I have been sporting a small panda brooch on my lapel for the last week – a gift from Dr Zhou Xuedong, Dean of the Dental School at Sichuan University in Chengdu. She is leading a 26-strong delegation of university leaders from China, who are in the UK for a leadership study tour. They spent a week with us at York, discussing with colleagues here the topical issues of knowledge exchange, governance, reputation build and international research collaborations.
These are topics of great importance to the leading universities around the globe. It was heartening and illuminating to discover how much we had in common with the leaders of major universities in China. As well as learning from each other, we forged a strong professional network and friendships.
The visit to York ended with the China-UK Higher Education Forum on 25 October. As well as the Chinese delegation, representatives from 60 UK universities joined the conference to discuss the various forms of partnership open to universities. These include student mobility, research partnerships, strategic alliances, overseas campuses, work placements, staff exchange, professional business training – the list goes on. And it illustrates how varied the role of universities can be in the modern world.
I’m now looking forward to a return visit to some of the universities whose leaders were in York this week – Wuhan, Shandong, Jiangnan, to name but a few - and (of course) Sichuan, where I hope to see a real panda….
Hilary Layton
Director of Internationalisation
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