Tackle bureaucracy

(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-17 06:32

It is ridiculous to put the power an official of a certain rank has on a par with the knowledge a professor has, and it is as ridiculous to stipulate that the status of a professor has an equal rank in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

But this happens in almost all universities. This is because a university is usually governed the same way as an administrative department is managed. For example, a university president is equal to a government bureau director or even a vice-minister in terms of bureaucratic hierarchy.

What is even worse is that, in some universities, the curriculum, research projects and examinations for recruiting postgraduates are not decided by professors or academic committees composed of professors but by a higher-level administrative department.

Little wonder that some deputies to the NPC session that concluded yesterday strongly criticized universities for becoming more and more like bureaucratic departments instead of institutions of higher learning.

As a result of bureaucratization, a professor who has official titles such as section head or director has more say than his counterpart who does not have any such official title. This is the case even if the latter is more prestigious in terms of academic achievements.

This has fostered an unhealthy tendency toward chasing official titles as opposed to pursuing academic achievements. These official titles equal power, making it easier for a professor to achieve fame and economic gain than by slogging away at scientific research.

People who do not teach and conduct research have more administrative resources than those who do, as they decide where a university's money goes and how the money is used.

Such bureaucratization creates an atmosphere that stifles academic development by making them accountable only to the higher authorities rather than for the development of the university as a place of higher learning.

This is because those officials on campus who benefit from this bureaucratization owe what they have to the higher authorities.

They will never serve the faculties whole-heartedly unless such bureaucratic management is replaced by a mechanism, under which board of professors, congress of teachers can effectively supervise university authorities.

(China Daily 03/17/2007 page4)