More about Zhejiang University

Where to start? Zhejiang University has 47,000 students and 15,000 faculty and staff. Nearly all of the students, and over 3,000 faculty and staff, live in university housing. The main campus, the original one started in 1894, is now the graduate school and has 10,000 students who live and take classes there. Many faculty and staff persons also live on this campus. There are 5,500,000 square feet of buildings. All this happens on less than 100 acres – about 2/3s of our developed campus. It is hard to imagine how it all works, but it feels nice being out on the grounds during the day.

This afternoon we were at the new campus which is quite stunning. The entire place was built during the last six years, and the project started with construction of all new housing for the people who had been living on the land that became the new campus. The university is starting some consolidation after operating on six campuses across the city for many years by closing a small one and selling the property - five acres for $360,000,000.

I spent the morning with the lead team from the Zhejiang University Logistics Group – basically our facilities group, plus food service, stores, and restaurants, and probably some other things I did not pick up on. They run the physical operations of five campuses and have over 5,000 staff members.

Just as in Dr. Ma’s time at St. Olaf when I could not figure out how I could be considered a mentor to him, it was sort of bizarre that these folks would be interested in anything I might have to say. We quickly found that in the end we do exactly the same work with a different scope.

They were very interested in our accounting approach, and we spent a great deal of time talking about our phone system, the wind turbine, and our other generation. The logistics group is a separate corporation, and the lead person has university vice-president status, along with being the CEO of the corporation.

There’s an idea in China that Harvard and Stanford should be the model, so the presidents send their administrators over there to learn and bring back. Somehow Dr. Ma found his way to St. Olaf, and he’s reported on all aspects of the place to his president. That’s caused some pressures on people like these because they are hearing about us on one hand and Harvard and Stanford on the other.

Harvard and Stanford are great, but also sort of unique, with resources most of us cannot imagine. The people doing the work at the Chinese public universities come away from their visits to the US frustrated because they can’t imagine their institutions ever having those resources. They are encouraged to hear that there are other models.

At each session we have talked about each other’s families as much as the work, and Ethan Sandberg is now famous in China! This is an important aspect here and once we got into all that the discussions changed completely, we were now people who either were, or hoped to be, grandparents.

At the end of our session today I was invited back to present at a nation wide facilities and logistics conference. It’s not set on a calendar yet, but I hope it will be a while because these flights are tough!

We had lunch today in a student food building that can seat 10,000 at one setting, and it was really good. We have choice, but they have CHOICE. Food from every region of China, Japan, Tibet, and the west. Across the university, the food service can seat 20,000 students at one time, and the production facilities are amazing. At the new campus they have a rice production facility with nearly $1,000,000 of equipment that can produce all the rice for 10,000 people per meal. Serious rice!

Tomorrow is more relaxed with tours at Hangzhou’s famous West Lake district.