The Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (VCAA) charged an IGHE Working Group with exploring the underlying principles and practices of a liberal arts and sciences education in a global context and in the context of a joint venture institution deeply informed by Chinese and US approaches to education.

The Working Group began by examining the core features of a liberal arts and science education, how Yale-NUS and NYU-Abu Dhabi sought to blend different educational philosophies, and the opportunities and challenges they navigated in doing so. It then considered the extent to which these schools offered a Western import, a cultural blending, or something new and global, and the questions that emerged as relevant for DKU.

The group then explored Chinese premodern educational traditions as one way of how DKU might further root its approach in different cultural and philosophical viewpoints. The group considered both the opportunities and the obstacles presented by further blending Chinese educational traditions with the more Western liberal arts and science model adopted from Duke University.

Last, the Working Group then turned its attention to a different kind of context: the diversity and commonalities among our own students as these influence their approach to learning and, consistent with a Chinese-inspired educational model, whether DKU might experiment with different approaches to teaching and learning that reduced the influence of grades.

This report summarizes the Working Group’s discussions of the issues above and concludes with a set of recommendations for further exploring issues related to DKU’s “rooted globalist” identity, the US, Chinese, and global sources of its educational model, and the opportunities for investigating more deeply ideas from classical and modern Chinese thought that could enrich a liberal arts education. The recommendations further address practical issues related to teaching and learning, grading, and language acquisition.