American Universities, Scientists Longing for Inclusiveness and Openness

Tsinghua University (PHOTO: VCG)

Lately, in the new Times Higher Education annual Reputation Ranking, Tsinghua University was named the 10th most prestigious university in the world, and China also saw Peking University at 15, five universities in the top 100 and other five new universities ranked altogether, making a record 17 in the top 200.

The rankings are helping attract more and more American universities and scientists to consider Sino-American bilateral cultural exchanges and educational cooperation as opposed to visa restrictions and racial bias towards Chinese scientists.

Big progress in China's higher education gets the world's attention

Although the reputation of China's universities has been steadily rising for some time, this is the first time it has been at the elite end of the global higher education market.

"China's breakthrough into the top 10 and its results across the table show that its excellence in higher education is increasingly coming to the notice of the wider world." said Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer at Times Higher Education.

Chinese universities actively promote academic exchanges and attract foreign talents while American universities worried that visa restrictions on Chinese students endanger American innovation，according to the summary of the following opinions. Besides, scientists' fears of racial bias surge amid current Sino-Ameican relations.

American universities calling for a relaxation of visa restrictions

Some universities and institutes in the U.S. believe America's science and technology strength could be undermined by toughened U.S. visa requirements that are restricting the flow of academic talent from China.

More than 500 Chinese students banded together after their visas were rejected this year. Last year, more than 1,000 Chinese nationals had their visas revoked over similar concerns, according to data provided by U.S. State Department.

Christo Wilson, an associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, said that one of his doctoral students is from China and has been stuck outside the U.S. ever since 2020. "It takes a long period of training and a high level of very specific expertise to run some of these labor-intensive experiments," said Wilson, explaining why he couldn't delegate this Chinese student's tasks to other doctoral students.

Randy Katz, vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Berkeley, criticized the current approach as self-defeating. "Focusing on institutional affiliation to determine whether someone is a national threat is not a surgical strike but more like carpet bombing," said Katz.

Voices for inclusive and open getting loud

The U.S. government's search for spies in laboratories and businesses has stoked fear among scientists of Chinese descent and damaged collaborations with researchers in China, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 scientists.

More scientists of Chinese descent than others said they feel it is harder to obtain research funding because of their race or ethnicity, and feel they face professional challenges for similar reasons.

Andrea Liu, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is disappointed by the large disparities recorded by the survey in the attitudes of Chinese versus non-Chinese scientists.

"It is difficult for me to see how anyone who is following the news on "the China Initiative" could fully support all the investigations," she said, "We still have quite a bit of work to do to educate our non-Chinese colleagues on what has been happening."

Meanwhile, calls from scientific groups to end "the China Initiative" as it was conceived have grown louder. In September, 177 faculty members from Stanford University in California sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, asking that "the China Initiative" be stopped.

Faculty members from other top universities backed that call. The American Physical Society (APS) wrote to Biden's science adviser, Eric Lander, and Garland, asking that the government should change its approach, including renaming the initiative.