Creating world-class universities in China: strategies and impacts at a renowned research university

In recent years, creating world-class universities has been an important project on the Chinese mainland. With the all-encompassing internationalization of higher education in the global market, it is of the utmost importance that the quality of universities be improved and that some of the top universities are pushed to become world-class. Influenced by the stimulating policies and financial incentives, some of China’s top universities are striving to earn the prestigious label of “world-class university” by conducting a series of reforms. The aim of the study discussed here was to explore the effects of the ongoing reforms and present the current dilemmas of top-down actions at elite universities. The data were obtained through in-depth interviews. First, we found that a personnel reform had been implemented to comply with the performance benchmark, but that it had subsequently been suspended owing to conflicts among different stakeholders. Second, it appeared that the humanities department at the selected university is at a disadvantage for both internal and external reasons. Third, it was found that the policy of recruiting returnees (graduates returning from study abroad) to lecturers’ positions is partly responsible for the further decline in students’ confidence in domestic universities. Fourth, the policy of admitting international students has triggered domestic tensions on the issue of educational quality and equality. Lastly, finding a way of coordinating the features of “World-Class” and “Chinese Characteristics” is not easy to be achieved.     

Waist‐High and Knee‐Deep: Humane Learning Beyond Polemics and Precincts

In this essay, Chris Higgins sets out to disentangle the tradition of humane learning from contemporary distinctions and debates. The first section demonstrates how a bloated and incoherent “humanism” now functions primarily as a talisman or a target, that is, as a prompt to choose sides. It closes with the image of Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, suggesting that humanism is more like the uncertain footing of Salcedo's fissure than the footholds on either side. The second section suggests that this “alien humanism” is hiding in plain sight, requiring us only to read an inch beyond the poster‐ready copy fueling the polemics. Even a cursory glance at the texts from which these epitomes are drawn — from Terence's “Nothing human is foreign to me,” through Shakespeare's “What a piece of work is a man,” to Arnold's “The best of what has been thought and said” — is enough to reconnect us with a tradition stranger and more dynamic than that portrayed by boosters and knockers alike. The third section explores the tensions between the research university and the tradition of humane letters it has come to house, arguing that it will not do to escape this rancor by hiding behind the functionalist, and ultimately circular, term “humanist,” defined as one who does research in the humanities. The final section shows that if this older tradition pulls away, to some extent, from the modern humanities, it simultaneously embraces scientific and professional fields, as demonstrated by the long tradition of the physician‐humanist.     

中国农民专业合作社的“规制失灵”--基于规制政策执行和供给的视角

政府规制是政府为了维护公众利益和纠正市场失灵而规范市场主体活动的行为。农民合作社是因提高农民组织化程度而具有广泛正外部效应的特殊市场主体,如何规范并推动其发展,是政府规制的重要议题。目前中国政府对农民专业合作社的规制中存在“规制失灵”现象：一方面,在规制政策执行层面,财政资金投向“重硬件,轻软件”,政府扶持过分强调“扶优扶强”,政府对合作社规范运行的规制不力,以及规制政策执行层面漏洞较多等问题,使政府规制的效率受损;另一方面,在规制政策供给层面,尚未建立有效的合作社运行监督机制,政策配套措施和实施细则出台滞后,以及农村金融政策和农业保险政策供给滞后等问题,都在制约着政府规制优化。     

STEERING PATTERNS IN THE AUSTRIAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM

Inspired by Burton Clark's “triangle of coor‐dination” whereby a university is steered according to its relationship to “state authority”, the “academic oligarchy”, and the “market”, the author analyses the debate going on in Austrian higher education circles today about the proper way for the universities of the country to be steered. The general proposal is to supersede the University Organization Act of 1975, which had really been a reformulation of the traditional ministerial bureaucratic centralism typical of Austrian university governance, in favour of market‐oriented and decentralized approaches with many of the functions of the Ministry of Science and Research to be handed over to a buffer organization to be created. The chances are, however, that fundamentally very little of current practice will be changed because of the strength of set patterns and because of the inner contradictions within the principal reform proposals.     

