The Intrinsic and the Extrinsic in Higher Education

Higher-education reform in China, which started in the late 1980s, has gone through ups and downs, and has known various experiments. At present, the prospect of China’s higher education is still misty and confused. While we have achieved considerable progress through trial and error, some problems seem even more serious than years ago. The number of college students has increased rapidly, but the quality of our higher education has not been fundamentally improved. Typically, the pursuit of quantitative expansion instead of the quality of education, the inflation of the management system, the low level and repetition of the academic researches and so on are some of the gravest problems we have to tackle immediately at the beginning of the 21st century.

On 20 July 2013, Yuanyuan Li, the president of Jilin University, published an article entitled ‘Further Promoting the Intrinsic Development of our Higher Education’, in which he echoes the original call for the intrinsic development of higher education, believing that intrinsic development is an important guideline of China’s higher educational development, and the necessary choice for higher education reform and scientific development.Reference Li¹ But, actually, Li did not explain what intrinsic development is, nor did he propose any useful strategies to reform the universities in that direction.

In fact, the proposal of intrinsic development of higher education was first put forward in the 1990s by the State Council. After the 14th Communist Party of China (CPC) conference in October 1992, the central government and the State Council of China issued the ‘Guideline for Education Reform and Development in China’ on 13 February 1993, analysing the situation we were facing at the end of the 20th century. It proposes that the development of our higher education should ‘stick to the route of intrinsic development, improve the efficiency, apply different policies in different areas, universities, and disciplines, and specify the goals and the priorities of the development’; it also encourages different schools to ‘have their own major developing directions, and promote their own distinctive features...’.² This was the first time that the idea of intrinsic development as a strategy was formally put forward by the government. In ‘The State Council’s Opinions about How to Implement the “Guideline for Education Reform and Development in China”,’ issued in 1994, it was stressed again that ‘the higher education should follow the route of intrinsic development, adjust the scale and structure of development to make it more appropriate, so that we can improve the quality and efficiency distinctively.’³ In the ‘National Long-term and Midterm Planning Guidelines for Educational Reform and Development (2010–2020)’ issued by the State Council in July 2010, the pursuit of quality is further emphasized: ‘We should set up the development view of taking quality as the core, paying attention to the intrinsic development, and encourage the universities to finally form their own distinctive features… We should establish the national standards for and the guarantee system of educational quality.’⁴ All these policies and regulations indicate that the Chinese government does not turn a blind eye to the serious problems in educational development. Through the reform of the educational system, China’s higher education could, hopefully, follow a healthier road and improve its quality and eventually build world-class universities. But right now there are still many problems in our higher education, such as the disastrous expansion, the fanatic pursuit of quantity, the disorderly management system, the bureaucratic working style, and the backwardness of research and so on.

If we are supposed to follow the guideline of intrinsic development, then either the state or the educational experts should explain it to the public so that it can be effectively carried out. But up to now we haven’t seen any convincing explanation as to what it actually means and what to do to fulfil this goal. When people are using this term, they just use it as an empty slogan without much substance or any specific measures to be taken.

To education practitioners like me, the intrinsic development of higher education is practicable not because of its connection with other things, but because we could find its basic nature and principles and then follow them. Here, I find Richard Brodhead’s description of college goals extremely relevant. An excellent college should become ‘a place of free and lively mental exploration, open to people of talent and commitment from every background, where human understanding can be cared for, and worked toward, and shared, and renewed’; in other words, ‘the deep goals of universities’ should invariably include ‘education, the creation and transmission of knowledge, and the training of the young for constructive lives in the world’.Reference Brodhead⁵ Brodhead, the ninth president and William Preston Few Professor of English of Duke University, was speaking from his rich educational experience in America, having served Yale for 32 years including having been Dean of Yale College for 11 years. But to truly understand the meaning of intrinsic development in the Chinese context we need to start from the opposite of this term, i.e. what is not intrinsic, as well as from the term proper. The antithesis of the intrinsic is the extrinsic, referring to something that does not form an essential part of it or originates from the outside. There are numerous symptoms of extrinsic development in present-day China. Here I want to list some of the most striking examples to be handled urgently in order to illustrate my viewpoint.

