From May 15th to 16th, 2025, our institute invited Associate Professor Wang Junfeng, Director of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Illinois at Springfield, USA, to carry out a two - day series of academic exchange activities in Conference Rooms A508 and A301. The activities included special discussions on the development of MPA education, frontier academic lectures, and guidance on writing English academic papers, injecting new momentum into the college's optimization of professional construction, improvement of teachers' and students' academic capabilities, and broadening of international horizons. Teachers from the MPA Education Center, teacher representatives from various departments, master's and doctoral students, and some undergraduate students majoring in administrative management participated in the activities. The meetings were respectively chaired by Dean Wang Yibao and Director Gong Yunlong of the Institute's International Cooperation and Exchange Office.
At the seminar, Wang Junfeng systematically shared the core system of MPA education at the University of Illinois at Springfield, USA, covering certification standards, tuition fee setting mechanisms, curriculum system construction, graduation requirements, faculty appointment, and teaching models. She also analyzed the current challenges and coping strategies in MPA education and explained the teaching evaluation standards of foreign institutions and the training characteristics of related majors. In the frontier academic lecture session, through sharing the academic report Frontline Emergency Management Professionals’ Sense of Community Responsibility: The Role of Risk Decision - Making Structure, Established Partnership, and Perceived Response Efficacy, Wang Junfeng took the personnel of the emergency management department of American universities as the research object to deeply explain the influence mechanism of community responsibility. In the guidance session on writing English academic papers, Associate Professor Wang "disassembled" the key processes "layer by layer", especially distinguishing the differences between "Discussion" and "Conclusion". She reminded everyone to pay attention to the cultural background of English words (such as the contextual differences between "efficiency" and "effectiveness") and the matching strategies for submitting to journals which need to be combined with research directions and journal positioning. She said that she welcomes domestic teachers to carry out cooperation through forms such as visiting exchanges and joint projects to jointly promote the output of academic achievements.
In the interactive Q&A session, teachers and students actively asked questions around MPA training, studying abroad planning, and paper innovation. Wang Junfeng's well - reasoned and easy - to - understand answers won bursts of applause, pushing the academic atmosphere to a climax.
The two - consecutive - day exchange activities comprehensively sorted out the current situation and challenges of overseas MPA education, providing a clear direction for our institute to benchmark international standards and optimize professional construction. The frontier academic sharing and paper writing guidance have effectively improved the research capabilities and academic standard awareness of teachers and students. In the future, our institute will continue to uphold the concept of open innovation, deepen international academic cooperation, and empower the cultivation of public management talents with international vision and professional literacy.
