Centers
Center for World-Class Universities ( CWCU )
Research Fields: World-Class Universities, University ranking and evaluation, University planning, Institutional research
Director: Professor Nian Cai Liu
Executive Director (Contact): Dr. Ying Cheng
Tel: 86-21-3420 5429 extension 22
E-mail: cwcu at sjtu.edu.cn
Address: Graduate School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200240, China
The history of the study of world-class universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University began with the founding of Institute of Higher Education (IHE) in 1985. The first book (in Chinese) on world-class universities, Research on World-Class Universities edited by then director, Professor Ai Zhu Tao, was published in 1993. In 2007, the first text in English, titled World-Class University and Ranking: Aiming Beyond Status, was published. It was edited by Professor Nian Cai Liu, the director of IHE and by Dr. Jan Sadlak, the director of UNESCO - European Centre for Higher Education.
In 2005, the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU) was named as a strategic research unit by the Chinese Ministry of Education. This acknowledgment was made in recognition of its long tradition of providing high-quality consultation reports to the Chinese government on strategies for building world-class universities and other S&T policies. Many of these reports have attracted the attention of national leadership, government officials, university leaders and the general public.
The center began to publish the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2003 and updated it annually. Although the initial purpose of ARWU was to find the global standing of Chinese top universities, it has attracted a great deal of attention all over the world. A survey on higher education published by The Economist in 2005 commented ARWU as "the most widely used annual ranking of the world's research universities". Burton Bollag, a reporter at Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that ARWU "is considered the most influential international ranking".
The center initiated and organized the First International Conference on World-Class Universities (WCU-1) in June 2005. The second and third International Conference on World-Class Universities (WCU-2 and WCU-3) were convened in 2007 and 2009 respectively. These conferences have attracted hundreds of participants, including university presidents, government officials, top scholars and policy researchers, from more than 40 countries. Now the WCU conference is recognized as an important global platform for those who are interested in the topic of WCU. Contributions to previous WCU conferences are indexed in Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science and Humanities (CPCI-SSH) by Web of Science.
The building up of world-class universities is currently a hot issue in many countries. The CWCU will continue to be devoted to developing a database and a clearinghouse on WCU, carrying out academic studies and providing consultation reports in order to preserve, organize and generate knowledge on WCU and facilitate the application of the insights gained.
By ongoing collaboration with other units at the University, CEHD provides essential support for the university-wide goal of “Learning at SJTU”. Building upon years of research experiences, CEHD aims at becoming an exemplar of bridging theory and practice in higher education in China.