On April 27, XMU President Zhang Zongyi with Vice Presidents Yang Bin and Qiu Weijie came to visit the ICI and had a conference with the members of its leadership and faculty representatives in ICI Building. Wang Yi, Chair of ICI Council, hosted the conference.
Qin Jian, Dean of ICI, first gave a work report on the Institute. His report covered the Sino-British cooperative education institution in terms of joint management structure, cross-cultural talents training characteristics, build-up of a diversified faculty team, existing problems, and development plan for the next stage.
Then, Philip Lambert, Associate Dean of ICI, Associate Prof. Chen Wenjie, Samuel Penn, and Duncan Breeze, and young teacher representative Liao Bojing delivered speeches respectively on the current teaching achievements and practical problems of the ICI at the early stage of development and put forward their opinions and suggestions on the cooperation mechanism between UCA and XMU, discipline development, teaching mode and teaching space.
After listening to the reports and speeches, President Zhang Zongyi delivered a summary remark. He gave full recognition to the ICI for developing Sino-British cooperation and seeking innovation in spite of differences, gave high appraisals for the works created by students, and showed great confidence in the future development of the ICI. He also pointed out that, as it is a new institute and new project run in deep cooperation between the two outstanding universities in China and UK, the achievements made in less than two years had not come about easily, and he would like to express his gratitude to the ICI leadership team for their efforts, and to the UCA teaching team for their efforts in coming all the way here. He believed that the practice of Sino-Foreign cooperation was very valuable and challenging, and that the differences in culture, disciplines and ideas were the source of innovation. He hoped that the relationship between differences and tolerance would be balanced, and that the ICI would bring its advantages to the full and develop innovatively so as to facilitate the new process of “Double First-Class” construction of XMU.
The leaders from the General Office of XMU, the Publicity Department, Human Resources Office, the Office of Policy Research/Office of Development and Planning, the Academic Affairs Office, Managing Department of Social Sciences and the Zhangzhou Campus Management Committee attended the conference.