Educational Research: The Importance of the Humanities

It is one sign of the lack of understanding of the value of the humanities, to educational research and inquiry as well as to our world more widely, that such justifications of them as are offered frequently take a crudely instrumental form. The humanities (which in this essay are not distinguished from the arts) are welcomed insofar as they are beneficial to the economy, for example, or play a therapeutic role in people's physical or mental well‐being. In higher education in the UK, they are marginalized for similar reasons, on the grounds that they neither appeal to the lucrative overseas student market nor constitute a significant source of grant income from research councils, industry, or other funding sources. While their place in educational research is still defended in many quarters, the increasing demand that research should have “impact” can leave the humanities appearing ineffectual. Furthermore, the very idea of research is widely taken to mandate empiricist and “scientific” approaches. Although there are no easy solutions to this state of things, Richard Smith argues in this essay that those of us who value the humanities in and for themselves might adopt two approaches in particular: to pursue vigilant criticism of the rampant instrumentalism and scientism of our time, and to emphasize the importance of that distinctive feature of humane inquiry: interpretation.     

HOW MANY CULTURES?

The debate about the proper relationship between the sciences and the humanities as formulated by C.P. Snow in his influential lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” and as rebutted by F.R. Leavis in a lecture entitled, “The Significance of Lord Snow” still goes on today. Its frames of reference, however, should be broadened from concentration on the lack of communication routes between the two cultures in question so as to deal with the problem of the lack of communication within given cultures and the rise of overlapping cultures such as that of social scientists. The debate, so far as universities are concerned, should be not so much one of science versus humanities but one of general versus specialized education with increased importance being given to the role and scope of continuing education. The university should be one place in society in which cultures communicate and converge and problems are solved critically and imaginatively so that graduates may emerge truly educated.     

Access to college and heterogeneous returns to education in China

We apply a semi-parametric latent variable model to estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of private returns to schooling for college graduates during China's reform between 1988 and 2002. We find that there were substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but such gains have dissipated to negligible levels in the most recent data. We take this as evidence of growing influence of private financial constraints on decisions to attend college as tuition costs have risen and the relative importance of government subsidies has declined. The main policy implication of our results is that labor and education reform without concomitant capital market reform and government support for the financially disadvantaged exacerbates increases in inequality inherent in elimination of the traditional “wage-grid”.     

Selling education through “culture”: responses to the market by new, non-government schools

The move to a market model of schooling has seen a radical restructuring of the ways schooling is “done” in recent times in Western countries. Although there has been a great deal of work to examine the effects of a market model on local school management (LSM), teachers’ work and university systems, relatively little has been done to examine its effect on parents’ choice of school in the non-government sector in Australia. This study examines the reasons parents give for choosing a nongovernment school in the outer suburbs of one large city in Australia. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu specifically his ideas on “cultural capital” (1977), this study revealed that parents were choosing the non-government school over the government school to ensure that their children would be provided, through the school’s emphasis on cultural capital, access to a perceived “better life” thus enhancing the potential to facilitate “extraordinary children”, one of the school’s marketing claims.     

Market conditions,productivity, and promotion among university faculty

This paper contrasts the performance levels and promotion experiences of 371 faculty members under three different market conditions reflecting the supply and demand for university faculty (buyer's market, seller's market, and stable market). The central questions examined are, What is the effect of market conditions upon (1) the length of time it takes for promotion; (2) the promotion rate; (3) the productivity of assistant and associate professors before each promotion; and (4) the productivity of full professors after attaining that rank? Findings are most consistent with a market model indicating that faculty promoted during a buyer's market remain in rank longer before being promoted and exhibit a greater rate of productivity than faculty promoted during other market conditions. There is also support for the elite model in that the impact of “tight” market conditions on productivity is greatest for faculty below the rank of full professor.     

