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Doctored agenda

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-22 08:47

The number of government officials with doctoral degrees is increasing, and quite a number of graduates with the highest academic degree end up working in government departments.

No one would challenge the fact that more knowledgeable people working as government officials could improve the quality and efficiency of administration. But that does not justify the fact that an increasing number of government officials get such academic degrees by taking advantage of their resources.

There is nothing wrong for a doctoral graduate to be recruited by a government department. And it is equally fair for a public servant, who is an avid learner, to get such a degree by working hard in his or her spare time for many years.

What is tricky is the phenomenon that it seems quite easy for government officials to get such degrees. Sources from the graduate school of Southwest University are quoted as saying that half of the prefecture and county top leaders in the city of Chongqing are taking part-time courses there for doctoral degrees.

As is known, it takes four years for most university students to get a bachelor's degree, three more years to get a master's and four or five more years for a doctorate. Ancient Chinese sages compared the pursuit of knowledge to a sea voyage without ever seeing shore and the years of study as hard as weathering the cold through open windows in severe winter.

In modern academia, doctoral degree is the most difficult to get and it takes a lot of hard work to delve deep into a particular discipline before one gets the degree. That explains why we held in reverence those with such degrees from abroad in the early 1980s when very few domestic universities had the authority to confer doctorates.

Yet, in some extreme cases, some government officials who do not have university diplomas or bachelor degrees can now get a doctorate. It has become a slur on the country's higher education.

Behind the trend is the pursuit of vanity and pretentiousness among government officials. Those honest and upright ones, who always consider doing a good job in performing their duties as the top priority, will attach more importance to their work rather than to the nominal credit academic degrees can bring them.

Had institutions of higher learning stuck strictly to their academic standards, it would have been impossible for so many government officials to acquire doctorates. It is certainly profitable for a university to make it easy for those in power to get academic degrees.

Yet, the trade-off between the two has added to the pretentiousness in officialdom and to the degrading of institutions of higher learning.

From a long-term perspective, it is suicidal for a university to lower academic standards for conferring degrees or even selling them. That can only be at the cost of its credibility.

(China Daily 10/22/2009 page8)