The need to make academia more competitive and accountable is one of the core issues in the ongoing reform of Peking University and many other universities across the country.
Under the reform plan, new PhD graduates from Peking University will not be offered posts as lecturers with the university, ending a tradition of more than half a century.
The university will open up all the associate professor and professor positions to competition from applicants inside and outside Peking University.
"Close- or in-breeding makes a species weak, hybridization makes a species strong," said Zhang Weiying, an acclaimed 44-year-old economist and assistant to the university president, who now also serves as director in the university's implementation panel for personnel reform.
"It's the same with scholarship."
Zhang noted that scholarship sometimes seems like an enterprise run by family members: The former students of prestigious old professors hold power.
"We have to do something to stop it before it's too late," he said.
In fact, Peking University has already taken a step towards its teaching reform plans by inviting prestigious professors from home as well as abroad to join its faculties.
The School of Software, affiliated to the university, has decided to recruit faculty directors from foreign countries. Five foreign scholars have already acted as heads of different faculties at the school.
Becky Bristow, a well-known US cartoon TV and film director, had a face-to-face interview at the school for the job of director of the Department for Digital Art Design over the weekend in Beijing.
If Bristow succeeds, she will become the sixth faculty director of the School of Software.
"We encourage universities across the country to invite foreign scholars to work as faculty directors, to improve universities' teaching team," said Zhang Yaoxue, director of the Department for Higher Education of the Ministry of Education.
China has 33 software schools attached to different universities. Some foreign computer experts have even been invited to head up the schools, according to Zhang, who didn't name the schools.
Universities such as Wuhan University in Central China's Hubei Province, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai-based Tongji University and Shandong University in Jinan, capital of Eastern China's Shandong Province, are among those inviting foreign professors to help improve teaching efficiency, said Zhang.
Shanghai Jiaotong University is determined to become a world-famous school - taking the study of machinery, dynamics and other curricula to new heights, said Yao Xun, with the university's personnel department, who is in charge of teaching affairs.
Yao said the university has ties with Michigan University in the United States, which regularly sends professors to his school to give lectures on machinery and dynamics.
"Although we have no foreign professors who act as faculty directors, we are seeking qualified candidates," said Yao.
He said his university would create a favorable climate for foreign professors who can meet its high expectations.
But Peking University's decision not to automatically promote new PhD graduates has also generated its share of objections.
Some people, especially those who are studying or plan to study with Peking University's doctoral program, protest that the rule will see the school lose some of its best students.
In a speech given to students of Peking University on June 12, Zhang Weiying answered undaunted: "You'll be welcome to come back to compete for tenures here in several years. If you are really good, you will be accepted."
The audience greeted his words with applause.
(China Daily July 10, 2003)