First, because the former Vice Premier of the State Council, Lanqing Li (term of office 1993–2003), called on big universities to merge with smaller ones, many universities including Zhejiang University, Wuhan University, Tsinghua University, Peking University and so on since the early 1990s have merged with many other smaller, but not necessarily weaker, universities, colleges, professional schools, research institutes, art schools, and even hospitals. Thus, the size of the major universities has immensely expanded. Second, college enrolments have reached unprecedented numbers, and more disciplines and majors have been set up in the pursuit of scale and funds, disregarding the inadequate numbers of teachers and equipment available. Third, in this tidal current of pursuing size and scale, the universities have taken up a lot of land to expand their premises, in order to become number one in the city, in the province, or in the whole country, even in the whole of Asia. Many local governments, with the intention of promoting the local economy in the disguise of cultural activities, add fuel to the flames and some cities have even built ‘university cities’, which mostly have proved unsuccessful and soon turned desolate after much money and land had been wasted. Fourth, many schools are eager to upgrade themselves and expand their scale. Two-year colleges are eager to become four-year colleges, which then again want to upgrade to universities. Specialized colleges and universities can’t wait to become more comprehensive. And within the university, numerous departments became colleges or schools overnight. Fifth, a kind of ‘quantitative management’ has been adopted in the universities. Almost all universities have made very strict regulations for the teachers and post-secondary students as to how many articles should be published in what grade of journals during a certain period of time (such as an employment term), or how many books should be published, or how many nationally-funded projects won. If one cannot meet these requirements, most likely he or she will not pass the employment-term-check or be employed again, let alone be promoted; and PhD candidates will not be granted their degrees until they have reached the required standards in publication even if they have successfully passed their oral defence. These are only a few examples anyone can see or experience in our current education. During the course of our educational reform, starting from the late 1980s, the most influential phenomenon has been the merger of universities and colleges, so I’ll spend some time analysing the benefits and losses resulting from this campaign in order to shed some light on the idea of the intrinsic development of higher education.

The Merger Movement in China’s Higher Education

The campaign of university mergers began in the early 1990s. But from the 1980s onwards people began to feel the seriousness of the problems in China’s higher education. Some of the problems were caused by the former Soviet Union’s influence, while some others were brought about by the Chinese themselves. These problems included fragmentation and division in the disciplines, repetition or doubling in setting up disciplines and majors, low efficiency and poor quality in teaching and research, lack of funding, adequate conditions, and so on. In order to produce high-quality graduates with a more comprehensive knowledge and an inter-disciplinary horizon, the government began to think about reforming the nation’s higher education. The ‘Decision to Reform the Educational System by the Central Committee of the CPC’ in 1985 proposed reforming the educational system. The 1992 ‘Guideline for Education Reform and Development in China’ marked the beginning of China’s higher education reform. Then, Lanqing Li proposed the experimental strategy of merging universities, in a desperate attempt to instantly create some world-class universities by merging smaller schools. The core idea here was to optimize the resources in these schools, including the software and hardware facilities, the libraries, and the equipment for teaching and experiments, to cut down the overstaffed management organizations, and to redress the repetitive building of disciplines and the hardware facilities, so that the limited financial and human resources could be invested in the most urgent projects. Various modes of merger were proposed and tested during the ensuing ten years. The first experiments were conducted in Guangdong Province (co-building the South-China University of Technology, and Sun Yat-sen University by the Ministry of Education and Guangdong Province). In addition, Nanchang University, Shanghai University, Yangzhou University and Yanbian University were among the first to merge with other institutes. Then, the State Council held a succession of meetings in Shanghai (1994), Nanchang (1995), Beidaihe (1996), and Yangzhou (1998) to sum up the experiences of the previous trial runs, to further promote educational reform, and to prepare for extending this strategy to the whole country. In 1997, Lanqing Li again proposed an eight-character (four words in English) principle: co-building, adjustment, cooperation, and merger, propounding that by 2002 the reforms in the higher education management system and the adjustment of the structure be largely accomplished, and a new well-proportioned higher education pattern be formed (i.e. with comprehensive universities, multi-disciplinary universities, and single-disciplinary colleges in appropriate ratios).Reference Peng and Liu⁶ Thus Zhejiang University in 1998 merged with Hangzhou University, Zhejiang Agricultural University, and Zhejiang Medical University, thus becoming one of the largest universities with enormous scale, numerous disciplines and majors, and, logically, a lot more academic achievements. Immediately following suit, almost all well-known universities, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, Jilin University, Shandong University, Dongnan University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University, and Fudan University and so on all strove to annex or cooperate with other schools, usually less famous and smaller ones. Towards the beginning of the 21st century more than 1000 schools at various levels were involved in this movement, resulting in a reduction of tertiary institutions by more than 100. Many universities started building medical schools, not because they really needed them or were qualified to do so, but because they discovered that the most distinguished universities in the world, including Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Harvard University, all have medical schools. To many people, the advantages of the mergers are obvious: the universities have more disciplines and more money, their academic achievements have increased immensely due to the increase in the number of faculty members, the structure and layout seem more reasonable, they have more software and hardware facilities… and if they comply with the official directions they get more support from the local and the central governments.

