On May 19th, 2014, Professor Ulrich Teichler, higher education expert from University Kassel of Germany, gave a lecture in Room 723, Yingdong Building for the IICE of Beijing Normal University. The lecture was entitled as “Diversity of Higher Education Systems and Diversification Policies in Europe”. Liu Min held the lecture and postgraduates and doctors took part in it actively.
Professor Ulrich Teichler is from international center for higher education studies of Germany Kassel University, whose research areas mainly concentrate on higher education system, the international cooperation and mobility of higher education. Professor Teichler pointed out that in history, European had ever provided the most optimal higher education for the whole world. However, recently, the diversity of higher education became a challenge from outer Europe. The diverse pattern of American higher education and the hierarchical pattern of Asian higher education contribute to the stratification of global higher education jointly. Secondly, Professor Teichler thought that the development of European diverse had mainly gone through three stages: the first stage, from the middle age of 1960s to the end of 1970s, was called industry diversity; the second stage, from the end of 1970s to the middle of 1990s, was called institutional diversity; The third stage, since the middle of 1990s, was called vertical hierarchy and global hierarchy. In 1974, Martin Trow defined the levels of higher education from three angles: elite higher education, popular higher education and universal higher education. However, Prof. Teichler proposed his own definition and he mainly analyzed the hierarchies of higher education from two aspects: First, as a descriptive definition, it is about the type of higher education institution, the type of project, the project level and its reputation; Second, classification: the horizontal and vertical diversity; formal and informal diversity.
At the end of the lecture, Professor Ulrich Teichler had a discussion with students present. Professor Teichler gave Dean Liu Baocun a book as gift and the dean presented him a famous work by Professor Gu Mingyuan, The Cultural Basis of Chinese Education in turn.