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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views
Craving Ivy League status despite faults
By Ni Tao |
May 18, 2010, Tuesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ONCE widely criticized for spoon-feeding and rote-teaching pedagogy, many of China's higher education institutions today in fact represent a research powerhouse that nurtures tens of thousand of top talents every year.
Chinese higher education joined the global brain race as a latecomer but proved its credentials as a dark horse - in terms of its speed in catching up with foreign counterparts in enrollment.
A decade of metamorphosis of Chinese higher education has seen the annual enrollment almost increasing sixfold, from 1.08 million in 1998 to 6.08 million in 2008, according to the Ministry of Education.
But there remains one playing field that Chinese institutions want badly to level: the global rankings that are dominated by Western universities both in numbers and in influence.
For this reason, the lavish praise and bold prediction from the head of an elite Western school is naturally music to the ears of Chinese educators craving encomiums and status.
Yale University president Richard Levin writes in the May/June, 2010, issue of Foreign Affairs, an esteemed US current affairs journal, that "in China, the nine universities that receive the most supplemental government funding recently self-identified as the C9 - China's Ivy League."
In an interview with the Guardian published on February 2, Levin gave even more kudos that could be felt as far as China's ivory towers.
"Chinese institutions would rank in the world's top 10 universities in 25 years' time, squeezing out some of the West's elite campuses," he said.
"This is an audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make it feasible," Levin was quoted as saying.
Basking in such unprecedented levels of adulation, some Chinese educators will likely be lulled into complacency. But there's no reason for complacency, even if a strong wind is blowing at their back.
To catapult its best universities into the world class, China has been showering them steadily with increasing amounts of cash.
By global standards, China's overall education expenditure as a share of GNP is almost measly - 3.48 percent in 2008, below the international benchmark of 4 percent. But education outlay is definitely growing, only at a slower clip than the country's GDP growth.
Even so, money alone cannot buy top notch universities. It indeed can buy faster computers, larger libraries, more sophisticated research equipment and magnificent high-rise buildings that often sit incongruously amid a landscape of humble and aging low-rises on Chinese campuses.
But none of them is a key ingredient in making many foreign institutions stand out.
On the contrary, these campus monstrosities are more than eyesores. Hundreds of similar projects, many of which will end up becoming white elephants, have left Chinese universities deeply in debt. Caught up in reckless expansion, public colleges in China had run up a whopping 200 billion yuan (US$29.3 billion) debt by 2007, the then Education Minister Zhou Ji told a press conference in 2007.
As a result, heavily indebted schools were forced to recoup the cost of their profligacy by selling leases of land they hogged, a move that fueled much controversy.
This practice continues to this day, the Beijing Evening Post reported on February 8. To Levin's dismay, that's where a significant portion of "supplemental government funding" has probably gone.
The spending spree in tertiary education sometimes exposes the even darker side of its meteoric rise.
During a meeting in early May in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, officials from the Party's top disciplinary body said universities have become a hotbed for graft, with the sectors of infrastructure, procurement, logistics and enrollment being the most corruption-ridden, the Beijing News reported on May 3.
Ironically, what had been intended to facilitate the coming of age of Chinese institutions has led to their gradual deterioration.
However, money may have only been a catalyst for this process, not a root cause.
The urge to punch above their weight is a more convincing reason why Chinese universities often display the kind of short-term thinking that hobbles their healthy development.
There is no better illustration of this misplaced urgency than the widely sanctified mandate that regards the number of academic works published annually - preferably in reputable periodicals - as the sole criterion for reviewing university faculty and determining excellence.
This ruthlessly quantity-oriented mechanism naturally transforms Chinese universities into mega-factories churning out articles that would barely qualify as serious academic works if subjected to more rigorous scrutiny.
Perhaps Chinese institutions might pause awhile in their headlong rush and heed some wisdom of the very schools they try to emulate.
"Measuring every year exactly what you've done with some set of formula is not what we think is the best way to have the most talented people do their work," said Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, at Fudan University on April 30.
It's an open secret that some Chinese professors plagiarize their students' works and brazenly claim them as their own, in addition to plagiarizing their fellow researchers or paying ghostwriters to do their writing.
In the face of this spreading cancer, how can universities - supposedly a safe haven for those searching beyond worldly pursuits - be expected to live up to the trust and civic pride invested in them?
