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Print Edition> Nation
UPDATED: April 5, 2009 NO. 14 APR. 9, 2009
Calls for University Reform
Chinese universities need more autonomy to improve the quality of higher education
By FENG JIANHUA
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"If a university does not have academic freedom and the professors do not have academic power, then no matter how magnificent its buildings are, how big its campus is, how luxurious its facilities are, whether its president holds the rank of a minister or vice minister, it is not a modern university, much less a world-class university," Yang said.

Yang said if universities are not given independence, then increasing funding for education and importing overseas talents would not fundamentally improve the quality of education or the academic competitiveness of Chinese universities. He said that giving autonomy to universities would instill vigor and creativity into them.

Unfinished reform

China's education reform began in 1985, when the government released circulars on improving the country's educational system that pointed out the illnesses plaguing it. The documents said the government's overly tight control of schools strangled their vitality.

In March 1986, the State Council issued regulations expanding the power of higher institutions regarding recruitment, graduate positioning, funding, infrastructure construction, professional faculty qualification appraisals and teaching and research management.

Then, in April 1988, the government actively pushed for a system called the president-responsibility system, where university presidents would have the strongest voice in decisions concerning their institutions. By early 1989, more than 100 institutes had adopted the president-responsibility system.

Yang said education system reform froze after 1989. Since the mid-1990s, Chinese universities have embarked on the path of commercialization. Universities have been growing in numbers and scale, while there has been little significant progress made in system reform to match the growth.

The 1999 Higher Education Law identifies universities as legal entities serving the society and clarifies seven rights of universities, including the rights to set up or cancel major areas of study, choose textbooks and teaching methods, make teaching plans, and decide on the number of students to be recruited into each department while the total number of newly recruited students are within the limit set by the government. From 1999 to 2005, the Ministry of Education published a series of policies affording new rights to schools, such as the right to adjust their own organizational structures.

Nevertheless, due to strong administrative control, there has been no fundamental change to the allocation method of educational resources in China. Education management and policymaking are still dominated by officials, who have hampered the implementation of relevant laws and regulations.

What's ahead?

To liberate universities from administrative control, it is imperative to sort out the relationship between universities and the government, between universities and the society, and between the administrative units and academic units within the universities, said Xiamen University President Zhu Chongshi.

A university's academic affairs should be determined by the academic units rather than the administrative units, said Zhu, and the administrative units should be service-oriented and meet the needs of academic units.

Yang said universities should first be able to enjoy autonomous rights specified by law, and in the meantime, should stop acting as the government's agent. Yang held that there should be no government agency supervising universities and that they should be real legal entities serving the society. This change requires a number of systematic alterations, like reforming funding-allocation systems and electing rather than nominating university presidents.

The key to university management-system reform is to let the institutions become academics-oriented and to have academic democracy. Some universities have already begun exploring these ideas. In 2000, Northeast Normal University set up a professors' committee at the college level and adopted a dean-responsibility system under the professor committee, becoming pioneers in the reform. Central South University established a university-level professors' committee, which makes collective decisions on important issues in teaching, research and talent recruitment.

Although professors' committees have been set up in some universities, and professors are invited to participate in running university affairs, there is still a long way to go in balancing administrative and academic power in Chinese universities, said Wang Changle, Director of Jiangsu University's Education Research Institute.

 

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