IN my opinion article "Tsinghua sells its soul for some extra cash" (Shanghai Daily, May 28), I questioned Tsinghua University's wisdom in renaming a teaching building after a brand of casual wear.

The name plaque had since been vandalized, but the university said it would remain.

And some readers have alternative views about the propriety of universities receiving corporate donations.

Shanghai-based Fernando Bensuaski wrote to me saying "much of your opinion is based on the premise that the university's core task is to preserve a civilization. I propose that this is not the case. The core tasks of a university are to develop and transmit knowledge."

He added, "The preservation of a culture is the function of a museum. As a developer of knowledge, a university always needs funding beyond what the state can give it."

Bensuaski is partly correct about university as a developer/transmitter of knowledge, because the universities we see today are little more than that.

Today's universities are almost exclusively focused on turning out graduates programmed for a special type of job.

And which specialty to choose is almost wholly decided by job prospects, or earning power.

But that is a shadow of what education was supposed to do in the beginning, East or West.

In Book 1 of the Analects, a Confucian classic, Confucius set out how learning should proceed.

"A young man's duty is to behave well to his parents at home and to his elders abroad, to be cautious in giving promises and punctual in keeping them, to have kindly feelings towards everyone, but seek the intimacy of the Good. If, when all that is done, he has any energy to spare, then let him study the classics," the book reads.

These principles were later incorporated into Dizigui, which some children, among them my eight-year-old son, still manage to memorize, but no longer find occasion to put into practice given the changed social conditions.

In the case of my first-grader son, the true meaning of education is the daily eight-hour engagement with mathematics, Chinese, and English.

These subjects have been carefully reduced into numerous, fragmented test items deliberately constructed to confound and frustrate.

Coming up with standard answers by following standard procedure can be a challenge, even for me.

Sound ridiculous?

Well, this situation does to a degree encapsulate the era's almost religious faith in our capacity to know (science).

And unlike the worship of the unknown, this overriding belief in our capacity to know has led to severe degradations in our living environment.

Just to mention a few: the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, the enormous water damming project that some begin to link with the drought, and the periodic poisoning of human food.

Chinese scholar

The traditional Chinese never put much stock in "pure" knowledge in a scholar. That attribute is never considered in isolation from the personality and character in question.

And the first lesson of any education started with cognizance of one's humble place in the mysterious universe.

"The Chinese respect for the scholar is based on a different conception, for they respect that type of education which increases his practical wisdom, his knowledge of world affairs, and his judgment in times of crisis," said Lin Yutang in his "My Country and My People."

Lin went on to say, "It is a respect which, in theory at least, must be earned by actual worth. In local as in national troubles, the people look to him for cool judgment, for far-sightedness, for a better envisagement of the manifold consequences of an act or decision ..."

Any Chinese university today is much better off in material terms than The National Southwest Associated University during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945), but that wartime university remained one of the very few truly first-rate universities modern China has known - and that estimation had nothing to do with the number of recipients of a certain prize highly regarded in the West.

Some years ago I read the memoir of a scholar who once studied there, then in the United States, and returned to the new China in the early 1950s, fired by idealism.

He summed up his subsequent experience by "I came, I suffered, I survived."

After reading the book, my esteem welled up for the author, rather than his big-time prize-winning fellow Chinese alumnus who shrewdly chose not to return, and later, when they met again, listened to the author's ordeal with indifference.

In Chinese judgment, character should always take precedence over intelligence.

Western universities began with the purpose of glorifying the Omniscient God (with churches still dominating on some campuses), and in this process they gradually evolved into an institution dedicated to the glorification of the omniscient humans.

About a century ago, some Chinese went to study in America, fired by patriotic fervor to save China, after the nation suffered repeated humiliations from devastating Western gunboats and weaponry.

But these Chinese were also acutely aware of the differences in the underlying philosophies of education between East and West.

In 1925 Zhang Xiaomin, a Chinese studying at a university in Wisconsin, wrote to Zhang Shizhao, then education minister, to share his observations of American-style universities.

Donor-dependent

He remarked that American universities, in addition to turning out experts and specialists, should ideally also help foster leading ideologies, improve social manners, and temper strong characters.

But in practice, American universities succeeded only in turning out specialists.

This Zhang blamed on the commercialization of education.

He wrote that the private universities in America were [and still are] funded by donations from big businesses, which meant that the educators had to depend on the whims of the money givers.

While disciplines like medicine, agriculture, and engineering do benefit from generous funding, liberal arts are easily crippled and distorted by the patronage.

Zhang said that some of the most foresighted scholars in America viewed such funding as "slave endowment."

Still, unsatisfied with control of mere private universities, some tycoons sought to place state universities at their disposal as well.

"Recently the oil baron Rockefeller intended to give a huge amount of money to Wisconsin State University, and has met with fierce resistance from some well-known professors, but the gesture also met with some approval among the faculty," Zhang wrote.

Zhang ended his letter with a note of optimism, saying that "some professors are trying hard to remedy this situation."

Now, nearly 86 years later, we are in a better position to judge if those American professors have been successful.