I was waiting for Ruth to jump in here with chapter & verse as she works for said uni and lives on-site, but...
Dongguan is a biiiiiiig city - in terms of its land area. It includes 30-odd towns under the mantle of Dongguan City and stretches from the northern edge of Shenzhen to the southern end of Guangzhou. About a 2 hour drive on the highway, and very little undeveloped land in between. This is, after all, the manufacturing center of the world and there are wall to wall factories (some now empty!) as far as the eye can see.
The main "downtown" area is made up of the four suburbs of guancheng, nancheng, doncheng and wanjiang. This is where most of the shopping, restaurants and major government departments are found.
Songshan Lake is a newly developed district heading south of the main areas lsited above - about 15-20 kms I'm guessing. It contains the beautiful Songshan Lake with a brand new Hyat Hotel on the shore and surrounded by the university, a couple of schools and lots of new "high-tech" businesses. The major town of Dalingshan is abut 5 minutes away.
I takes between 30-60 minutes by local city bus to get there from downtown and about 50RMB by taxi.
It's a nice new area, but it is a bit away from the major retail/restaurant strips.There is a KFC there, however, so it can't be that bad!
Access to Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou & Macau is all pretty easy and inexpensive. There's also the Dongguan towns of Dalingshan (electronics), Houjie (shoes & furniture) & Humen (best clothes shopping in the world) surrounding Songhan Lake.
I believe that particular university pays really well and doesn't have terrible workloads and if I was ever going back down south I would definitely be trying to get a gig there.
PM Ruth for more info...