“新文科”视域下的外语学科建设：挑战、构想与路径

“新文科”的概念自2018年在教育部“四新”建设中得到明确表述以来,引起了广泛关注。不同学科都重新审视了新时代国家对人文与社会学科建设提出的新命题,试图从人才培养与学科建设的角度加以回答。本身就跨人文与社会的外语学科概莫能外。从“新外语”,到“大外语”,很多专家就外语学科在新时代的新使命提出了自己的见解。本文试图从对“新文科”的解读入手,对“新文科”之“新”对外语学科提出的挑战以及外语学科可能的应对提供自己的思考。     

我国学前教育普惠性概念的建构及政府责任

普惠性概念的提出其实质是在“入园难,入园贵”背景下,公共权力机关对公众学前教育权益诉求的积极回应,表达了政府在制定学前教育政策时追求的目的与价值.而要实现学前教育的普惠性,必须明确政府和市场作用的边界,政府的主要责任在于制定学前教育规划、政策和标准,提供公共财政支持,加强监管这三方面.     

Mind the Gap: Appropriate Evolutionary Perspectives Toward the Integration of the Sciences and Humanities

Although Darwinism has gained a foothold in the social sciences, in the humanities, with a few exceptions, it is still largely rejected—not, as some would claim, because humanists are all radical poststructuralists who deny that material reality exists, but rather because, with notable exceptions, Darwinists who work within the humanities have adopted a trenchant “us against them,” in-group/out-group mentality that has done a good deal more harm than good. In order for evolution to be effectively taught as part of a humanistic approach to literature and art, a more productive, truly “two way” approach is necessary, and must do more than impose the scientific method on the humanities. When this kind of imposition occurs, the humanities are treated only as subject matter, thereby discounting historical and interpretive research that is invaluable to scientists and claims they might make in these areas. This paper claims that for evolution to function as a paradigm with true explanatory power across disciplines, scientifically oriented evolutionists need training in humanistic methodologies just as much as humanistically oriented evolutionists need training in the scientific method. Evolution, in this context, becomes not the paradigm that can explain everything from a scientific point of view but rather the beginnings of a conversation about lower and upper level questions, and how these questions might inform and enrich each other’s research.     

What Young Russians Think about Russia and America

The article provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic and cultural picture of the world of contemporary Russian university students on the basis of surveys of their perceptions of America and the Americans as well as Russia and the Russians. The data that were collected from a free association experiment that was conducted by S.G. Ter-Minasova in 1992, 1995, and 1998 are compared with the data that were obtained by the author during her study in 2015. Respondents were asked to write down one to 10 associations that came to mind for a given concept. By comparing the data between the different surveys, we are able to note how the perceptions of Russian students about Russia and Russians, America and Americans and the reasons prompting these perceptions have changed. The most notable findings are that the following words representing the lexical-semantic group describing financial status were no longer cited in the 2015 survey: “poor,” “rich,” and “dollar,” whereas the following words belonging to the lexical-semantic group describing power appeared on the most recent survey: “war,” “impudent,” “selfish,” “haughty,” “the desire to dominate others,” “cunning,” “powerful,” and “racism.”     

Hail to Thee, Our Alma Mater: Alumni Role Identity and the Relationship to Institutional Support Behaviors

With the decline in state and federal support for higher education continuing to plague colleges and universities across the U.S., many institutions are looking to increase the levels of support annually received from alumni and other constituencies. Research on alumni relations in American colleges and universities has historically focused on different factors related to charitable giving. Although this study has resulted in some valuable information for institutions to use for alumni involvement purposes, most of the research has not been able to produce a meaningful look into how alumni identify with their college or university after graduation. The purpose of this study is to assess how college and university alumni view their role with these institutions after graduation and how that perception relates to behaviors of support. An online survey was constructed to assess three dimensions of alumni role identity based upon previous research on the identification process of blood donation. This study took place through the alumni association at a large, public research university in the Midwest and found that those who displayed increased alumni role identity were more likely to support the university through joining the alumni association, attending university sponsored events and charitable giving. This study breaks ground for a new method of measuring the role of alumni within colleges and universities in efforts to increase support and ease the financial pressures of today’s institutions.     

