Founded in 2008 through a partnership between Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) educates creative, ethi-cal, and impactful communicators, and contributes both to Northwestern’s excellence and the rise of Qatar as a knowledge-based society. NU-Q’s vision is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual, and focused on the Global South as an intellectual and creative space for research and teaching. NU-Q positions itself as an “em-bedded institution” in which U.S. higher education overlaps with regional and “Southern” circuits of academic exchange that catalyze critical debates on enduring and emerging issues, and enables a relationship between the university and the world that is globally competitive and locally resonant. NU-Q is a distinctive university dedi-cated to that vision.

A newly founded, small-scale research university geared toward international standards and competitiveness, ShanghaiTech University has three STEM divisions (information science and technology, physical science and technology, and life science and technology) and three HASS divisions (creativity and arts, entrepreneurship and management, and the humanities). The university’s undergraduate education receives its inspiration from the whole-person approach, and gives particular weight to a “broadly based and in-depth” pedagogical framework, in which the liberal arts make up an indispensable component. Through interdisciplinary curricular planning, small class sizes, emphasis on interaction and openness in learning, and international exchange programs, I explore effective measures to grow general education at ShanghaiTech as well as address challenges that are unique to a Chinese tech university.