By Shanice Davis

CSUSM professor, Dr. Yuan Yuan, is known to be both upfront with his expectations and fair

while charming the class with his warm smile and funny jokes.

Dr. Yuan Yuan, a Literature and Writing professor here at CSUSM, talks about how much he

loves his job as a Literature and Writing Professor.

“I enjoy being a professor because you have a lot of time to read and think,” Professor Yuan

said.

“As the Chinese saying goes, thinking without reading leads to laziness and reading without

thinking leads to confusion. Especially for a professor engaged in theories, thinking helps put

ideas into different perspectives and reading further challenges those perspectives.”

Professor Yuan was originally born in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province, China.

“[Jinan] is about a hundred miles away from Qufu where Confucius was born about two

thousand years ago,” Professor Yuan said.

Before arriving in the States, Yuan received his Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Language and

Literature and his Master’s Degree at The Institute of Modern American Literature, both located

in Shandong University in China.

Professor Yuan later received his Doctorate Degree in English at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee. Living and studying in both China and the United States, Professor Yuan acquired

language proficiency in both English and Chinese.

Professor Yuan has been living in the states since 1985; he first migrated to Milwaukee,

Wisconsin from Jinan under the Fulbright Scholarship. He lived in Milwaukee for six years

before settling in San Diego in 1991.

Shortly after Yuan’s arrival to San Diego in 1991, he began working at CSUSM.

”I have been teaching at CSUSM for about 23 years now, and I witnessed the huge change of

CSUSM from a university without a campus and with only a couple of hundred students, to now

a campus big enough you could get lost amidst over ten thousand students,” Professor Yuan said.

For Professor Yuan, being a professor was not something he had always wanted to do, but deems

his dream job was to be able to fix all problems.

“For instance, I like to repair stuff,” Professor Yuan said. “Whenever something is broken at my

home, I always try my hand to fix it; of course, I always make it worse. That is why we bought a

new stove last year.”

As for Dr. Yuan’s life outside of school, he cites reading, citing, traveling, painting and

photography as some of his hobbies.

Professor Yuan also dabbles in instructing a Chinese film course; Yimou Zhang is his favorite

Chinese film director.

“His movie, Hero, is one of the most artistic movies of all time,” Professor Yuan said. “Both the

cinematography and the narratives are splendid in that movie.”

As a last note, Professor Yuan advises CSUSM students to continuously challenge their minds.

“Read, think over what you read and remember your reading and thinking,” Professor Yuan

said. “I see a tendency of putting one’s brain in one’s pocket, I mean, the iPhone. If you lose

your IPhone, you go crazy—a total loss. Try to be an ‘organic’ human in a post-human world.”