Twenty-one: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Critical Acclaim

I gave copies of Reaching 40 (my co-edited volume on Stockton College) to some faculty and administrators at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. This was a gift, but it was also part of an effort to help them understand what Stockton is and what it is like.  If they are to work with us and create articulations of any kind, then they should have a better sense of Stockton and I hoped that the book would be useful in this regard.

It turns out that I may have been correct in this. The following day after giving the book one of the professors informed me that she was very impressed with the volume and had found it a particularly enjoyable read. What she felt most intrigued by was the fact that as a volume commemorating the history of the college it wasn’t merely celebratory, which any volume about a Chinese university would have been. She was most impressed with this and found it inspiring, and she hoped that her colleagues would also. She herself believed in being critical and not merely accepting the positions of a regime, but she was surprised to see that a volume of this nature would also end up as an arena for critical analysis.

I indicated to her that this book was unusual for any commemorative volume in the United States as well, and that this is one of the things that makes Stockton unique – or distinctive, if you will – that it has always had spirited debate and conflict, and that it is for this reason that we (the editors) did not feel we should shy away from controversy in our anniversary volume.