In bed with the wrong person

My mom never had to warn me. I knew to (try to) make wise decisions, and that includes making sure I know who I’m getting in bed with. I mean, the wrong girl could mean very, very bad news. No form of protection can prevent a slew of consequences that follow a mistake.

When Duke University got into bed with Shanghia Jiao Tong University (SJTU), it made a mistake. Scratch that, Duke administrators and decision-makers made a mistake. Ranked 23rd in Asia and the Middle East by US News and Reports and fifth in China by the Chinese Education Center Ltd., SJTU was most certainly a good academic institution on paper. You won’t find them in the Academic Ranking of World Universities because, well, they’re the ones that created it.

Life was not all smiles and rainbows, however. A year ago, SJTU was linked to cyberattacks directed at Google and several other companies in the United States. Like any committed partner, we ignored the signs and continued with our relationship. Then this summer, SJTU told university leaders it would not sponsor Duke-Kunshan’s appeal to the Chinese Ministry of Education for project approval, something that you think would have come up in the first couple weeks of dating.

So Duke got somewhat burned there. But alas, you must kiss a few frogs before getting Prince Charming. My experience with dramatic chick-flicks and TV shows tells me that it’s about two or three.

A year after our relationship with SJTU started to collapse, the burning sensation went away and we found another partner. Hello, Wuhan University. I don’t understand President Brodhead often, but he seemed excited about this, stating, “[w]e appear to have found a suitable partner in Wuhan University .... which has been highly respectful in our negotiations of Duke’s leadership role.” Nice, Wuhan University—I’m going to Google that.

So, Wuhan University is not ranked in US News & World Reports as one of the top 50 universities in Asia and the Middle East. No matter, it’s not like Duke cares about rankings, right? (“It is always good to see Duke recognized among the very best universities in the country,” Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, told The Chronicle in August.) It is ranked seventh in China by Chinese Education Center Ltd. and has produced 17 billionaires, according to the China University Alumni Association. SJTU may have produced more, with 25, but Duke, not included among the 10 American schools on Forbes’ “Billionaire Universities” list, has presumably produced fewer than nine. If you’re going to business school, you probably want to be a billionaire, so Wuhan may not be a bad idea

But this goes beyond statistics and into some of the same issues that broke down the relationship between SJTU and Duke. According to The Times Higher Education, former executive deputy president of Wuhan University Chen Zhaofang and former executive deputy secretary Long Xiaole were arrested based on “charges of bribery relating to [their] responsibilities for infrastructure, logistics and finance at the institution between 1999 and 2009.” These corruption cases go back to 2004, with four officials already having been tried and sentenced. The former chief of Wuhan’s logistics was sentenced to 11 years behind bars.

Granted, Wuhan is not the only university in China with a checkered past, but it should never be acceptable to partner with a university which has had a series of misconduct and criminal activity. Further, it is directly under the administration of the Education Ministry of the People’s Republic of China. Putting two and two together, we are entering into a relationship with a university with serious links to the Chinese government. Again, many universities have links to the government, but we seem to have found the only university with both a history of criminal activity and links to a government Brodhead himself said “does not share this country’s attitudes toward open inquiry, freedom of expression and free access to information.”