated at least as much by a desire to make money from “academic cooperation” with China as it is by loftier academic motives.Many American colleges and universities now have “interests” in China that are not directly related to their academic missions.It is fitting, therefore, to ask whether promotion and protection of those interests and the desire to attract large numbers of full tuition-paying Chinese undergraduates threaten the core values that made American institutions of higher education attractive to so many foreign scholars in the first-place.We know about the glories of academic globalization; What are its perils?

Mr. Daly brings to his observations a longstanding involvement in US-China educational cooperation, as noted above, and a rich background in U.S. –China relations that includes eleven years of residence in China and spans the fields of diplomacy, education, public policy, news commentary (CNN, Voice of America), as well as arts and entertainment.

After graduating from Syracuse University, Mr. Daly joined the U.S. Foreign Service, where he worked as a Cultural Exchanges Officer at the American Embassyfrom 1987-1991. After leaving the Foreign Service, he taught Chinese at Cornell University and then worked on television and theater projects in China as a host, actor (北京人在纽约),and writer, and helped to produce Chinese-language versions of Sesame Street and other Children's Television Workshop programs.During the same period, he directed the Syracuse University China Seminar and served as a commentator on Sino-U.S. relations and Chinese affairs for CNN, the Voice of America and Chinese television and radio stations. In 2000 and 2001, prior to his tenure with Hopkins-Nanjing, he served as Director of President Clinton’s U.S.-China Housing Initiative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Daly has also interpreted for Chinese leaders, including Jiang Zemin, Yu Zhengsheng, Xu Kuangdi, and Li Yuanchao, and American leaders, including Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger,and Zbignew Brzezinski

The China Garden restaurant is located at 1100 Wilson Blvd, in Rosslyn, VA, only a couple of blocks from the Rosslyn Virginia Metro Stop (Orange and Blue Lines) and is one escalator flight above the office building entrance. (Free parking is available in the parking garage under the complex where the restaurant is located. The parking garage can be accessed from Wilson Blvd. If you park in the garage, please make sure not to park in any reserved spaces. Parking tickets can be validated at the restaurant.)The event will begin with half-hour of socializing, followed by dinner at 7pm.Activities will end between 9 and 9:30 pm.Dinner will be $16/person including tip and taxes, but not drinks, which can be purchased separately. As per our usual policy, to the extent possible, conversation and table talk should be in Mandarin, and speaker and audience comments are “off the record.” Please RSVP by Wednesday, November 2nd. I look forward to seeing you all for this stimulating and thought-provoking event!.

Cheers, Carlos Da Rosa 202-669-7484