Graduate Student Workshop:
Title: How to Build a University (When You’re Fresh Out of Grad School)
Speaker: Mark E. Frank
Abstract: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a new university from the ground up? How would you do it? Normally, academics leave this sort of thought experiment to start-up entrepreneurs. Universities are typically sites of tradition: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was established in 1867, Harvard predates the United States, and Oxford dates to the Middle Ages. But innovative “start-up universities” are emerging around the world, concentrated in Asia. Some, like Duke Kunshan University or Yale NUS, are satellite campuses of established universities, but others, like Ashoka University, the Asian University for Women, and Fulbright University Vietnam—all established within the last 20 years—are independent. In this session aimed at grad students, I recount my experience joining the faculty of Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City during its “start-up” phase and working closely with others to redesign the undergraduate curriculum, build new academic programs, develop connections with other universities, and apply for US accreditation. More importantly, I use that saga as a lens on what makes a university tick, and why universities tend to converge on certain “best practices” while diverging in other areas. This will be an interactive workshop, and participants will experiment with designing their own undergraduate curriculum from the ground up.
Bio: Mark E. Frank is an historian of modern China in global context and an Assistant Professor of History at Fulbright University Vietnam. He completed his PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UIUC in 2020 and spent one year as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Environmental Humanities at Yale University before moving to Vietnam to teach at Fulbright, where he is also the coordinator for the History program. His research interests include human relations with the environment, the history of science and technology, nationalism, and ethnic relations in modern China and surrounding regions. He is currently writing a book titled “The Rooted State: Plants and Power on Chinese Frontiers” that draws connections between agrarian ideology, environmental practice, and ethnic relations along the Chinese frontier during the early twentieth century.
Time: 2:00 - 4:00 PM, March 12 (Wednesday), 2025
Location: Lucy Ellis Lounge
