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May 15, 2009

2 Powerful Vietnamese Women Build Private Universities By MARTHA ANN OVERLAND

Charismatic as well as politically astute, Ton Nu Thi Ninh is a patient woman up to a point. As a high-ranking member of Vietnam's Communist Party, and regarded as the most powerful woman in the country, she had to be. But for far too long Ms. Ninh has watched the abysmal state of Vietnam's higher education handicap the country's future potential. If Vietnam is going to be more than a source of cheap goods, patience is no longer a virtue; it's a liability. So what the government has been unable to accomplish, Ms. Ninh, now a private citizen, intends to. Rather than performing triage on the public-university system, she is using her connections and powers of persuasion to raise the funds and bring in the people to build a new private university from the ground up. It is a challenging proposition. In Communist-ruled Vietnam, private education is still tainted with the notion of profit and greed. Unlike in America, says Ms. Ninh, there is little understanding that private education can also be a public service. A former ambassador, Ms. Ninh is crisscrossing the globe to drum up financial support and academic expertise for Tri Viet University. (She estimates she will need $30-million in the first three years alone.) Ms. Ninh is talking with Arizona and Portland State Universities and De Anza College, in California, among others, hoping to persuade them to come on board as advisers, curriculum designers, or donors. She will have competition. Dang Thi Hoang Yen, one of the richest women in Vietnam, is just as impatient as Ms. Ninh, and just as persuasive in her own way. Hers is the power of the purse. As a skillful capitalist, she made a fortune by building high-tech industrial parks that house foreign companies. Working with

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international investors, Ms. Yen saw close up that Vietnam's universities were producing unemployable graduates. Ms. Yen knew it would take years of piecemeal reforms to make significant changes. So instead of waiting for the government, she got out her checkbook. She bought a large plot of land outside Ho Chi Minh City, hired architects to draw up the plans for a campus to eventually enroll 20,000 students, and appointed Mark S. Scheid, a former director of international programs at Rice University, to be the first president of Tan Tao University. As with Tri Viet University, Tan Tao will be modeled on the American university system. English will be the main language of instruction. Until a new generation of Vietnamese Ph.D.'s and professors is trained, Mr. Scheid says, the plan is to hire 70 percent of the faculty from the United States, relying on less expensive retirees and new graduates. For the first few years, tuition will be free. Mr. Scheid plans to seek both institutional and programmatic accreditation in the United States once the university is further along. And he has received positive responses from American academics and administrators he has contacted about helping develop the project: "I thought it would be hard to find U.S. universities that said it was important, but that has not been the case." It is telling that the education ministry's decision making is so paralyzed that these two women, and not the government, may be the first to deliver Vietnamese students a quality liberal-arts education. (The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has been in Vietnam since 2001, but it offers mainly business and computer courses.) Vietnam actually approved the building of a university with international standards back in 2005. Insiders say a power struggle between hard-liners and reformers in the ruling Communist Party, not money, has kept it from getting off the ground. The old guard wants to keep a tight leash on what is taught and who is teaching it; reformers argue that competition from private foreign universities is the only way to spur real change. For the record, neither woman has government approval to run a university. They applied for their licenses months ago. After no word, both decided to steamroll ahead.

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Last month, Tri Viet University finalized the details of its lease, and Intel has just agreed to advise on curricular development and help with IT equipment and fund raising. Workers at Tan Tao University have already finished erecting the first of five floors of the main building. Still, the delays and stonewalling have not pleased Ms. Ninh. She is puzzled why the lessons the country learned when it adopted economic reforms are not being applied to education. "The ministry of education is meddling in petty affairs instead of developing a strategic vision," she says. So as the deputy ministers and department heads bicker, two of the country's most powerful women are already making plans to welcome their first freshman class. http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 55, Issue 36, Page A23
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