Classes have officially begun as of Monday, though our campus itself is still quite bare! Due to the continued threat of the coronavirus, Peking University has opted to move classes online so students can further their education from the safety of their homes. As this comes with its own set of challenges, Professor John Edward Hopcroft, Professor John Keith Zacharias, and Professor Donald David Stone have reached out to offer words of encouragement to students.

John Edward Hopcroft

Visiting Chair Professor

Director of Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies

Peking University

Recipient of A.M. Turing Award

Recipient of Chinese Government Friendship Award

Recipient of Peking University Friendship Award

Foreign Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences

PKU cares about the success of its students and is working hard to ensure their safety and provide them with the world-class education. Due to the coronavirus, it is essential that large groups do not congregate and that is why students are not on campus. Instruction is by video and is of high quality. We hope to return to normal in a few months when it is safe.

John Keith Zacharias

Professor in the College of Architecture and Landscape

Peking University

Recipient of Peking University Friendship Award

I'm very much looking forward to the semester and hoping to have a very productive time. There are electronic media that are very helpful in this sense. It doesn't replace face-to-face communication. That's quite obvious, but anyway we are able to communicate with each other, exchange ideas and advance our research under the current circumstances. I would so much like to have face-to-face communication with those I'm collaborating with but for the present we have to put that on hold. We didn't have those electronic communication media 17 years ago during the SARS virus crisis. At that time, I had prepared a course to take students to Shanghai. I prudently thought I should cancel the course. The students said they would like to go. So we did. We had some wonderful contacts with professors at Tongji University and with the students. Let that be a kind of memory of what can happen during a critical time!

Donald David Stone

Professor in the School of Foreign Languages

Peking University

Recipient of Chinese Government Friendship Award

Recipient of Peking University Friendship Award

Amid the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, I am bothered by the fate of my friends and students and the country I love so much! Friends send me reassuring messages on WeChat. But I can guess at their sense of isolation and fear, and the outside world could certainly be more understanding and helpful. In the meantime, we must hope that scientists are working on vaccines to contain and cure this new plague. When this plague lifts, it is important that we learn something from it. As human beings, we must learn from experience.

Thank you for taking the time to offer your support, professors!

We are all eager to finally defeat the coronavirus and return to our beautiful campus. Until then, we will all do our part to follow our lectures online, and use this time spent cooped up indoors to get through a few more books.

Be safe, study hard, and we'll see you on campus once COVID-19 is conquered!

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Message from PKU Intl Faculties: Stay Strong and Keep Learning!

Writer: Qiu Kanghua, Trevor

Editor: Zhang Jiang, Huang Weijian

Designer: Pu Hairui

Source: Office of International Relations, Peking University