Nanjing University

A comprehensive university

Nanjing University is a comprehensive research university in China. "Comprehensive" here describes the range of fields it covers rather than a single specialism: the university's own account lists 47 schools and 7 undergraduate colleges^[2]. In the Chinese system a school is normally the unit that runs degree programmes in a field or a group of related fields, while undergraduate colleges carry part of the teaching in the early years; a long list of schools therefore means a broad spread of subjects, from the humanities and social sciences through the natural sciences and engineering.

Sixteen of the university's disciplines appear on China's Double First-Class construction list^[2]. That list is a national roster of universities and disciplines selected for priority investment with the aim of building world-class research capacity. Because it is drawn up discipline by discipline rather than institution by institution, the number of listed disciplines is often read as a rough measure of how many fields a university is recognised in.

Students

The official figures give 16,514 undergraduate students, 18,826 master's students and 12,180 doctoral students^[2]. Adding the two graduate categories gives a total of roughly 31,000, close to twice the undergraduate number — a structure typical of universities that put most of their weight on research training rather than on large undergraduate cohorts. The same count includes 1,748 international students^[2].

The library

The library reports 6.74 million printed volumes and 7.79 million e-books^[2]. The electronic figure being the larger of the two reflects a shift common to research libraries, where journals and reference works are bought as licences rather than as physical copies; the two numbers are nevertheless counted on different bases and are not directly comparable.

Academic staff and alumni

Among the university's staff are 36 current members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering^[2]. The two academies are China's national bodies for the natural sciences and for engineering respectively, and membership is a lifetime honour conferred on researchers rather than an ordinary job title.

Its alumni include 6 people honoured as "Two Bombs, One Satellite" meritorious scientists and 5 who won China's State Preeminent Science and Technology Award^[2]. "Two Bombs, One Satellite" refers to China's early nuclear, missile and satellite programmes, and the honour commemorates the scientists who worked on them; the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award is the country's highest science and technology honour. Both are counted among alumni, that is, among people who studied at the university rather than among its current employees — which is why they are usually cited alongside staff numbers when a university describes its research standing.

A computer scientist trained and teaching there

Zhou Zhihua took all three of his degrees in computer science at Nanjing University — a BSc in 1996, an MSc in 1998 and a PhD in 2000 — and has been on its faculty since 2001^[1]. He has also served as Vice President of the university^[1]. His career is a compact example of a pattern common at research universities: a student who completes every stage of training in one place, joins the staff soon after finishing, and later takes on an administrative role alongside research and teaching.

What the figures describe

Read together, the numbers outline an institution that is moderate in size at the undergraduate level, considerably larger at the graduate level, broad in the subjects it teaches, and well represented among the holders of national academic honours. That combination — a wide disciplinary base, a graduate-heavy student body and a concentration of academy members and major-award winners — is what the label "comprehensive research university" is meant to capture.