New plans to strengthen Lingnan University’s internationalisation efforts

18 Feb 2016

To couple with its development direction, Lingnan University will stage a series of new initiatives to bring its internationalisation effort to a new height.
 
President Leonard K Cheng shared the upcoming plans to further strengthen the University’s internationalisation at the Chinese New Year Media Reception held on 18 February.
 
“We joined the Global Liberal Arts Alliance in 2012 and hosted its leadership meeting in March last year. Riding on Forbes’ ranking of Lingnan as one of the top 10 liberal arts institutions in Asia last year, we are exploring with our leading Asian peers the formation of an Alliance for Asian Liberal Arts Universities to promote liberal arts education in Asia. Given Lingnan’s small size in faculty and students, a typical feature of liberal arts institutions, establishing inter-university collaborative platforms is a key strategy in enhancing our University’s teaching and learning quality as well as our research profile and impact,” said President Cheng.
 
In fact Lingnan University has already had a very solid foundation in this area. About 68% of its undergraduate students spend a term studying abroad in one of its 173 international and Mainland partner institutions spread across 37 countries, or participate in short-term summer programmes. At the same time, about 300 students from around the world come to Lingnan for exchange every year, and they have greatly enhanced cultural diversity of the campus.  Furthermore, over half of its 180-plus faculty members have an international background in academic training and working experience.
 
Lingnan is exploring a number of initiatives to enhance its undergraduate and postgraduate education and academic research. For examples, collaborating with prestigious universities in the region and beyond to launch a global elite liberal arts undergraduate programme to benefit top students in Asia; co-developing international and regional taught master and professional doctoral programmes; developing inter-university research platforms to promote joint international and regional research and publication, and inter-university postgraduate platforms to promote PhD students exchange.
 
The University has started to reap benefits of its internationalization efforts. For example, Lingnan has two students selected to join the Global Liberal Arts Alliance’s pilot Global Scholar Programme, and they have already embarked on their global exchange journeys in this academic year; it established student exchange agreements with some of the other top 10 Asian liberal arts institutions including Yonsei University, Seoul National University and Waseda University in fall 2015; it signed an agreement with Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona to offer a joint Double-Master Degree Programme in Research in Economic Analysis and International Banking and Finance beginning in 2016/17; and it became a partner of the Centre for Global Higher Education jointly launched by ten institutions from Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa last month, which is the largest research centre in the world specifically focused on higher education and its future development.
 
“As these initiatives bear fruit in the near future, Lingnan University will be able to offer to our students more interesting and beneficial learning experience, to our faculty members more opportunities to excel in teaching and research in the worldwide academia, and to contribute to our wider community, our nation and the world,” said President Cheng.