China campus urgently needs more UK oversight, say former staff

Have to hope that there are not degrees being awarded in life&death subjects such as medicine and engineering if there is such shoddy teaching and grade-inflation!

Oh dear. Well at least we won't have similar problems with all these new campus in Dubai and Kazakhstan, so we can be reassured to that extent at least!

This so called, University Iis a disgrace to education. I worked there for 2 years and thei issue is governance; incompetent and unethical management and leaders , especially in the language and literacy dep. A huge blight on the status of transnational education. Some good academics governed by leaders who know less than zero about looking after staff.

The academy of pharmacy is a total mess...now and possibly future

Excellent article with disturbing revelations. Higher education’s worst-kept secret?! When their former VP Academic concedes "substandard" and unis getting paid fees to mark their own branch exams!!!! The evidence has long been there online, but we look away. Truly remarkable (and telling) that Zhang, a PhD student, is the lone brave voice risking everything while her senior professor peers stayed anonymous. Day is right to insist that cross-cultural equality, inclusivity, and standards are non-negotiable. Kudos to THE and journalist for actually publishing this.

Similar substandard practices and dodgy leadership have been consistently coming up at another British joint uni, the Ningbo Nottingham University (aka UNNC). As two of its former professors scrutinised the problem in a book which cited the UNNC example as 'neoliberal dulosis' or slave-making, '[I]t is not just the look and sound of the simulacral UNNC tower that does not ring entirely true on this campus we will argue, for alarmingly we will go on to recount experiences that suggest that some students and staff—us included—were also sometimes encouraged only to sound and perform as if real academics. “Boy, have we got an education for you!”' (Fleming, Harrison 2020, p. 140) 'Inside neoliberal universities like UNNC, bullies, victims, perpetrators and witnesses alike tend to normalise and “diffract” these experiences and actions (of our own and others’ bullying) through the managerial discourses and technologies (of power and knowledge) that foster them. Bullying is systemic, in fact, or rather manifest through existing power relations to such an extent that either bullying or being bullied has become the “normal mode” of modern “academic life”. Here, bullying is coimplicated and justified by the “alleged need for control and improvement of our performance”.' (ibid, p. 180) Hopefully THE's persistent reporting and urge would attract serious oversight attention from the UK to end these academic misconduct and 'game-the-system', bringing the order back into the universities' governance. Work cited: Chinese Urban Shi-nema : Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) David H Fleming, Simon Harrison