民族地区高校图书馆“民文”“藏书”及其社会性因素分析

“藏书”是图书馆所秉承的基本任务和功能。在民族地区高校图书馆“藏书”体系中,民族文献与“民文”“藏书”无疑是个特色项目和核心内容。民族文献与“民文”“藏书”的形成与发展不仅与高校历史、学科特色与财力等传统因素有直接联系,也与民族人口、高校学生数量、出版业的现状和学生、学者的专业偏好的独特性等因素。观察和分析这些特点和社会性因素才能充分了解民族地区高校图书馆“民文”“藏书”的基本特点与内在规律。     

HIGH ABILITY STUDENTS WHO DROP OUT FROM BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

During the last thirty years the annual dropout rate from universities in Britain has been fairly constant at around 14 percent In 1990 the financial cost of this carnage was estimated at £ 60,000,000. This study was concerned with 204 highly able students — as measured by school examination successes – who dropped out of universities by the end of the first year of study. Very few did so because the work was too difficult. Despite 45 percent saying they had left “because University did not suit them,” starting again in a new university was a common feature. The students were very unaware of the stress factors associated with leaving home to start life in a new community, and usually did not seem to have counselling support to overcome this early hurdle. Evidence from other studies suggests that the nonresponders were probably less successful in mending their lives than the responders.     

The Idea of an International University Reshaped by Students: An Ethnographic Study in a Chinese University

This paper presents how students reshaped the idea of an international university offered to them. The findings derive from participant observation ethnographic fieldwork carried out at Fudan University in China. The analysis proves that the idea of an “international university” offered to Fudan University students was double-edged in the sense that it both cultivated and screened international talent. Students reshaped their university by manipulating or “twisting” the screening process when applying for short-term study abroad programs, on the one hand, and creating cultivating “devices” within the university, namely student-initiated associations on the other hand. The findings of this paper add a new aspect to the idea of the “international university” from students’ perspective and turn the spotlight on students as active builders of their university.     

后金融危机时代英国大学生就业保障制度创新

随着席卷全球的金融危机对就业市场的深度影响,英国近年来大学生市场处于持续低迷状态,可就业人数逐年递减,培养质量下滑导致大学生就业更加困难。在这种背景下,英国政府和高校在延续传统的就业措施的同时,进行了一系列具有针对性的改革,对缓解大学生就业压力起到了积极的促进作用。     

The Future Starts in the Past. The Loss of the Spiritual Centre of the University

Discussion on the crisis in/of the humanities and in/of the university institution has in the past decades become ubiquitous. The surge of literature on the subject strongly suggests that the problem is a genuine one. However, the variety of explanations that have been offered not only have brought along confusion, but the majority of these explanations also neglect the historical development of higher education. As such, they tend to underestimate the scale of the problems affecting the humanities and higher education. This article seeks to investigate an alternative explanation that takes into consideration the history of the changing ‘value’ of humanities within higher education. In doing so, the legacy of postmodernism is considered and the idea of a ‘spiritual centre’ of the university and its relation to the humanities is put forth and explored. The article concludes with some contemplations on a possible way out of the current crisis in the humanities and in higher education.     

The potential for student performance prediction in small cohorts with minimal available attributes

The measurement of student performance during their progress through university study provides academic leadership with critical information on each student’s likelihood of success. Academics have traditionally used their interactions with individual students through class activities and interim assessments to identify those “at risk” of failure/withdrawal. However, modern university environments, offering easy on-line availability of course material, may see reduced lecture/tutorial attendance, making such identification more challenging. Modern data mining and machine learning techniques provide increasingly accurate predictions of student examination assessment marks, although these approaches have focussed upon large student populations and wide ranges of data attributes per student. However, many university modules comprise relatively small student cohorts, with institutional protocols limiting the student attributes available for analysis. It appears that very little research attention has been devoted to this area of analysis and prediction. We describe an experiment conducted on a final-year university module student cohort of 23, where individual student data are limited to lecture/tutorial attendance, virtual learning environment accesses and intermediate assessments. We found potential for predicting individual student interim and final assessment marks in small student cohorts with very limited attributes and that these predictions could be useful to support module leaders in identifying students potentially “at risk.”