From 20 to 24 October 2015, CUPL President Huang Jin was invited to attend the annual conference of UK Confucius Institutes (CIs) and Confucius Classrooms (CCs) held in London. When he was in London, President Huang headed a delegation to visit Times Higher Education (THE) and the Faculty of Laws at University College London (UCL Laws), and had a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor of Bangor University (BU).
President Huang met the chief editor of THE, John Gill, its Hiring Solution Executive, Nick Davis, and its Key Account Manager, Simon Chan, as well as other THE staff during the said visit to THE. Gill mainly introduced the following information to our delegates: the World University Rankings 2015-2016, calibrated performance indicators for that Ranking, its reference database and so on. President Huang gave a detailed account of the basic information of CUPL to his hosts. He stressed CUPL’s predominant role and also emphasized its outstanding performance in fields of law studies, political science as well as humanities & social sciences. He hoped to upgrade our university’s internationalized school operations by referring to the calibrated performance indicators of THE Ranking. Meanwhile, President Huang also expressed CUPL’s willingness to collaborate with THE in the future. He hoped that the two sides could jointly conduct research and initiate collaboration in such areas as the ranking of disciplines and the development of the related databases, especially in certain fields like regional law education and the development of its database.
While visiting UCL Laws, President Huang held a talk with its Vice Dean (International), Prof. George Letsas, its Director of Graduate Taught Programs, Ms. Sarah Campling. President Huang mentioned that it was CUPL’s first official goodwill visit to UCL Laws. He expressed the hope that the two sides would establish a teamwork relationship in the coming days, and strengthen their collaboration in areas of the LL.M. project as well as academic exchanges of their teaching staff and students. Prof. Letsas indicated that CUPL students were the cream of the crop among the applicants of UCL Laws LL.M. project inthe academic year of 2015-2016. Among 49 applicants from CUPL, 25 of them wereadmitted by that project with the number of applications ranking second among Chinese universities and colleges,while our students’ admission rate exceeded 50% of the total number in the Greater China Region. In addition, the two sides also took the chance to exchange views on the enhancement of their cooperation in multiple fields like legal history, Environmental Law, European Community Law, Human Rights Law, as well as the feasibility of signing scholarship agreements for the LL.M. project.
During the same period of time, President Huang and his party had a meeting with CUPL local partners, the Vice-Chancellor of BU, Prof. John Hughes, and the Foreign Co-Director of the CI at BU, Prof. David Joyner. As for the said CI at BU, the focal points of their discussion were:its development blueprint, the plan to improve the professional competence of its faculty members, personnel training, greater influence in the local society, etc.
