Friendship Games should rekindle skepticism

When the Duke Blue Devils and the Georgetown Hoyas took to the hardwood in China last week, they had an ambitious if unexceptional goal: to conduct some ping-pong diplomacy while touting their university brands.

As international ventures run, ping-pong diplomacy promises low risks with good returns, and the Friendship Games gave Duke the chance to net “face” in China while goosing up its flagship international venture, Duke Kunshan University. But events may have unfolded differently—the Hoyas’ eventual punch-up with the Bayi Rockets reminds us just how risky going east can be. If a botched exhibition game can tarnish a university’s reputation in the international press, a botched international campus stands to go very poorly indeed.

Walls have gone up in Kunshan, and the time to critique the DKU enterprise has come and gone. But the enterprise is far from formed—there are curriculums left to plan, buildings left to construct and academic partnerships left to be forged. For the sake of new students and a robust public conversation, we want to recapitulate four key concerns about DKU in hopes that the campus will be better for it.

First, Duke’s choice to open its own campus poses near undue risk. Duke has pursued academic partnerships—notably, with the National University of Singapore—to great success in the past, and peers like Yale and Stanford have wasted no time emulating this model. Academic partnerships allow universities to establish a foothold abroad and facilitate genuine inter-institutional exchange without creating huge financial risks. DKU has a legal—but not an academic—partner, and its ability to forge academic partnerships in the future may be key to its success.

Second, as an American university in China, DKU must compete with western universities and China’s burgeoning higher education sector for students and tuition dollars. More than one thousand universities have been created in China in the last decade and, thanks to The Ministry of Education’s Project 985—which injected $6 billion into China’s top 39 universities in its last three-year cycle—more growth seems certain. If DKU cannot enroll enough students at the right price, Duke in Durham will be footing more of the campus’s price tag.

Third, although DKU’s academic offerings and students may not be initially up to par with its Durham counterpart, the Kunshan campus will grant Duke diplomas. This could reduce the cachet of degrees issued stateside. At the moment, DKU only has plans for Masters in Management Studies and executive Masters in Business Administration programs—diplomas that are not at the core of Duke’s degree offerings. This does not put Duke’s most prestigious degrees, like the MBA or Bachelors, at risk. Duke will endanger the prestige of these degrees if it issues them in China.

Fourth, there is no guarantee of academic freedom in China. Duke researchers will be hard-pressed to put knowledge in service of society if the Chinese government holds them back.

This does not amount to an argument against DKU—perhaps the campus’s financial and organizational potential outweigh these risks. The DKU train has left the station—but continued skepticism can tell us where to take it and when to get off.