"As for political work, we encourage both students and Faculty to study Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Tse-tung Thought.

"Instead of the former five year program, we have not arrived at a three year program, Of this, one-and a half or two years are spent on the students special field.

We have revised the lecture system. Formerly a lecturer would often leave the classroom immediately after delivering his lecture, but now he takes time to meet with students who want in analyzing problems that arise less time is spent in lecturing more in study by oneself.

"But these reforms are only elementary, Even now, in late 1972, we have only made a beginning in our educational revolution."

AT THIS POINT we all left the conference room to visit some of the University buildings. I found myself walking around the campus with Chia China, a man of about 60, professor of English Language and Literature. He like most of the others, was dressed in the customary simple suit of dark blue, with stand-up collar band and blue cap with visor.

He told me that he had gone Harvard as a graduate student in 1930. (That was the year I returned to Harvard as an assistant dean. He and I probably passed each other now and then in the Yard.) He remembered with pleasure studying literary criticism under Oliver Elton, who in that year was a visiting professor from England. The next three academic years he spent at Yale and returned to China in 1934.

The date is significant. By 1934 the Japanese had invaded northeastern China and were preparing to launch a blitz-krieg on her major cities. Chiang Kai-Shek was already fighting the Communists. Mao Tse-tung was leading the Red Army on its 6000-miles Long March.

Chen Chia had gone to Harvard as a young gentleman of the old school. How could it have been otherwise? Only sons of well-to-do families could afford to travel to America and spend several years there. And when he returned home he and his colleagues were a part of the small upper crust of Chinese society.

His students, too, during the years 1934 to 1949, and even up to the start of the Cultural Revolution, were sons and daughters (mostly sons) of the traditional bureaucracy.

We all returned to the conference room for questions and wrote discuss.

Naturally, one of the first questions was "Wasn't it hard for all of you during the Cultural Revolution to overhaul the curriculum which you has been used to fourteen years."

A ripple of laughter went round the table and the professor and administrators exchanged glances as if to say.

"Here it comes"

They met the challenge forthrightly, One of the professor of English, a women, said with a smile: "We can learn from the students, especially their political attitudes, because we are much conditioned by our bourgeois background."

"For some time", added Professor Chen, "the students criticism made us professor uncomfortable, but it has been very beneficial. Students of the new type worked with us on course materials and methods in a friendly, constructive manner. They and we now understand one another much better. We have become comrades."