Leave the ivory tower a piece of pure land

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-29 08:17

Recently, besides successive exposure of corrupt senior government officials, people's attention has been attracted to another field with high incidence of corruption - China's ever-enlarging universities.

It is reported that the executive vice-president Chen Zhaofang and executive deputy Party secretary Long Xiaole of China's prestigious Wuhan University in Hubei province had been detained on suspicion of corruption. Before being dismissed, both Chen and Long held long several offices in the university ranging from administrative operation and financial management to academic studies and had been awarded numerous honorary titles. The two chiefs have taken several millions of yuan in bribes from the school construction project.

The "earthshaking" case had seriously tainted the reputation of Wuhan University with a history of more than 100 years, a former president of the institute said bitterly.

While, if you pay attention to Chinese media reports in recent years, you will find that the two cases are not single and accidental ones. Prior to these two cases, Li Haiying, former vice-president of Wuhan University of Technology, was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking bribes and embezzling a total of 14 million yuan. Li Jinhe, former vice-president of Hubei University, was jailed for 13 years for accepting bribes of more than 800,000 yuan.

Following the marketization of China's higher education and quick expansion of many universities, crime by taking advantage of positions in campuses has been on the rise.

Why have Chinese universities, once honored as pure ivory tower, become a new seedbed for corruption? According to media statistics, currently, college corruption cases usually concentrate in several fields: school infrastructure construction projects, logistics support services, facility and textbook procurement, students' recruitment and academic research.

The Chinese people always put emphasis on their offspring's education courses. In order to enroll more students and improve the teaching and accommodation conditions, a large number of construction projects were launched on campus nationwide, which brought room and possibility for abuse of power and rent seeking by college officials in charge of these projects. As the access to higher education is still less than the demand, the resource of enrolment sometimes may be subjected to "black case work". Without effective inspection, some officials find it is easy to feather their own nest from schools' mass procurement and logistics services.

In order to curb the increasing college corruption cases, as desired by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China, the universities should spare no effort to fight corruption and build a clean administrative leadership, step up scientific and democratic decision-making mechanism, strengthen management and supervision of school finance, construction projects, purchasing, budget for scientific research and enterprises affiliated to colleges. It is crucial to check and inspect school leaders' power and subject them to dynamic and overall scrutiny.

The crux of the college corruption issue lies in the coincidence of over commercializing and obstinate bureaucratization in universities. So fundamentally, college anti-corruption campaign must first redefine the relation between higher education institutions and the administrative department; reset the role of university leadership and avoid double roles of acting both as scholar and official; reform the internal management system, separate administrative power from academic research and reduce the impact of administration on education. So only after colleges get rid of bureaucratic regulation and government administration fully engages in the rule of law, can corruption cases be reduced.

China Daily

(China Daily 10/29/2009 page8)