In her Senate Assembly Annual Address on Oct. 30, 2006, Coleman said "the level of our engagement with China is truly astounding and very exciting....We want to test several hypotheses in our work with China: first, that we can build partnerships that will allow our faculty and students -- and the University as a whole -- to reach their fullest potential in a globalized world. Second, that the lessons of our success as a great public research university can help produce change, not just on one campus, but throughout Chinese higher education. And third, that we can learn much from the ambitious experiment in higher education that is under way in China."

Asked whether he is misinterpreting the university's intentions and that he's making too much of them because he is a disgruntled professor who has lost research funding he obtained and not gotten to teach his preferred courses, Kauffman replies: "I represent the little guy, the native born Americans" who no longer dominate the science and technology communities at major research universities. What makes him unique, he says, is having been born in Waynesboro, Penn., working his way through college in a machine shop and receiving his Ph.D. in aeronautics. His views on the world were formed by his work in the aeronautics field during the Cold War when the Untied States guarded its technology from the Soviet Union, by the time he spent working for the Air Force and his two years living in Moscow.

"What troubles me is that we're treating the Chinese much differently than the way we dealt with the Soviets," he says. "When you look at the Pentagon's 2007 Military Threat report, they don't exactly say they're nice guys."