Rector Ruben de
Freitas-Cabral
The Macau Inter-University Institute (IIUM) has announced two new institutes will be opened in China.
The Institute for International Business Studies and the Institute of International Arts and Communications will be IIUM’s future expansion in the mainland and will be supervised directly by IIUM staff, according to Rector Ruben de Freitas Cabral.
“The courses will be held in China and this time they will be entirely IIUM’s responsibility”, he said.
The IIUM already has a Portuguese culture and language institute taught at the Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou.
At the sidelines of the announcement, a two-day forum on international co-operation was unveiled to discuss higher education development and its main challenges in face of globalisation and internationalisation.
The event represents an international assembly of researchers, administrators and scholars from higher educational institutions, including in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, the United States and Portugal.
For Rector Cabral, higher education is in the moment of ‘open ideas’ and Macau is the ‘epicentre as a privileged area’.
‘The university campus must be a meeting point where social development can be discussed’, he said.
According to the IIUM Rector, there are concerns about how to globalize and internationalize educational systems effectively.
He also emphasised the importance for universities to open themselves to globalisation, and to deal with it as well as to manage it.