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China's Universities Need a Universal Soul
Tue,02/09/10
Last year, harsh criticism of China’s universities circulated on the Chinese Internet. It was attributed to Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale University, but turned out to be a hoax. Some clever Chinese had taken Schmidt’s speech at a 1987 Yale undergraduate convocation out of the context to attack China’s higher education.
In an interview on February 1st with the U.K. newspaper, the Guardian, current president of Yale University Richard Levin predicted that within the next 25 years, China’s elite universities could be among the world’s top 10, thus rivaling Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the Ivy League institutions in the United States. This time the remarks were both positive and real, and thus were appreciated by the Chinese media.
Coincidently, the “world-class university” issue came up when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hosted leaders and professors and Chinese universities to solicit their opinions on his government report to be delivered in March at the upcoming session of the National People’s Congress. Wen reportedly said that “a good university is to have its own unique soul, which is independent thinking and freedom of expression.”
There is no doubt that in the past decade China’s higher education has witnessed astronomical growth in terms of physical facilities, student enrollment, and research productivity. But there also is no doubt that China’s universities do not have a “unique soul”; otherwise, Premier Wen would not have said so.
Recent criticism of China’s higher education has been aimed at the university bureaucracies and the lack of eminent scholars and software. Chinese universities though are at least as sophisticated as their counterparts in the West, in terms of infrastructure and hardware.
Examined at a deeper level, the problem facing higher education in China is not as simple as the software and hardware dichotomy suggests. The question of have the independent thinking and freedom of expression at universities that Premier Wen alluded to is what differentiates Chinese universities from many elsewhere in the world. In fact, not only world-class universities, but every institution of higher education, should encourage its faculty members and students to think independently.
Free inquiry and academic freedom are at the heart of modern universities, let alone world-class ones. In his recent book, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), Professor Jonathan R. Cole, who was my doctoral advisor at Columbia University and who led the university’s academic affairs for 14 years, includes it as both a core value of a great university and one of the factors that “make for” a great university.
Of course, such aspects as faculty research productivity, quality and impact; grant and contract support; faculty members with honors and awards; access to highly qualified students, excellence in teaching; physical facilities and advanced information technologies; large endowments and plentiful resources; large academic departments; location; contributions to public good, and excellent leadership are all essential.
But it is the existence of free inquiry and academic freedom, or the lack thereof, which becomes the watershed in the greatness of a university. In retrospect, the establishment of the tenure system at U.S. universities was not merely to provide job security to tenured faculty members, but primarily to protect their right to academic freedom.
Because of the imperatives of free inquiry and academic freedom, leadership at great universities cherishes this value and fiercely defends any activity that could undermine it. Unfortunately, the absence of this tradition in China, according to Cole, “has limited the pool of academic talent and stultified imagination and innovation.”
Therefore, to make its universities truly great and world-class, the Chinese state should give them a “soul,” which is not unique but universal, by nurturing free inquiry and academic freedom. Otherwise, Yale President Levin’s prediction could become another “hoax” 25 or so years later – not for its inaccuracy, but because the object of the prediction has not solved the underlined problem to attain greatness.
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