On the morning of November 18, 2025, Professor Victoria Honeyman, Pro-Dean of Student Education at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leeds (UK), visited the School of Public Affairs (SPA), Zhejiang University. Professor Zhao Zhirong, Dean of SPA, Professor Shen Wei from the Department of Political Science, and Ms. Lu Lin, International Relations Secretary, attended the meeting. Both parties conducted in-depth exchanges on inter-university cooperation prospects and reached multiple consensuses.
At the start of the talks, Professor Victoria Honeyman gave a detailed introduction to the development of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Leeds. The faculty is soon to be upgraded and renamed the Faculty of Environment and Social Sciences, which will integrate eight schools including Politics and International Studies, Law, Sociology, Education, and Earth and Environment. Its core disciplines cover international relations, political science, global development, and other fields. The faculty has completed the restructuring of over 100 programs and hundreds of courses, and boasts a mature international student support system. It provides comprehensive guarantees for overseas students, including priority admission, special scholarships, on-campus accommodation, airport pickup, and adaptability guidance.
Subsequently, Dean Zhao Zhirong introduced the school-running characteristics and development plans of SPA. With over 120 faculty members and seven departments, the school has focused on internationalization in recent years, with more than half of its faculty holding overseas PhD degrees or having international work experience. The school’s research areas include green and sustainable finance, public budgeting and finance, urban governance, etc., which are highly aligned with the disciplinary layout of the University of Leeds’ new faculty, laying a solid foundation for bilateral cooperation.
In the cooperation discussion session, combining their disciplinary advantages and student needs, both parties clarified multi-level cooperation directions. In the short term, they will promote undergraduate summer study tour programs; in the medium term, they will establish a green channel for master’s degree admission, with the University of Leeds offering special support such as priority admission and tuition fee reductions for SPA undergraduates, while exploring a joint PhD supervision model. In the long run, both parties plan to gradually advance faculty exchanges and academic cooperation, and explore the possibility of establishing joint programs or even a joint institute.
This meeting marks an important start for deepening international cooperation between the two parties and builds an efficient communication platform for subsequent pragmatic cooperation. In the future, taking this talk as an opportunity, both parties will give full play to their respective disciplinary and resource advantages, carry out in-depth cooperation in talent training, academic research and other fields, build a broader international exchange platform for teachers and students of both universities, and jointly contribute to talent training and academic innovation in the field of global governance.
