FIU’s China campus shutdown blemishes International title

It’s check-out time for a highly acclaimed and equally profitable Florida International University hospitality program that had a 1,200-student campus in China and also brought to its Miami classrooms Chinese students who paid far more than their share of tuition.

FIU has quietly shut down the school in Tianjin, a reverse of the fanfare the program has gotten since it opened in 2006. Miami Today alone has written more than 50 articles about the Chinese link, including a Sept. 21, 2006, photo of the China campus’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Now, the profit-making arm of the university has closed without announcement.

The FIU hospitality school’s ties to China were the victims not of academic inadequacy, enrollment lags or finances – China has long been an FIU profit center – but of a political shift in the winds. 

The school in Tianjin was established when it was fashionable to court the Chinese and their financial support – China paid the entire $100 million cost of building the 1,200-student Tianjin campus – and now it is equally fashionable to look at China as an enemy to be kept farther than just at arm’s length.

At a Florida Board of Governors meeting last June, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this month, member Jose Oliva of Miami Lakes targeted the $3.2 million that FIU had received from China during an earlier academic year for the university’s programs in China, which also included a Spanish program. He was told that FIU was in the process of shutting them down.

The Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management is one of the university’s shining lights, at least in the business world. It has long been known for educating students not just from Miami but from around the globe who were destined to lead the industry. 

In the process of that education, foreign students became familiar with and proponents of the United States, Florida and Miami. The program made friends while making money from full-tuition-paying students from abroad.

When we ate an especially fine meal in a famed hotel’s dining room in Istanbul years ago, we asked to see the manager to thank him. The smiling young Turkish manager spoke impeccable English in addition to running a flawless dining service, and he was delighted to learn we were from Miami. He had lived in Coconut Grove while proudly getting his hospitality degree at FIU, and he was putting that degree to good career use.

Now a university whose middle name is International is in the frying pan for being too international. Its international involvement is more than other Florida universities, so it’s under state scrutiny. Not all nations are welcome here anymore, and the list of nations-non-grata has FIU academic programs – and revenues – as victims.

We think that’s painting with far too broad a brush the picture of dangers from abroad. FIU is not unveiling secrets of rocket science or nuclear war or scientific discovery when it teaches how to run a hotel or a tourism operation – that is, unless the science of bedmaking or leaving mints on the pillow is OK for hotel maids to know but not students from China.

The easiest way to make enemies is to un-friend them, which is what we’re doing when we say Chinese nationals can’t buy costly Florida homes in certain areas or overpay to get an FIU hospitality degree that’s known around the globe or transfer for their final two years to the Miami campus. 

At the same time, the easiest way to quash solid academic money-making initiatives in our public universities is to punish schools for being too creative – and maybe too different from other universities that sit under ultimate and too-tight state control. Is FIU standing out where favored schools like the University of Florida and Florida State don’t? Then let’s rein them in.

Maybe the worst thing is that FIU didn’t, and probably can’t, protest this incursion from Tallahassee. It not only faces state control but relies on state funding, and those seem to trump either academic freedom or university entrepreneurship.    

Now FIU students will know the Chinese from afar as enemies but not up close as classmates. There’s no chance to find common ground or future connections. 

It’s check-out time for some of the International in Florida International University.