Commentary

Building Top-tier Universities: Focus on Nurturing Students and Reflecting Special Features of University Administration

Hou Jingfang Director General
Department of Education
Zhejiang Province
People’s Republic of China

Translated from Chinese by Arthur Wang

Presently, building top-tier universities has become a fundamental state policy in many countries cross the whole world. Mr. Jiang Zeming, the former president of China, pointed out at the centennial celebration of Peking University: “In order to realize the modernization drive, there is a demand of top-tier universities up to international standards in our country". In the age of knowledge economy, high-tech level has already become the core component of a country's economic competitiveness. Top-tier universities play an irreplaceable role in the development of high technology for a country.

Building top-tier universities is an important component of national educational modernization drive. Many developed countries regard building top-tier universities as a fundamental state policy. It is believed that restructuring and supporting potential universities to reach the world-class level will accelerate the pace of a country’s economic development.

Building “top-tier universities" in Zhejiang province has two levels, including world top-tier universities and domestic top-tier universities.

Science and technology innovation and socio-economic development are the key to building top-tier universities.

Building top-tier universities has increasingly demonstrated that it has helped and pushed the economic development. It is also based upon this fact that various strategic alliances have been established on the premise of reciprocal benefits among government, industry and university.

Stanford University achieved instant fame when it developed a unique style of its own, which gives other American universities enormous enlightenment and excitement. Stanford University was established in 1887. In the first 50 years, it was mediocre in its academic achievement. And there were quite a few times it had been faced with financial crisis. However, in 1944, the university came up with the famous "20-year plan” which determined a new policy of development making the university and industry would join together. In 1951, the university established the famous " Silicon Valley" covering 400 hectares, which has made Stanford "the source of new thought, new ideas, new scientists and engineers". The university ranked top in the world higher education because of its realization of great-leap-forward development. Stanford became the pioneer in establishing " Science Park" model. in 1980s’, many countries followed suit which boosted their economic growth, such as the science parks of Cambridge University of Britain and Singapore, etc.

Following this model, colleges and universities adjusted their own strategic plan, and geared their educational goal towards serving socio-economic development and improving the economic competitiveness of the country.

Building top-tier universities is a strategic project in realization of an economic society with sustainable development. It is also an important link between scientific research outcome and productivity.

On one hand, by building top-tier universities, we aim at the most advanced scientific research in the world so as to improve our capability in the high-level academic research. On the other hand, we emphasize that tackling key scientific and technological problems and local socio-economic development are closely related. And local economic development helps the scientific research outcome turn into production in time. At the same time we encourage local government and industry to support universities in scientific research and development.

Basic strategies of building top-tier universities: uniqueness and competing with special cutting edge against others.

There is no set mode in top-tier universities in America, but if we look closely we can see that every university has its own special features, which are different from others.

California Institute of Technology is a case in point. It is known as a place of elites and it is famous for its small size and high quality. This university was a secondary technical school at the very beginning, and expanded into a university in 1920. Since World War II, it had 6 departments. There are 900 undergraduate students, 1,100 graduate students, but about 1,000 teachers (over 280 professors). Twenty-seven professors or alumni from this institute won Nobel Prizes for 28 times. Stanford University which emerges rapidly through the cooperation with industry is a good example as well.

In the course of building top-tier universities, we should avoid aiming too high, demanding perfection and "jumping on the bandwagon". We should know our strengths and weaknesses and bring forward realistic goals and strategic plans.

To build top-tier universities, we should maximize favorable factors and minimize unfavorable ones, and utilize little funding to complete large undertakings under the existing conditions. Our top-tier universities should have a world standard, as well as with Chinese characteristics, locally Zhejiang characteristics. The world standard is to up to the universally acknowledged top-tier university level, and have general characteristics of prestigious universities of various countries. Distinct Chinese characteristics or Zhejiang characteristic are based on national and provincial conditions, the reality of the university, reflecting the characteristics of education and individual character of the university. None but the generality and individual character combined properly, we can build real world-class universities. The reality is that we are building top-rank university in a developing country with limited funding. We must emphasize selectively and make every effort to develop a style of our own, so that we can compete with our own special features.

We can not build top-tier universities in isolation. We should fully reflect the scientific development, and pay close attention to the role of higher education in sustainable development. Building top-tier universities must be put in connection with the development of general higher education. The higher education of Zhejiang has already reached the national top-tier level at present in teaching facilities. In this case, the development of higher education of Zhejiang is in a historical "turning point", meaning it turns from quantity to quality. Enriching higher education, improving the quality of education, promoting the competitiveness of top-tier universities have already become the primary and main task in the coming years. So, the general guidelines of educational development in Zhejiang are: with the scientific development and reality of the province in mind. Following the guidelines the central Ministry of Education "consolidation, deepening, improvement, development", we will set up the criteria for the project in the scale, structure, speed, quality and efficiency. We must utilize this historical opportunity scientifically to deal with the relations between building top-tier universities and development of the general higher education since general higher education is the foundation of building top-tier universities. . The modern higher education system of Zhejiang could be reconstructed through optimizing the educational structure and moving forward wholly in order to inject the new motive force into sustainable development of higher education of Zhejiang.