That is a question Chinese institutions may well spend some time pondering before setting their sights on achieving parity with their foreign counterparts.
Chinese higher education joined the global brain race as a latecomer but proved its credentials as a dark horse - in terms of its speed in catching up with foreign counterparts in enrollment.
A decade of metamorphosis of Chinese higher education has seen the annual enrollment almost increasing sixfold, from 1.08 million in 1998 to 6.08 million in 2008, according to the Ministry of Education.
But there remains one playing field that Chinese institutions want badly to level: the global rankings that are dominated by Western universities both in numbers and in influence.
For this reason, the lavish praise and bold prediction from the head of an elite Western school is naturally music to the ears of Chinese educators craving encomiums and status.
Yale University president Richard Levin writes in the May/June, 2010, issue of Foreign Affairs, an esteemed US current affairs journal, that "in China, the nine universities that receive the most supplemental government funding recently self-identified as the C9 - China's Ivy League."
In an interview with the Guardian published on February 2, Levin gave even more kudos that could be felt as far as China's ivory towers.
"Chinese institutions would rank in the world's top 10 universities in 25 years' time, squeezing out some of the West's elite campuses," he said.
"This is an audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make it feasible," Levin was quoted as saying.
Basking in such unprecedented levels of adulation, some Chinese educators will likely be lulled into complacency. But there's no reason for complacency, even if a strong wind is blowing at their back.
To catapult its best universities into the world class, China has been showering them steadily with increasing amounts of cash.
By global standards, China's overall education expenditure as a share of GNP is almost measly - 3.48 percent in 2008, below the international benchmark of 4 percent. But education outlay is definitely growing, only at a slower clip than the country's GDP growth.
Even so, money alone cannot buy top notch universities. It indeed can buy faster computers, larger libraries, more sophisticated research equipment and magnificent high-rise buildings that often sit incongruously amid a landscape of humble and aging low-rises on Chinese campuses.
But none of them is a key ingredient in making many foreign institutions stand out.
On the contrary, these campus monstrosities are more than eyesores. Hundreds of similar projects, many of which will end up becoming white elephants, have left Chinese universities deeply in debt. Caught up in reckless expansion, public colleges in China had run up a whopping 200 billion yuan (US$29.3 billion) debt by 2007, the then Education Minister Zhou Ji told a press conference in 2007.
As a result, heavily indebted schools were forced to recoup the cost of their profligacy by selling leases of land they hogged, a move that fueled much controversy.
This practice continues to this day, the Beijing Evening Post reported on February 8. To Levin's dismay, that's where a significant portion of "supplemental government funding" has probably gone.
The spending spree in tertiary education sometimes exposes the even darker side of its meteoric rise.
During a meeting in early May in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, officials from the Party's top disciplinary body said universities have become a hotbed for graft, with the sectors of infrastructure, procurement, logistics and enrollment being the most corruption-ridden, the Beijing News reported on May 3.
Ironically, what had been intended to facilitate the coming of age of Chinese institutions has led to their gradual deterioration.
However, money may have only been a catalyst for this process, not a root cause.
The urge to punch above their weight is a more convincing reason why Chinese universities often display the kind of short-term thinking that hobbles their healthy development.
There is no better illustration of this misplaced urgency than the widely sanctified mandate that regards the number of academic works published annually - preferably in reputable periodicals - as the sole criterion for reviewing university faculty and determining excellence.
This ruthlessly quantity-oriented mechanism naturally transforms Chinese universities into mega-factories churning out articles that would barely qualify as serious academic works if subjected to more rigorous scrutiny.
Perhaps Chinese institutions might pause awhile in their headlong rush and heed some wisdom of the very schools they try to emulate.
"Measuring every year exactly what you've done with some set of formula is not what we think is the best way to have the most talented people do their work," said Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, at Fudan University on April 30.
It's an open secret that some Chinese professors plagiarize their students' works and brazenly claim them as their own, in addition to plagiarizing their fellow researchers or paying ghostwriters to do their writing.
In the face of this spreading cancer, how can universities - supposedly a safe haven for those searching beyond worldly pursuits - be expected to live up to the trust and civic pride invested in them?
That is a question Chinese institutions may well spend some time pondering before setting their sights on achieving parity with their foreign counterparts.
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