On the morning of April 1, Carolyn Martin, President of UW-Madison, led a delegation to visit SJTU. President Zhang Jie met with the delegation on the Minhang Campus and invited President Martin to be the guest of the “Inspiration Lecture” together with him to talk freely about higher education. Attending the meeting were Xu Min, the president assistant and Dean of the Med-X Institute and the officials from School of Law, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Department of Physics, Department of Mathematics, Institute of Natural Sciences, and Division of International Cooperation and Communication.

During the talk, President Zhang Jie and President Martin respectively introduced the recent development of SJTU and UW-Madison, affirmed the achievements in the cooperation between the two universities, discussed the fields and format of cooperation, signed the cooperation memo, and reached a consensus on promoting the cooperation between the two universities, enhancing academic communication, furthering academic cooperation and mutual understanding, as well as building the educational and scientific cooperation framework.

After the discussion, President Zhang Jie, President Martin, Xu Xuemin, Sangtae Kim, the head of the Morgridge Institute under the Institute of Wisconsin Exploration, were invited to the “Inspiration Lecture” as the guest speakers.

President Zhang Jie said that SJTU was making unremitting efforts to nurture innovative talents with strong leadership and promote the concept of innovative education, and the “3 In 1” talent-training idea has been established as a result which includes “knowledge transfer”, “capacity development” and “character nurturing”. “Knowledge transfer” emphasizes on students’ rich storage of and complete structure of knowledge, “capacity development” on students’ capability to discover and solve problems as well as to integrate different kinds of knowledge, and “character nurturing” on student’s healthy personality and broad outlook.

When talking about “Wisconsin Idea”, President Martin said that University of Wisconsin has broken its traditional closed position through talent nurturing and knowledge delivering on the basis of fundamental education and scientific research to play an important role in social service and promote the social and economic development of the state. “Wisconsin Idea” creatively proposes the third function of the university–to offer direct service to the society and tighten the collection between the university and social production as well as practical life.

When asked by a journalist from the Xinhua News Agency about “education globalization”, President Zhang replied that it’s important for Chinese students to have international perspectives because China is developing rapidly now and it’s critical to get along with other countries harmoniously. Only by transforming from the industry-driven development pattern to the knowledge-driven one, can China be an innovative country and achieve sustainable development. He said, “Facing the future, it’s an urgent task for China’s higher education system to nurture more talents with international perspectives for our country so that the relationships with the world will be friendlier and China can develop in a sustainable way”.

"I choose to be the president purely for students”, President Martin said when mentioning her idea about university management. She told that a president should exist for the sake of students and his or her responsibility is to take care of students.

The two presidents agreed that both SJTU and UW-Madison have great potential in the fields of sciences, engineering, technology transfer, commercialization of intellectual properties, public-private-partnership, development of alternative energy, green technology, biomedicine, and interdisciplinary studies in life science. They hope the students co-educated by SJTU and UW-Madison can play a significant role in the economic and cultural communication between China and America.

As a famous research university in the world and one of the most prestigious public universities in the US, UW-Madison, is described as a member of the “Public Ivy League” in America. UW-Madison is especially outstanding in the fields of education, geography, history, business, and sociology. Every year, the College of Letters and Science of UW-Madison consisting of 39 departments attracts excellent students all over the world to study there and pursue dreams. Mrs. Carolyn Martin stood out from the competitive election in 2007 to be the new president of UW-Madison.