News & Events

May 2006 - ASU to Award Honorary Degree to Vice Minister Wu Qidi

ASU will award an honorary degree to Wu Qidi, vice minister of education of the People's Republic of China, at its May 11 spring commencement.

Wu will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in recognition of her significant achievements as a leader in higher education and her exceptional work in academic research.

Wu oversees all Ministry of Education universities in China, which number around 70, and is guiding the transformation of many into major research institutions.

She is confronting a challenge familiar to ASU: figuring out how to offer a quality education to a large and growing number of students. She has been studying ASU's approach and the concept and structure of President Michael Crow's New American University.

Wu and President Crow conceptualized and led a discussion between public university presidents from the U.S. and their Chinese counterparts to discuss innovative models for public higher education, in Chengdu, China on June 1-2, 2005.

The China-U.S. Forum was sponsored by the Ministry of Education of China and co-hosted by Arizona State University and Sichuan University. The Form focused on (1) strategies for enhancing social embeddedness/ regional development, and (2) new mechanisms for international research collaboration. The economic context and policy frameworks for higher education in China are undergoing extraordinarily rapid change. This meeting provided an unprecedented opportunity to discuss these issues with presidents from 30 Chinese universities, primarily from the Western region of China, who bring a broad range of perspectives on these shifts.

Before her post as vice minister of education, which she assumed in 2003, Wu was president of Tongji University. During her eight-year presidency, she led the university from being a leading engineering school to becoming a comprehensive, research intensive and international university, ranking among the top Chinese universities.

ASU's commencement takes place at 10 a.m. at Wells Fargo Arena. For more information, contact the University Ceremonies Office at (480) 965-3565 or via e-mail at (commence@asu.edu).

Excerpted from full article in ASU Insight, April 28, 2006