Ideally, the universities after the merger could be more comprehensive, improve their efficiency, and produce graduates of higher quality. Indeed, after the merger campaign, the number of professors and academics, state-funded projects, publications, and national laboratories in the universities has dramatically increased. But actually the merger campaign has incurred a lot of difficulties and raised new problems. As Shulin Li put it, these featureless ‘superjumbos’ are invariably and ‘seriously homogenized’ and Chinese higher education was stricken with ‘gigantism’.Reference Li⁷ The quality of teaching and academic research showed no distinctive improvement. Many smaller schools were actually unwilling to merge with the bigger ones, which were usually more dominant and manipulative. After the reluctant mergers, we would expect to see more internal problems within these giant schools. Apparently they seem to be of one accord but divided at heart. There have been incessant internal and factional struggles for power and resources among different groups of interests, with the leaders from previous schools seeking to re-position themselves.

Some observers have pointed out that world-class universities are not necessarily the largest ones. The government-directed campaign to concentrate the educational resources could, in fact, be seen as the bureaucratic heritage of the old planned economy. The merger movement paid more attention to form than substance while neglecting the integration and optimization of management and resources. Many scholars are very critical of this trend and disappointed at the outcome. According to Wei Pan, ‘the aircraft carrier’ of higher education – referring to the gigantic universities after the merger – can never be constructed through merging with other schools, otherwise Harvard and Yale, Cambridge and Oxford would have already merged long ago; it is only statistically useful if a university has more students, more professors and more disciplines. A real world-class university is not necessarily large in scale and area. If you bind a thousand torpedo boats together, would you get an aircraft carrier? Certainly not.Reference Pan⁸ In addition, after the merger, many campuses are far from the main campus, causing inconvenience for the students or teachers to take or teach classes. The logistic service departments are not really rationalized and the integration of disciplines is not very desirable either. Some other scholars have also criticized the short-sightedness of the campaign and advocated the development of distinctive features in each university. In their insightful book The Formation and Development of World-class Universities, Yingjie Wang and Baocun Liu said that ‘the essence of building the universities does not lie in the size or scale, but in the special features and academic strengths’ and every university should build up its characteristic disciplines according to its own conditions instead of targeting at something too large and all-inclusive. They agreed with David Baltimore, the former president of the California Institute of Technology, and a Nobel laureate, on the idea of biological diversities in higher education. Universities should diversify, with their own features: ‘the most important thing is to maintain their own distinctiveness and to strive to be the first-rate…’.Reference Wang and Liu⁹

In this fervour to catch up with the fashion and cater to the taste of politicians, we could not see a rational reform aiming at the improvement of higher education. Instead, it makes us recall the boisterous Great Leap-forward Movement in the 1950s and 1960s in Chinese history. When, after 25 years, we reflect on the consequences of this policy, we can see that what has been carried out in the name of reform actually lacked the true spirit of reform and overlooked academic excellence. When talking about the future of Yale University, its former president A. Bartlett Giamatti (1978–1986) regarded ‘intellectual excellence’ as one of the ‘imperatives’ for the university.Reference Giamatti¹⁰ Intellectual and academic excellence, instead of expansion or larger market share, should be the primary purpose of a university. Chinese scholar Xianjin Cai also asserts that, in the development of higher education,

Cai further points out, referring to the merger movement, that

I am not suggesting that we should split the giant universities and go back to the previous pattern. To be practical and economical, we need to base our future path on the present situation and make the best of it. We can’t afford to repeat the chaos and failures any longer. Education needs not only to draw lessons from failures in the past, but also to foresee and prepare for the future. Right now, we cannot blindly compare with others but, as the 1994 ‘State Council’s Opinions’ put it, we should ‘persist in improving the quality and efficiency’ of higher education, and ‘strengthen the coordination and planning of the development, adjust the structure and layout’ of higher education, in order to realize

These proposals, instead of excessive expansion for political aims or some individuals’ promotion, should become our paramount considerations. We cannot allow our education to continue on the old track of ‘extensive management’, which betrays the long-term interests and basic guidelines of our country and violates the rules and principles of higher education development. What we really need is a genuine commitment to education, to the people and our next generation in particular, and to the country’s future.

