Hongde Lei

Professor Hongde Lei was born in a village in Honghu, Hubei Province, China. He
earned his PHD in environmental education from Peking University in 2004. After
that and until now, he has been working at School of Education, Huazhong Univesity
of Science and Technology. His teaching and research interests center around
institutional research, college teaching and learning, and history of Chinese higher
Education.

In the past decade, Professor Lei has devoted himself to the research of American
selective liberal arts colleges (LACs). In the academic year 2022-2023, he will be a
visiting scholar at Macalester College. He plans to conduct a holistic case study on the
institutional characteristics of the LACs, especially on the internationalism
emphasized by Macalester. The study aims to provide multi-perspective insights for
those students who would like to choose LACs, and to promote other countries such
as China to develop its own LACs so that more students will benefit from the
transformative power of liberal arts education. As a result, more well-educated whole
persons and global citizens will grow to make the world better.