“(America) is where management education is tops in the world.”
V. Kanti Prasad, School of Business Administration dean

Prompted by the global economy and a goal to increase visibility of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, university administrators traveled to China in mid-October to make and strengthen global connections.

The trip, led by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, allowed UWM administrators to build partnerships among the Milwaukee business community, Chinese and UWM officials.

Chancellor Carlos Santiago, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Rita Cheng, School of Business Administration Dean V. Kanti Prasad and College of Nursing Dean Sally Lundeen served as representatives of UWM.

Those partnerships included a School of Business Administration program and a College of Nursing partnership to help provide instruction for a Chinese medical university.

The business administration program, which began early this year, is offered in partnership with Motorola University, the corporate education arm of Motorola Inc. The program started in January and offers an executive master’s degree. There are currently 29 candidates in the program.

“This is a really significant program for global business education,” Prasad said.

Prasad said that in 1992, there were sparse master’s degree candidates for business in China, but this year, that number is about 12,000, a measure of the increasing importance of business degrees.

“It’s a correlation of economic growth,” Prasad said.

And for those high degrees, America is a natural target.

“This is where management education is tops in the world,” he said.

Prasad added that the partnership is indicative of a new global interdependency.

“We’re not highly visible in global circles.” The trip also gave the Chinese a chance to experience Wisconsin and Milwaukee, Prasad said.

In China, Prasad, Santiago and others signed a declaration of intent to start negotiations to renew the executive master’s program partnership.

The program’s goal is to train skilled managers and ready them for greater achievement in the business world.

UWM is one of three American colleges involved in such a partnership, Cheng said. The other two are Arizona State University and State University of New York-Buffalo.

The students in the program are primarily higher-level managers who have a chance to be future leaders in China and its business community, Prasad said.

As of now, Prasad said, the partnership is still a preliminary program that administrators hope will be extended.

For the College of Nursing and its Dean Sally Lundeen, this trip was a follow-up to a trip in the fall of 2003.

“It’s really all about networking and building relationships in Asia, particularly in China,” Lundeen said.

The college is partnered with the Second Shanghai Medical University along with Marquette University and the Center for International Health.

The Shanghai university is one that is nearing completion — scaffolding was still up during the trip — and is one of the biggest universities in China. It is merged with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, considered the MIT of Chinese universities, Lundeen said.

Housing at the university is equipped to handle about 7,000 students, about 1,750 of whom would graduate each year. UWM’s College of Nursing graduates about 220 students each year, she said.

As part of the program, faculty would travel to China to train doctoral candidates. Once those candidates have graduated, they would turn around and train Chinese nursing students seeking bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees.

“If we’re going to do a true partnership, it can’t be just the way we want to do things,” Lundeen said.

If the only faculty training Chinese doctoral nursing students were American, there would be a massive logjam of students, Lundeen said.

“UWM looked very good on this visit,” she said. “We were able to connect with some very important people.”

Chancellor Santiago wrote an editorial for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published Nov. 5 in which he talked about the trip to China.

“My experience in China only heightened my conviction that revitalizing Milwaukee’s economy is inseparable from establishing UW-Milwaukee as a premiere public research university,” he wrote.

The programs should open more opportunities for students and faculty to enter into partnerships, said Cheng, Academic Affairs vice chancellor.

The trip allows UWM to stay on the cutting edge, she said. Milwaukee businesses must have a Chinese presence as a part of a global business strategy, she said.

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