Fervour for Upgrading

In addition to the movement of merging in higher education, almost all colleges and universities have been trying by every means to set up more disciplines and majors, regardless of their own conditions and resources. Many would resort to dishonesty or even deceit in statistics and various connections to upgrade their institutions from two-year colleges to four-year ones, or from colleges or institutes to universities, or from specialized ones to comprehensive ones. Subsequently, their names would also change for the better: from colleges and institutes to universities. This manic fervour to upgrade has rarely been seen in China’s history or in more mature educational systems such as the European or American ones. As we all know, most distinguished universities actually don’t want to change their names. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which claims more than 80 Nobel Prize laureates, is never heard to consider promoting itself to Massachusetts University of Technology. Ironically, due to MIT’s world prestige, some colleges want to profit from associating with it by naming or renaming themselves as BIT or HIT, but then they have to keep Daxue, the characters for university, in their Chinese names. Instead of ‘a name for a place that would open the door to knowledge and all the life opportunities that education can provide’ (Ref. Reference Brodhead5, p. 217) many of our college names are becoming signs of vanity, pomposity, and ambitiousness. In China, the upgrading of the colleges seems to have become the leaders’ individual achievement, like political achievements for politicians. Many universities set up special offices and people (usually headed by one of their vice-presidents) to handle these ‘public-relations jobs’, which usually include getting more disciplines, more Master/Doctor degree programmes, more funding, more projects, and developing connections with the powerful judges and evaluators of these selections. It is this kind of unrestrained, chaotic and utilitarian expansion that I would like to call the ‘extrinsic developing mode’ with Chinese characteristics.

Obsession with Numbers and Quantification

Another manifestation of the extrinsic development of higher education is the obsession with the dramatically enlarged enrolment, the various statistics, and quantification in evaluating universities. The last 20 years in China have witnessed a frantically enlarged enrolment in colleges and universities, which was mainly spurred by the economic interests and the pursuit of scale. In 1998, the total enrolment in the tertiary level was 1.08 million, the number then rose to 1.64 million in the next year. Since then enrolment has increased by 400,000 every year, on average. In 2013 and 2014, the number soared to almost 7 million and thus was over six times as large as in 1998. Similarly, the enrolment in various master programmes and doctor programmes was 58,000 in 1998, and this number has increased every year. In 2013 and 2014, total enrolment for these advanced degrees stood at 608,000 and 611,000 respectively, almost 14 times the 1998 figure.¹³ The universities scramble for disciplines and students in order to enlarge their scale, partly because of their heavy financial dependence on student tuition fees, and partly because of their eagerness to reach national, or even world standards of great universities. But the most direct and important reason was government planning. According to Shulin Li, due to the Asian financial crisis, which began in 1997, China’s export growth rate dropped suddenly from 20% to 0.5%. Partly in order to boost the domestic economy the government suddenly announced that college enrolment that year would increase by 500,000 on 13 June,Reference Li¹⁴ less than one month before the college entrance examinations. The consequences of this and what happened subsequently are appalling, if not disastrous. The enrolment expansion in postsecondary education during the last 20 years directly resulted in a lack of teachers and staff in colleges, insufficient dormitories, libraries, and other facilities for the students, a devaluation of college students and knowledge in general, in the eyes of society, a quality reduction of higher education in general, and a low employment rate of the graduates four years later, along with many other social problems.

Symptoms of the extrinsic development in higher education can also be seen in the quantification of academic researches and projects. The universities usually don’t have many requirements for undergraduates as to publication, but as soon as students enter into masters and doctoral programmes, they face the issue of publishing a certain number of articles during their course of study. Even if they have finished their degree theses and passed their oral defences, they do not get their degrees until they have published the required number of articles within a certain allotted time, usually within one or two years after graduation. Furthermore, doctoral students are required to publish articles that may cited in the SSCI or A&HCI, or the CSSCI – the Chinese SSCI, if their majors are in the social sciences and humanities, and SCI or EI if their majors are in science and engineering. The claimed reasons for this requirement are to encourage the students to do academic research as early as possible and improve their academic quality and level, or to help them become familiar with the rules and methods of doing scientific research. What will never be admitted is that the publications and projects of the students are used to fill out the various forms of disciplinary evaluation organized by different institutions, especially by the Ministry of Education, so that the universities in question can improve their ranking. So, in essence, this requirement is still a way of extrinsic development. And due to this unreasonable requirement, many students risk their academic life by resorting to improper methods to get their papers published, many of which are patchwork and lack academic seriousness and ingenuity. It also takes a lot of time and energy to get things published, especially for apprentice scholars, thus affecting the normal teaching plans and research.