the Sam Jackson College Experience

Yes, Virginia, there are blue skies in Beijing... sometimes.

你 好 from Beijing! I have been here in China since the start of September, and this week classes finally got started here at Beida (Peking University), a week behind Yale’s schedule. So far my experience in the Peking University-Yale Joint Undergraduate Program has been quite good, though China has a lot to take in. This is the first of an ongoing series of letters / updates I’m going to do my best to issue regularly while I am here for the semester.

What have we done so far?

• Arrived September 1
• Settled in and explored Beijing, going on several sight-seeing trips
• From Sept 6-10 we went on a trip to Yunnan Province, which was very interesting – more on that soon!
• Classes started September 14
• Currently experiencing life here in Beijing and China!

In this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m here in China, and share some first impressions. More detailed posts to come on the other points above as well as some of what is mentioned here.

Let me just first give a brief overview of why I’m here, since I never really elaborated on it before. I have always wanted to study abroad, although the country of choice has historically been France – hence the 7 years of French, etc. However, after I had completed my language requirements with an L5 French course at Yale, I decided to take Chinese. I wasn’t sure at the time (last fall) whether or not I would end up studying in China, but Yale offers a lot more resources for study in East Asia than it does for Western Europe, unfortunately.

For Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you have options like the Light Fellowship for fully-paid intensive language study available to you. I would have ideally been studying here in China this semester on a Light fellowship; unfortunately, you have to be starting 4th Semester or higher Chinese to study in a Light-approved program during the year. I didn’t want to go on a summer program and sacrifice the season to 80-characters-a-night of Chinese homework, among other reasons, so that option was out. Still, there was the Yale-PKU program, which I applied to and decided to go on last spring.

I still haven’t answered the questions “Why China, why now?” The reasons are straightforward: Why China? I feel very certain that the China-US bilateral relationship will be the most important one of any two nations in the coming century. No other two countries have as much combined power to effect change in the world – for good or ill. I therefore feel I have essentially a moral imperative to better understand China and its people, culture, and trajectory, because whatever course I choose to take in my life, I’m sure China will overlap to at least some degree. As for the latter question – what better time than the present?

Now, onto my (first) first impressions!

The very first thing I noticed, and the thing that I continue to notice the most, has to do with pollution and air quality. But, this topic merits its own post, so I’m going to leave it aside for now. For the moment, let me just say that while I am becoming a little bit used to it, the perpetual haze serves as a continuing reminder of what sacrifices have been made for the sake of “modernization.” So, aside from that:

China is a lot less exotic – at first brush – than I had imagined. No immediate, overwhelming culture shock – not like going to Texas or Las Vegas, for example ; ) ! In all seriousness, though, although China is a very ‘different’ place from my familiar America, my expectations have been in line with what I’ve experienced, generally speaking. In places where I have been ’surprised’ it has been at how accessible Beijing has been to me, with just 1 year’s worth of Chinese study. No doubt, a lot of work from the Olympics 2008 buildup has paid off for me in this regard, with the subways helpfully having both English announcements and Pinyin / English station names, since I don’t always know all the station title characters! (For a look at the current subway system, and how fast new additions are expected to be brought online, check out this map – dashed lines are subway lines under construction or planning).

Modern China is aptly described as a country undergoing immense changes, and in this regard there are everywhere great contradictions and idiosyncrasies. Wandering around Beijing one can be successfully lulled into thinking China is really well developed, leaping forward into the future. The truer picture of the city – as microcosm of China – is often just concealed behind thin walls, secret alleys and courtyard houses and markets hidden away out of sight. The hustle and bustle of modern construction draws much attention, but can’t always distract from old and beautiful buildings several stories shorter, paint peeling and fading after decades of neglect. Other times, though, it’s possible to get away from this same hustle and bustle and appreciate the thousands of years of history which lead up to today’s China. There are many sites in wonderful condition. Tragically, for every great historical site – in either good or poor condition – there seems to be some complementary “10 times more beautiful and wondeful” palace or temple which was inevitably destroyed by Westerners in the 19th century or Chinese in the 20th. Many, however, have been rebuilt.

