Making university and curricular sustainable entrepreneurship: a case study of Tsinghua University

Making the university and its teachers and students alike as sustainable entrepreneurs are central endeavours in this age of sustainable development today. This paper presents an in-depth case study to examine the development of sustainable entrepreneurship of Tsinghua University of China at institutional and curricular levels. The paper first proposes an analytical model of the sustainable university as the alignment of six elements based on three interrelated propositions. The paper then applies the model to study Tsinghua’s culture of sustainability and entrepreneurship and its strategies from green university to sustainable university. Next the paper discusses five cases courses in sustainability education from diverse disciplines with shared goal to foster sustainability competence as global competence and shared pedagogies for experiential learning. The paper concludes with theoretical discussions of institutional-level sustainable entrepreneurship and also practical discussions of shared characteristics and challenges of curricular-level sustainable entrepreneurship with special references of pedagogical and digital opportunities and challenges. The paper presents findings from a self-reflective practitioner-as-researcher action research jointly conducted by the instructors of case courses. The paper used a mixed-method approach with participatory observation, interview, focus-group, survey, and curricular development experiments.