北大教授饶毅给中国大学大跃进泼冷水：三流的北大清华先争二流免谈一流
美国《科学》杂志一月长篇报道中国大学“大跃进”。全篇以南开大学为例。南开的校长饶子和，大刀阔斧，一举招聘15个院长，所以应聘的都给，不做院长就做教授，同时招聘55个教授。中国大学纷纷举债盖大楼，扩大招生，掀起奔世界一流大学的滔天巨浪，看起来是一片轰轰烈烈的大好形势。
在这些肤浅的热闹后面，要大钱，大楼，聘教授和菜市场买菜一样热闹的时候，中国大学里还有冷静的人吗？
幸亏《科学》杂志最后一段，说：中国最好的北大清华也还是世界三流，期待中国马上有世界一流大学不是起反作用，就是太幼稚。“我们应该面对现实，先把北大清华建成世界二流，以后再前进”。
结尾这些令人头脑清醒的话，是北京大学的饶毅。
简单几句，令人击节。
Science 11 January 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5860, pp. 148 - 151
http://www.sciencemag.org/xxxx/content/full/319/5860/148
CHINESE UNIVERSITIES:
Gunning for the Ivy League
Hao Xin and Dennis Normile*
As they strive to become world-class educational institutions, China's
universities must overcome a host of impediments, from antiquated curricula
to mounting debt
TIANJIN, CHINA--When Rao Zihe became president of Nankai University in May
2006, he hatched a plan to restore glory to a faltering institution. To
shake up the system, Rao set out to hire new deans for 15 of the 21 colleges
. Applications flooded in. After interviewing six or eight candidates for
each post en masse at Nankai's leafy campus here in Tianjin, a port city 120
kilometers east of Beijing, Rao chose his deans. Then he pulled a
switcheroo: He offered faculty positions to all the runners-up--several
dozen scientists--and most accepted.
Like a baseball xxxxutive building his team, Rao aimed for up-and-comers,
mostly assistant and associate professors from toptier institutions,
including Yale University, Cornell University, and the University of Oxford.
He brought aboard part-time senior academics and retired government
officials to provide experience. All told, Rao hired more than 200 new
faculty members--more than 10% of the academic staff--in the first 18 months
of his term. Renewing the faculty one professor at a time "wouldn't achieve
my objectives" of overhauling curricula and teaching methods and setting
higher standards, he says: "We need a critical mass [to change] the
environment."
Nankai's makeover is part of a broad push by Chinese authorities to create a
tertiary education system that matches the country's aspirations. And like
everything in China these days, it's being done in a hurry. In a remarkably
short time, China has moved from universities for an elite few to mass
higher education. University enrollment soared from 3.6 million in 1998 to
25 million in 2006. Nearly a quarter of college-age youth now receive
tertiary education, surpassing the country's goal of 15% by 2010.
The quality of education has largely been an afterthought--until now.
According to today's mantra, a vigorous higher education system will promote
homegrown innovation. Aiming for the stars, Chinese educators and leaders
want their top universities to join the ranks of the world's best.
They have a long way to go. "There's a huge gap between China's universities
and world-class universities," says economist Yingyi Qian of the University
of California, Berkeley, now on leave while heading the School of Economics
and Management at Tsinghua (Qinghua) University in Beijing. Undergraduates
at China's top universities are on a par with those at top U.S. schools,
says Qian, who has studied how China's education revolution compares to the
shift from elite to mass education in the United States in the late 19th
century. As China expands the system, it needs to add quality to quantity,
Qian and others say, by employing far more world-class professors. He
predicts that will take decades.
Great Leap Forward?
Before the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the country had
scores of comprehensive universities. In the 1950s, China adopted the Soviet
model of specialized higher education. For example, to remake Tsinghua in
the likeness of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, nonengineering
departments were moved to other universities. All universities were ordered
to focus on education and leave research to institutes of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. These moves "completely destroyed" the previous
education system, Qian says. Colleges founded in the 1950s concentrated on a
single specialty: textiles, railways, metallurgy, and so on. Then in the
1960s, the Cultural Revolution shut down universities altogether. They
resumed operations in the late 1970s but only admitted a tiny number of
elite students.
As early as 1995, the education ministry launched a plan to prepare 100
universities for the 21st century. Project 211 put $2.3 billion on the table
, mainly for infrastructure and curriculum development. In 1998, after then-
President Jiang Zemin proclaimed that "China must have a number of first-
rate universities of international advanced level," the ministry hatched
Project 985, which aims to help universities fortify existing strengths and
develop new research areas. Originally intended for Peking University (Beida
) and Tsinghua University--widely considered China's two best--the program
has since been expanded to three dozen universities. Most of the money has
gone to building capacity. For example, Beida used a portion of its $225
million 985-phase-1 allocation to establish the Institute of Molecular
Medicine, focusing on translational research for cardiovascular diseases.
Despite this largess, the central government's overall university budget
allocation has declined from an average of $847 per student in 1998 to $672
per student in 2005, according to xxxxer education minister Chen Zhili.
Compounding the decline, many local governments have failed to honor pledges
to match central-government funding.
At a press conference last autumn, Education Minister Zhou Ji played down
the debt crisis as a "special situation in a historic process and not as bad
as some have imagined." Zhou said that the central and local governments
would increase allocations to universities. Observers expect that any
ramping up will be gradual.
