MISSION VIEJO : Chinese Professor to Visit Saddleback

A business professor from a Chinese university will visit Saddleback College for most of next year to observe U.S. teaching methods, school officials said.

Professor Xue Bo, a business and marketing teacher at the Yunnan Institute of Finance and Trade, is scheduled to arrive Jan. 8 and stay 11 months.

“He will sit in our classes, mainly to see how we teach computer applications in business,” said Marly Bergerud, Saddleback’s dean of business science. “He will also meet and work with our faculty, so that we can learn about his culture and his country’s educational system.”

Xue, whose trip is being financed by the Yunnan Institute, will be the second Yunnan professor to visit Saddleback under an exchange between the two schools. Professor Yang Juang-Hua visited Saddleback last semester, teaching Chinese language, history and culture. He was paid by Saddleback for his work.

“He had lived through the Cultural Revolution (in the 1960s), during which he was banished to the farms and separated from his family,” Bergerud said. “He increased our staff’s and students’ understanding of his country in a way that is not possible through books.”

Bergerud was one of two Saddleback administrators who visited Yunnan last year, but no Saddleback professor has taught there.

“Our faculty senate is discussing ways that (Saddleback) can financially handle that,” Bergerud said. “If we sent somebody over there, Yunnan would pay them its full-time salary--$500 a year. That would hardly pay somebody’s mortgage back here.”

She said the most likely plan would be for Saddleback to give a professor a paid sabbatical leave to visit Yunnan.