Weiming Lake, peking university - from wikimedia

This complicated situation is very obvious at our school here, Peking University, known in China as Beida, short for “Beijing Da Xue” (Beijing University, 北京大学). Beida was created from a combination of other campuses, some of which were once royal gardens; many of its buildings are old, historic, and very beautiful. Others are new modern classroom and science buildings which would not look out of place on many an American college campus or office complex. Of the former category, many have seen interior renovations, but cry out for help maintaining their facades; others are just in desperate need of repairs, period.

As far as facilities and infrastructure is concerned, it’s clear we’re not at Yale anymore. Some of the dorms here do not have any showering facilities, and students may have to walk 5-15 minutes outside to go take a shower, because the plumbing simply isn’t in place. In this regard, our program has its own showers indoors – a real luxury : ). To be fair, a lot of what we see here is merely reminiscent of the kind of expansionary construction seen at college campuses in times which had both a combination of bad architectural taste and financial distress – Wesleyan until recently, anyone? Though, to be fair to our Middletown neighbor, what I’m describing here is really a whole different category. I’ll take some pictures soon.

All in all, despite my well-known proclivities for highly vocal complaining, I don’t have very much to really say at this time. I’m in a good “frame of expectations” right now, so while I am definitely appreciating Yale more! I’m able to have a good time here, too. Things are not perfect, but they’re good enough. As time goes on, maybe this will wear thin and I’ll start to get more frustrated, but on the whole things are quite OK. The myriad disadvantages and inconveniences in daily life here are small prices to pay for the chance to get to live in China and experience it first-hand, with Chinese roommates, as opposed to the isolated “international island” that all other schools experience in their study-abroad programs here with Beida. One of our professors, a Chinese graduate of Yale Law School now teaching us at PKU, told a funny joke at the opening ceremony: “PKU is my mother school, and Yale is my father, and now they have had a beautiful child, the PKU-Yale Joint Program! However, as you may know, China has a very famous one-child policy, ensuring that it remains a very unique program…”

Our Chinese roommates are all very nice, thoughtful and open to creative exchange, and I am really enjoying getting to understand China better through them and my time here. You learn a hundred times more from a month here than you could just trying to read about the place – or at least, you learn different, on-the-ground knowledge and understanding. Experiences from everyday life build on one another into a real appreciation and understanding, it seems.

China can’t be reduced to a stereotype or a single two-dimensional picture. I don’t expect to really “get” China after just 4 months here, but I hope to have a better grasp of the place than I did before I came, and that much seems certain.

More updates to come!

Though we have seen college blog networks come and go over the last few years, there is one especially promising network on my radar that I thought I would share with everyone today. The College Blog Network is a recent entry to the scene but more blogs join daily. It’s intended to facilitate communication between student and other college bloggers (with .edu e-mail address). You can create feeds of the general college blogging firehose, get links to new blogs, compile favorites, vote for the best, etc.

I wanted to encourage all readers with .edu email addresses to both sign up their own blogs, and also to go to the site and give the current Yale blogs a “thumbs up”! You have to register, but it only takes a second to do so.

I saw that TCBN was advertising for “college blogs” on some search engines, and driving traffic in some other ways, and I hope to see some strong growth here. The site is developing a great blog widget, which you can see in action on the homepage and at rocloop.com right now. Once it is less beta-y, I might try to put it up here.

Anyway, classes are over for most people (I have one which meets during reading period) and I have 3, 20 page final papers due in the next week and a half or so, and will have to blog correspondingly less. In the meantime, check out the archives for my blog, and go look for other interesting posts on TCBN! And don’t forget to bump this site and any others you find interesting : )

This is what one of my professor’s did today–not with any ill intent, but with potentially catastrophic results!

Step 1: Assign a 20 page long research paper, worth 70% of the course grade. Have it be due May 5th.

Step 2: On April 22nd, send out this e-mail (names changed):

Dear [course] students,

In response to queries:

The paper is due this Thursday. You may bring it to class, or if need be, bring it by 5 pm to room # of [building]. Give it to [name] at the main desk, or, if she is not there, anyone else in the office.

The papers will be graded and returned to [name] by May 11, and will be there in the fall if you don’t get them this spring.

Also — don’t forget! — in addition I want an electronic copy.

Best,

[Professor]

Step 3: Success! Fewer papers to grade because, imagining themselves to have only 2 days to complete their probably unstarted 20 page papers, the students’ heads have all exploded.