It's the faculty
Financial ills are likely to be cured sooner than ailing faculties. At most
Chinese universities, senior faculty members entered their university as
undergrads and joined the faculty while working on Ph.D. degrees. Such
inbreeding, Rao and others say, results in outmoded courses, antiquated
teaching methods, and a lack of fresh ideas for research. When Rao arrived
at Nankai, the university's life sciences courses focused on traditional
disciplines such as entomology and botany and ignored emerging fields;
curricula and teaching methods were little changed from the half-century-old
Soviet-style model; and there was little interaction among departments. "We
needed new people, new fields, new subjects," Rao says. Meanwhile,
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many of China's best and brightest scholars
established careers overseas.
The need to infuse new blood into universities was recognized in the 1990s,
when the government set up incentive programs to tap the expertise of
expatriate Chinese. Many programs offered lucrative incentives for overseas
scholars to return. The programs have had mixed results: Some of these "sea
turtles"--as the returnees are nicknamed in Chinese--were looking for easy
moonlighting gigs. Indeed, some star part-timers offer their host
institutions little more than high-profile names that are good for public
relations (Science, 22 September 2006, p. 1721). "We call them 'seaweed,' "
says Bo Li, an ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Other part-timers offer genuine added value to a host institution. One
example is forest ecologist Chen Jiquan of the University of Toledo, Ohio,
who for the past four summers has organized an ecology lecture series at
Fudan. Last year, Chen flew in leading lights, including Jerry Franklin of
the University of Washington, Seattle, to lecture to several dozen graduate
students who competed for a position in the seminar. "This way the students
are exposed to the frontiers of science," Chen says. For the short term, a
reliance on part-timers is "beneficial" in exposing professors and students
to new ideas and global trends, Qian says. But building world-class
institutions, he notes, is a full-time job.
The tide may be turning. More and more highly qualified Chinese-born
academics are forsaking overseas posts to devote all their energies to bui
lding China's education system. Although they earn less in China, they have
other motivations. Yi Rao said that for him it was a "sense of belonging."
He gave up an endowed professorship at Northwestern University's Feinberg
School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, to become the dean of Beida's
College of Life Sciences in September. Rao was the first endowed professor
in life sciences to return to China fulltime. Another senior returnee is
structural biologist Yigong Shi, currently a professor in the Department of
Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He has been advising Tsinghua
University since 2003 and plans to soon take up a full-time position there
to lead its School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology.
Nankai's Rao went a step further, recruiting entire teams. Immunologist Yin
Zhinan, who gave up a tenure-track position at Yale University to become
dean of Nankai's College of Life Sciences, says that he would have worried
about being ineffectual if he were one of only a few coming back. "For
modern biomedical science, you really need collaboration and interaction. If
you are the only one, there aren't enough resources or enough interaction,"
he says. With 55 new faculty members in life sciences, medicine, and
pharmacology, Yin says, "we should be able to build a unique biomedical
program."
Rao's team-building is a work in progress, in that some recruits are at
Nankai only part-time. Romano Rupp, a physicist at the University of Vienna
in Austria, is dean of Nankai's Teda Applied Physics School--but is only in
Tianjin when his class schedule in Vienna permits. One of Nankai's new deans
asked not to be identified in Science because he has yet to negotiate the
terms of his departure from his current institution. He will be working at
Nankai part-time for at least 2 years. Other new recruits say that a
challenge for Nankai is bringing facilities, students, and logistical
support up to levels they grew accustomed to overseas. If support fails to
match expectations, they say, the best may leave. For this reason, "it is
too early to tell" whether the overseas hires will have an impact at Nankai,
says Ge Molin, a mathematician who has spent his entire career at the
university.
Nankai is getting some funding from the Tianjin government. "To be honest,
we don't know" how long the support will continue, Yin says. Rao admits that
he agreed to less than a full commitment--a "soft landing," he calls it--
for many recruits so that they could wrap up affairs at the institutions
they are leaving. But in the long run, he says, "I cannot tolerate any deans
being part-time."
The Chinese government hopes to tackle the dearth of qualified faculty
members by redoubling efforts to send graduate students overseas. Last year,
the government promised to give the China Scholarship Council $1.3 billion
over 5 years to pay for 5000 scholarships a year for students who have been
accepted by Western institutions. The rationale is that foreign-trained Ph.D
.s will boost faculty quality when they return home, as required by award
contracts. The program has been criticized, however, for shortchanging
domestic graduate programs and grad students, who receive stipends of less
than $100 per month.
Fresh blood among faculties won't, by itself, rexxxx all the entrenched
practices and petty regulations that conspire to keep Chinese universities
out of the higher echelons. Education ministry requirements are so detailed
that, for example, they specify that only full professors can supervise Ph.D
. students. "In the U.S., who supervises graduate students and Ph.D.
students? All professors, including assistant professors!" Qian says. "The
assistant and associate professors are on the frontier." Qian hopes that an
awareness of practices at top foreign universities will prompt rexxxxs in
China. "Just having this goal [of seeking world-class status] will be
enormously helpful," he says.
These issues will not be resolved in a hurry. Yin worries that Chinese
impatience is leading to unrealistic expectations about how quickly
educational quality can be improved. "We really need to calm down. You
cannot expect a big outcome in 2 or 3 years," he says. Beijing's Rao agrees
and claims that China's best universities--even Beida and Tsinghua--are
still third-rate. "It is premature, if not counterproductive, to raise
expectations about Chinese universities becoming world-class soon," he says.
"Let's be realistic and first take steps to make them second-rate before we
go further."
