Shaw Foundation Surprises Universities With Support For Asian Graduate Students

Last year, administrators at the California Institute of Technology received a pleasant surprise: a letter from a Hong Kong foundation asking if they would be interested in having the foundation support Asian graduate students at Caltech, particularly students from the People's Republic of China. The letter came from the Shaw Foundation, a private charitable enterprise established in 1973 by Sir Run Run Shaw, an 82-year-old native of Shanghai. Sir Run Run heads the Shaw Brothers Organisation, which owns and operates movie theaters in Southeast Asia and North America, film and television studios in Hong Kong, and real estate interests in Southeast Asia, North America, and Great Britain. Although "there had been some previous contact" between Caltech administrators and the foundation, says Meredith Roche, director of foundation relations at Caltech, "we did not contact them and ask if there was a program" to support Caltech students. Rather, she says, "they invited us to apply" to become one of the institutions receiving Shaw Foundation funds. After a series of transcontinental letters in which "they sent us a proposal, and we explained what our process was" for funding graduate students, says Roche, the foundation established the Shaw Scholarship Program for Graduate Studies at Caltech. Two years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a similar surprise from Hong Kong. "The initial inquiry came out of the blue from the Shaw Foundation," says Frank Perkins, dean of the graduate school at MIT. "They selected us, rather than us going to them." Exactly why the movie mogul chose these schools to be the recipients of his largess remains somewhat of a mystery. Publicity materials released by the foundation state that "the dispersal of funds to the various institutions [reflects Sir Run Run's] personal interest in each of them and in the fields of health and education in general. The selection was based on the specific needs of each institution, and followed a careful assessment of many worthwhile projects." The Shaw Foundation's program at Caltech awards three fellowships of $25,000 each, renewable for three years, to grad students whose homeland is the PRC. All of the Shaw fellows at Caltech were new students when they received their awards, and all are "exceptional students," Roche says. According to the terms of the fellowship, all must be studying science. The Shaw fellowship program at MIT is slightly different from its counterpart at Caltech: At MIT, five students are given up to two years of support. Perkins says the Shaw Foundation has requested that 80 percent of the awardees at MIT - four of the five students - be from the PRC, with the remaining student coming from a Pacific Rim country. Included in the guidelines for the program at MIT is the stipulation that the fellows be studying engineering or the management of engineering, but this broadly worded requirement "gives us free reign to cut across the fields of engineering and management," says Perkins. In addition to Caltech and MIT, the Shaw Foundation has supported scholarship programs at Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; the State University of New York, Stony Brook; the University of Southern California; and Brigham Young University. Programs also have been established at the University of Toronto in Canada and Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, as well as at several Asian universities and a variety of Asian hospitals and cultural institutions. Another recipient of the foundation's largess is Shaw College, a school for undergraduate and graduate study in science and technology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. While many of the programs supported by the foundation involve science education, funding science students isn't a specific goal of Sir Run Run's, according to Louis Page, who administers the Shaw Foundation's projects out of the Shaw Group's Hong Kong headquarters. "Sir Run Run has a special interest in education, not particularly the sciences," Page says. However, he notes, a majority of the Shaw Foundation scholarships are intended for students from the PRC, and "it is believed that the need is greater there" for education in the sciences as opposed to other fields. "Therefore," Page says, "there is a preference for science students, although the scholarships are not restricted to sciences." Indeed, since last year's Tiananmen Square massacre (The Scientist, July 10, 1989, page 1) Chinese science students - and those in other fields - have been spending a disproportionate amount of time learning party rhetoric, says a Shaw fellow who, like many other Chinese students, is fearful of speaking for attribution lest his family back home be harmed by authorities. "Every student has to learn politics, no matter if they are science students or art students," he says. "Students - even graduate students - spend more time than before on this kind of study" since the squelched uprising, says the Shaw fellow, who is studying a physical science discipline at a United States university. "I had already decided to study abroad" before the Tiananmen Square massacre, says the student, who is in his first year of graduate studies. "After that, I really wanted to go." Chinese students "would like to express their ideas, but they can't," he says. "I would like to use a word - oppressed - to describe them." But surprisingly, the political situation in China has not affected the ability of most Chinese students to come to MIT to study this year, says Perkins. "We expected there to be problems this year, but essentially all of those people who were admitted and had financial support came," the dean says. "We had lots of phone calls and lots of fax messages from students who were concerned" about their freedom to study abroad, Perkins says - "perhaps more than usual - but they were relatively unaffected" by the Chinese government's crackdown on political dissent. The first-year Shaw fellow says that while he had no problems obtaining a visa to study in the U.S., "I had some problem with the passport." Although he had already obtained a passport, he says, "I had to go through some sort of re-examination" in order to get the passport validated, because of new regulations imposed by the government. The regulations, the student believes, are "definitely a result of the demonstration" on Tiananmen Square. Perkins says he and admissions officers at other institutions are speculating that although Chinese students were relatively free to leave the country for the 1989-90 academic year, new restrictions will be imposed for 1990-91. The administrators fear that the passing of a year since the aborted uprising has provided "time for the authorities to get their act together and decide who's coming [to study abroad] and who isn't," he says. For Perkins and Roche, their work with the Shaw Foundation marks the first time they have dealt with a funding source entirely through correspondence and fax messages. "It's a little unusual" never to have had face-to-face contact with a donor, says Perkins. "We'd love to sit down with [Shaw foundation staffers], but we have not done so yet." But although his office has had to communicate with the foundation by dispatching missives across the ocean, Perkins says, "I get a pretty quick response" to the letters MIT has sent. Likewise, Roche says the distance has not caused any serious communications problems: "It's a fairly new situation," she says, "but it's worked fairly well." Once the Shaw Foundation has selected a school to receive funding, Page says, "the program is administered by the university, and the award recipients are selected by the university. The application procedures and the eligibility requirements would depend on the particular university." Although this arrangement leaves the university with a considerable amount of leeway in selecting awardees, Page says, "it is the foundation's wish that the student should return to China after graduation." The Shaw Foundation fellowships are "very, very good for Chinese students" says a second-year Shaw fellow, also speaking on condition of anonymity. The money, he says, helps the students to "solve their financial problems"; without the fellowship, a student might "need to apply for Chinese government support, which is very difficult to get." Usually, he says, the Chinese government supports students "only for the first year," requiring the students to obtain "a research assistantship, or something like that" on their own in subsequent years. After the initial term of the fellowship is over, Roche says, the Shaw Foundation has "suggested that we could ask for a new fellowship plan for three new students." But Perkins notes that the foundation provides "no guarantee" to the schools that a renewal will be forthcoming. "We have no contractual agreement," he says. "The whole thing has been handled on an informal basis." Both Roche and Perkins say that a relatively large percentage of students at their campuses come from the PRC. But regardless of whether the size of the Chinese student population or some other factor attracted the Shaw Foundation to these institutions, the foundation's contribution is very much appreciated. "I still to this day don't know exactly what triggered [the foundation's] interest in MIT," Perkins says. "But I'm delighted that something did." For more information on the Shaw Foundation, contact the organization at Lot 220, Clear Water Bay Rd., Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Shaw Foundation Surprises Universities With Support For Asian Graduate Students

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