Main actions of top-tier university building: talent recruitment, discipline setup and administration improvement.

It is a strategic task of developing higher education to build top-tier universities. It is a battle of huge investment, long period and involving a wide range of knowledge as well. Looking at the successful experience of foreign top-tier university building, the following aspects should be brought to close attention.

In building top-tier universities, it is the most important to train academic personnel. Building top-tier universities needs to gather top-tier talents first. International top talents have already become the key sign of a top-tier university. It is a great choice of high educational development of Zhejiang to bring in outstanding talents and make top-tier "talent highland". But the cost is very high. It is calculated that, the cost to recruit a professor is roughly between 600,000 to 1,000,000 yuan. With limited resources, our policy has to be two-fold: to attract top talents from outside of the province and to select and train them locally.

How to select and train the academic personnel is the foremost important in building top-tier universities. University talents can be classified as three groups. The first is commander-in-chief, which is very small in number; but is the key group. The second is the discipline backbone, the core force. The third is the discipline group, the basic strength. Zhejiang’s philosophy in building top-tier universities is: "make good use of existing talents, train key talents, attract talents on the senior level, making a future talent pool"; also implement the strategy of "four levels, multi-modes". In addition, we have launched "the starting funds for the research of scholars returned from overseas " and "university faculty’s research funding plan". To build a strong research team at a top-tier university, we will pay close attention to and fully utilize the scholars returned from overseas. It is an extremely important resource for strengthening the team of university talents.

We should promote scientific research and teaching level in an all-round way by setting up advantageous disciplines, improving key laboratory facilities and making great efforts to strengthen graduate level education.

First of all, we believe that setting up of advantageous disciplines is the starting point of top-tier university building to bring up the individual characteristic of a high-level university. Building top-tier universities should be aimed at the front of scientific development and the important social productivities. We should utilize the existing manpower and material resources. Our goal is to combine fundamental disciplines and application disciplines, to combine traditional disciplines and newly-developed disciplines and to emphasize on several preponderant disciplines so that we will build the top-tier universities with distinctive characteristics.

Second, building key laboratory is considered as the lifeline in a top-tier university. The key laboratory is one of the important signs of the advanced level of a university. We should follow the guidance of building of key laboratories on the basis of analyzing the technology development trend with fully combining the reality of socio-economic development of Zhejiang and we should rely on the disciplines which have characteristics, foundations and great potential to set up the “key” laboratories.

Moreover, we should make graduate education as the main task of top-tier university building, so that we can improve higher level universities’ comprehensive competitiveness. We have to strengthen the graduate education from the strategic height of promoting the level of running a university of Zhejiang. We should combine discipline setup, key laboratory facilities and bringing up talent force with graduate education. While expanding the scale of graduate education, we are making great efforts to improve the quality and level of graduate education, train advanced talents for the sustainable development of the economic society of the whole province.

Top-tier university building should be advanced by administration reform. We encourage administration system innovation and improving the quality of education by effective management. At present, we are faced with the challenge that the funding for higher education is not used at its best efficiency. The administration becomes a crucial task.

First of all, we should promote resource rejoining to bring university's potential strength into play, and construct the "green channel" in order to implement the interdisciplinary development strategy. According to strategic choice of top-tier university development, we should especially pay attention to the combining effectively the existing discipline resources, utilizing the comparatively complete discipline of some universities to strengthen interdisciplinary research and teaching, making great efforts to open up new disciplines and develop cross-discipline majors. We must go out of the way to establish top-tier universities with characteristics of Zhejiang. We will strive to have greater break-through in the short time in scientific research and education.

Second, we will look for the “top-tier university growing point" by seizing the opportunity for innovation. The successful experience of the foreign university tells us that we must take advantage of the opportunities when they come. Top-tier university building is a unique process. The key point is to understand the reality, the individual characteristics, the advantages and disadvantages, to meet the social, economic need of the society. Moreover, we should improve the management environment of top-tier university building by encouraging system innovation actively and strengthening the vigor of teachers' team. Norm and innovation are two basic points of the institutional improvement. Using the experience of running a foreign top-tier university for reference, we can try to set up chief scientist system and combine personal intelligence and collective strength together more effectively. To overcome the "inbreeding" phenomenon, we should reform and perfect university's teachers recruiting system, which is mainly through the graduates of the university itself; In order to retain outstanding faculty members, it is important to set up "a tenure professor system" progressively.

In addition, building top-tier universities requires us to devote more efforts and offer funding support for universities. In the respect of investing, there is great disparity between us and top-tier universities of foreign countries. We have to calculate carefully and budget strictly, invest the limited money on the important projects. We should try every means to continue to increase the investment into the higher education. We will make every effort to fill the gap between ours and the university's operating expenses in developed countries.

Chinese Education Newspaper
3rd edition
July 1, 2005