Kaye participates in ASU Sneaker Tour

10/27/2008

Kaye participates in ASU Sneaker Tour
David Kaye - Sneaker tour
David Kaye
     Community members took a walk in Professor David Kaye's shoes on Friday, Oct. 24, when he gave a presentation at the College of Law to an ASU Sneaker Tours group about his recent teaching experience at a university in China.
     Kaye, Regents' Professor and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Study of Law, Science, & Technology at the College of Law, showed the audience photographs of his trip to Nanjing and other Chinese cities and universities talked about living and teaching in China.
     Since 1992, ASU has offered in-depth, interactive campus tours to familiarize community and business leaders or organizations with the university's education, research and outreach programs. Before arriving at the College of Law, Friday's tour toured the new offices of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability.
     During the 2007-08 academic year, Kaye was the Freeman Foundation Visiting Professor of American Law at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in China, where he taught International Human Rights Law, Philosophy and History of Law in the West, the American Legal System, and Science and Law.
     The program is challenging for both Chinese students, who take courses from American teachers and must be fluent in English, and for American students, who must be fluent in Chinese, the native language of their teachers.
     Law is a popular undergraduate degree in China, which is rebuilding its legal system quickly after its destruction during the country's cultural revolution from 1966-76, under the late Communist leader, Mao Zedong, Kaye said.
     "Law schools were dismantled, universities were shut down, and students were sent to work in the fields," he said.
     Kaye often received politically sensitive questions from his students, who solicited his opinions about subjects such as government corruption, freedom of speech, and Mao ("He was a great man, and yet he had great flaws"). In return, he asked them what they thought about the U.S. Department of State's condemnation of China for alleged human-rights violations. "We discussed the official Chinese response, which is `Look at all the horrible things going on at the hands of Americans,'" he said. "But they also said that perhaps both (reports) are exaggerated."
     Kaye said he was surprised that the cultural revolution isn't discussed by the Chinese, nor taught to many members of its youngest generation. He displayed a photo of a lush green field, where a university president and his wife had been tortured and killed by students during the revolution.
     "And now, it's just a field, with no marker," Kaye said.
     This wasn't his first time teaching college students in China: in 2003, he was a Fulbright Professor at the Wuhan University law school in the province of Hubei, in central China.
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