Step 4: For plausible deniability, send out another e-mail, a little bit later, acknowledging your mix-up:

Dear [class] Class:

Big mistake on my part! i confounded our due date with that of my other class. The real due date is May 5, with the same procedures to be followed as in the last e-mail. Don’t forget the electronic version.

Sorry!

[Professor]

Aiee!!! In all fairness, this was just a simple mixup between two classes’ final paper due dates, and not some ingenious attempt to drive part of the class insane, but it certainly caused me a fair amount of moral trauma! I read of the message just before going to a meeting with another professor to discuss topics for a separate 18 page paper, and was somewhat visibly shaken… : ( Still, the “oops” e-mail did come only 15 minutes afterwards, so that limited the time in which any drastic actions could have been taken.

Still, a message to all professors around finals time: be careful, please! For the sake of your students. : )

Yale actually has blogs that it hosts on its own, at blogs.yale.edu. They’re open to faculty, students, etc to be set up. If I knew about this, I forgot. Not the best consolidated resource for student blogs, as it doesn’t appear to be especially well utilized, but worth a look all the same. This site is separate from the special admitted students website that Yale has, which has some student bloggers on it.

I found…

• the Center for Language Study has a blog (and a twitter–language labs are often very trendy)
• A lot of information about Yale’s Windows server infrastructure from Ken, who works for Yale ITS.
• Beth Castle, another person who works at Yale but is not a student
• The best one of all is perhaps this old defunct blog about a Labrador retriever puppy (not to discredit the other blogs, just to showcase my love of puppies)
• Interesting academic blogs (mostly now all abandoned) on projects like ethnographies of Islam in Egypt.
• A very cool art blog called Range of Vision, from Ken, technical director of the Yale center for Digital Media Center for Arts at Yale (I was afraid it was related to DMCA–digital millenium copyright act). Married to Beth, I think? Hasn’t been updated in a year.

… and a few more. But essentially, no one was home. There were a few official blogs for Yale institutions of one or another variety, but nothing really especially active. Does no one know about the blogs? Were all the bloggers abducted by aliens? Anyone with a NetID can make one. They are blocked from being indexed by search engines, which might stop some from getting involved: I know there would be opportunity for abuse, but it can be very limiting. Apparently “This service was developed in response to a number of requests from students, faculty, and staff for a publishing tool kit that would allow people to post and maintain blogs for a variety of topics.” — but I’m not sure where all these people requesting blogs went.

What doesn’t exactly make sense:

What you should know. Privacy, commenting, etc. All accounts on blogs.yale.edu are considered “personal space.” While many bloggers intend for their material to be widely distributed and easily accessible, we need to balance the ability to publish with the privacy of users. In line with this policy, we have disabled search engines from indexing the content of blogs.yale.edu, which means that a Google search will not find your blog. If you would like to publicize your blog you are free to do so. There is, however, an internal search engine that you can use to explore blogs.yale.edu

Why not make this a user-adjustable option? If the privacy is of the utmost concern, what’s the point of enabling an internal search which could turn up results? It just feels like a bit of a strange situation here, where there is clearly uncertainty with what to do with this pilot program.

Here’s the Yale Alumni Magazine’s take on them:

September/October 2005
It’s like traveling back in time to when only geeks knew how to navigate the Internet: in April, the university launched the pilot version of a tool that will host blogs for students, faculty, and staff. As of mid-August, though, the Yale University Weblogs site had not yet been publicized, and the early adopters were mostly IT types from around the campus. But not all the posts are about “OVID interface problems” or “Site e-mail aliases in Sakai”: you can also turn up some nice pictures of a Labrador puppy named Willie and speculation about the plot of the new Dukes of Hazzard movie.

Nothing seems to have changed, although there sadly haven’t been any updates about Willie for several years. Whatever happened to the development of the blogging project? The university needs to move forward in technology adoption. That’s part of why I applied to be on the library policy standing university committee. We’ll see how that goes.

Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for an afternoon and you’ll see an endless stream of tourists, all constantly rubbing the same toe of the John Harvard statue (to which drunk students forever do unspeakable things).

So it’s a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they’re all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It’s true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries–the libraries, in fact, don’t require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular ‘incidents’ when people try to sneak in just to take a look… or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it’s not that Yale is special about it, it’s just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus–Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my “in a word” explanation, and skipped to the end, don’t worry! You didn’t miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don’t go inside residential college gates it’s not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction… : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.