Chairman Mao has said that "education must serve proletarian politics and be combined with productive labor." The extent to which this is now being practiced in China would startle most Westerners. TIME's Jerrold Schecter, who was allowed to stay on in China after the departure of President Nixon, paid a visit to Futan University in Shanghai and cabled this report:
The ferocity of the Cultural Revolution has disappeared from the tree-lined walkway leading to the red brick dormitories. Wall posters now extol the virtues of serving the people and studying the thoughts of Chairman Mao. "Heighten our vigilance and defend our motherland," says one. Only tattered remains of the big posters from the revolution hint at the turmoil that closed Futan University for nearly three years. Reopened in November 1970, it has been transformed.
Novelties. Imagine a university director who is a political organizer from a textile mill; students who are mostly army privates or the children of factory workers; an American-trained academic with a world reputation in theoretical genetics turning all his energies to increasing the yield of wheat; physicists making transistors for portable radios.
All these things are actually happening at Futan, Shanghai's biggest and most prestigious center of higher education, and now a monument to Maoism. Formerly the French missionary Aurora College, Futan, with its student body reduced from 6,500 to 1,135, is still in the throes of change.
A 30-ft. pink statue of Chairman Mao stands at the university's entrance. Inside the building, the curriculum is being radically reshaped to reflect Mao's doctrine that colleges should combine "education, production and scientific research." In practice, this means that Futan has completely dropped the traditional courses in literature and science and replaced them with such subjects as electronics and optics—and it conducts those classes in its own factories. Built and operated by the university, the factories produce equipment ranging from quartz-tungsten lamps to logic circuits for third-generation computers. The university also plans a petrochemical plant. "The purpose of these factories is to serve as a base for scientific experiments," explains Tang Chin-wen, 39, the textile-mill technician whose ardent agitprop work won him the leadership of the university. "It is to change the situation that prevailed before the Cultural Revolution, when practical knowledge was divorced from theoretical knowledge."
Combining theory and practice proved easier in the six science departments than in the seven arts departments, according to Tang. In the department of Chinese literature, he says, students charged that the professors had created "a hotbed for the restoration of capitalism." Throughout the autumn of 1969, while the university remained closed, "struggle, criticism and transformation" sessions were held because the professors "did not see society as a factory and kept divorcing the students from the masses." As one pigtailed coed put it: "We were wearing new shoes, but still going on the old road."