June 17, 2005

China Notes #14

Recently I have been doing a bit of research into the history of Nanjing University, the institution where I now teach, and I would like to share a bit of its story with you.

Nanjing University is one of China's top research universities; in fact, of the thousands of tertiary-level educational institutions in China there are only two (Beijing University and Qinghua University) that consistently rank higher. While Nanjing University is particularly strong in the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, it also plays a leading role in other academic fields. For example, the English department is known nationally for being strong in literature and dictionary compilation, as well as in linguistics. This reputation is one of which you all have at least some reason to be proud because Nanjing University traces its ancestry in part to a Christian university that Presbyterians had a hand in founding.

The history of all China's older universities tends to be complicated because in the early 1950s the new Chinese government conducted a significant reorganization of the existing universities, consolidating similar departments from different universities into new independent specialized institutions. But today's Nanjing University is descended in part from three colleges started by Western missionaries in the 1880s: Nanking University (Methodist); Nanking Christian College (Disciples of Christ); and a Presbyterian school for boys called Presbyterian Academy. In 1910 these schools combined to form the University of Nanking, and over the years other church bodies also joined in various aspects of the university's work.

From early in its history, the University of Nanking was also distinctive in terms of the quality of its program. Of China's Christian colleges, it had a student body second in size only to that of Yenching University (Beijing), and in a 1925 study these two universities were rated as the best of the Christian colleges in China.

One way that many of the Christian colleges contributed to China was through pioneering new fields of study. In this regard, the University of Nanking was best known for its work in agriculture and forestry. This is somewhat surprising, given the university's urban setting; however, its forestry and agriculture departments were not only among China's first, but also soon came to be among its best, and led the way in trying to bring the resources of science to the problems of rural life in China.

Throughout its history, many Presbyterians have played an important role of the life of the University of Nanking. For example, the agricultural work of the university grew initially out of the famine relief efforts of a Presbyterian missionary faculty member, Joseph Bailie, during the great drought of 1911. The pioneering rural survey work of Presbyterian Lossing Buck in the 1930s was also a major milestone in the university's agricultural work, resulting in studies which are still used as important reference material even today. Of course, the most famous is Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck, who taught as a Presbyterian missionary in the Department of English Literature from 1920 to 1933. (Faculty and graduate students here still study her life and work today.)

Like all of the Christian colleges, Nanjing University was taken over as a government educational institution in the early 1950s. However, since China and the United States re-established ties in 1979, Presbyterians have continued to serve the university in various ways. In the early 1980s, Philip and Janice Wickeri taught at Nanjing University as two of the first Americans to teach in China after the Cultural Revolution. The tie continued through Presbyterian teachers Barbara Penny and Suzanne Webber, placed at the university through the Amity Foundation (which is literally right down the street from the front gate of the campus and housed in a building that was originally the home of a Nanjing University president). And today I train language teachers in the graduate program of Nanjing University's English Department.

Even before 1949, Nanjing University was very much a Chinese university, and it has obviously been even more so since then. However, it is also an institution with which Presbyterians have engaged in a long and fruitful partnership.

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 245