It is common practice today that colleges reserve good students trained by themselves and ignore academic innovation.

 

The statement was made by Zhu Qingshi, president of the Chinese University of Science and Technology, who denounced the abnormalities predominant in some colleges and universities in China while attending a roundtable meeting held in Shanghai last Wednesday among academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

A survey from the Renmin University of China shows that of all the 987 college teachers interviewed, 604, or as high as 62% of the total, stay in the school where they graduated. Contrary to this high percentage point of exclusive academic teaching in China, teachers in other countries have a high mobility rate. In Harvard University in the US, for example, among all the 47 lecturers who teach in its business school, only one received his highest academic degree from Harvard.

 

A result, as Zhu points out, is that most colleges and universities in China have failed to make much achievement in academic innovation for the past decade, and the speed of innovation has fallen behind its input. Another result is that students do not have the courage to outperform their tutors, and colleges lack the atmosphere to promote free academic research. And the more famous a college is, the more severe the problem is.

 

"Another abnormality is that contrary to the fast speed of erecting school buildings and the main gate, few has been done to expand the number of majors in a school," said Zhu.

 

He points out that while the number of universities and colleges in China had greatly increased, from 1,000 in 1998 to the present 2,300, and student enrollment increased by fourfold during this period, the variety of majors has not changed much over time.

 

(Chinanews.cn November 20, 2006)