Just one month after Beijing's Haidian District Court announced the result of a lawsuit lodged against Tsinghua University, Peking University finds itself the defendant in a similar case.
The Haidian District Court has now accepted a lawsuit filed by Zhang Jialin, the person in charge of an advanced research class program at Peking University, who accused Peking University of not fulfilling inspection responsibilities and exploiting business partners. The claimant is asking for more than CNY470,000 in compensation.
Prior to Zhang's lawsuit, Tsinghua University's Executive Class was the focus of the Chinese media. Yu Bo, president of a trade company in Shenyang, was said to have paid CNY37,000 tuition fee in January 2008 to become a student of the Company Management and Capital Operation Executive Research Class offered by the Continuing Education School of Tsinghua University, but after the class was open, Yu found that the experts and scholars mentioned in the school's advertisement did not appear at all. What's more, the school scheduled small classes and then enlarged this to a class of 170 students. There were other problems such as disorderly teaching management and inadequate teaching time. After his dialog with the school failed, Yu filed a lawsuit in October 2008, accusing Tsinghua University of making false claims. However, the university denied that it had anything to do with the advertisements Yu downloaded from the Web. As there was no evidence showing that Tsinghua made false claims, Yu lost the lawsuit, but he is reportedly preparing to appeal the court's decision.
Unlike Yu, Zhang is said to have had a good relationship with Peking University before the lawsuit. Zhang, who used to be a teacher at Peking University's Training Center, said in the petition that he signed with Peking University's Training Center in November 2007 to manage a program offering an advanced research class on change management and leadership potential development. But due to constant disputes on issues such as teacher deployment, classroom rent, use of teaching facilities and payment of expenses, the relationship between them deteriorated. Zhang disclosed that profit is a main incentive for prestigious universities such as Peking University to cooperate with partners on research classes, and it is also the very factor that leads to a deterioration of relations with their partners. According to Zhang, the universities will subcontract their training programs and these are sometimes further subcontracted, and this has seriously affected the quality of the program.
So far, there is no comment from Peking University.
