WEI, Jian’s blog

On the making of word first-rate universities in China

On April 2, 2008, GuangMing Daily (one major newspaper of the China government) published an article by professor RAO Yi and SHI Yigong on how to transform China’s top universities into the world’s best (a short summary in English).

The solution by them can be summarized to two measures: 1) Recruit more top scholars from abroad to form a critical mass (see also an old NYtimes article ). 2) Make new rules so faculty members have more academic freedom and have more say on management.

Apparently the second one is more difficult, since as many people doubted, it is hard for the universities to be independent and have the right atmosphere for academic freedom while everything is under control of the government.

I searched the internet and to my surprise, there are not too many discussions after this article. There seem a lot people in China think democracy and political reform is the penicillin for everything, and without that nothing could be done even for higher ed. For my point of view, that is not true and there are still concrete things that can be done even in current situation:

1. In the long run we need to cultivate the spirit of science from the earlier age of our students so later they will do research because of their interest in pursuing science, not just to get a degree. Only with long-last interest and self motivation, can we have great scientists and thinkers, not just good ones. For this purpose, one important and concrete thing that the government can do is to build more public libraries (and fill them) for each town or village, as those in the United States.

2. Open a few universities to the world and make them the central portals for knowledge and training center for more faculty members. By open to the world I mean the working language should be English, and the recruiting is open to any people in the world, not limited to Chinese. These universities should be similar to those in Hongkong and compete with the best in the world. I believe this is the fastest way to become competitive in this English dominated environment.

3. Make use of the internet. For example, in the states many students use wiki/google to search useful information and use the department homepage to find interesting research project and faculty member’s publications etc, in China, however, wiki can not be accessed, and even for the best universities there are not much to see on their department homepage (I once inquired the webmaster of the department I was in, but got no response, which is natural since the webmaster has no power at all to make the changes). Plus, making things available online (also in English) enhances the transparency of management and may even help to prevent scientific misconduct, which is a serious problem for many universities in China now.

That is all I can think of now. I hope the policy makers, deans and professors in China can have more discussion on this topic. In US, there are in fact a lot interesting stories about higher education on Chronicle of higher ed and http://www.insidehighered.com/.