Week 4 blog
Yuzhe Zhang, A01
FREDRIK de BOER’s article discussed
an issue of university, inc.
Nowadays the corporatization
of universities is becoming increasingly common among colleges. As far as I
know, fewer and fewer colleges are dedicated to teaching, instead, they put
more emphasis on making money or conducting commercial activities to raise
funds for some research projects.
One of the most serious results is that the undergraduate
education has been neglected. “The
biggest single factor in the QS rankings is academic reputation,” and “The next
biggest factor – ‘citations per faculty’ - looks at the strength of research in
universities, calculated in terms of the number of times research work is cited
by other researchers” (Coughlan, 2014) reveals the same situation. Because
that the reputation of a university is strongly linked to the level of
scientific research, and the reputation is an important factor in ranking, there
is no strange that the college administrators attach importance to it. They pay
high scientific research funds, and let the best teachers do the scientific
research. Such a system would cause the lack of undergraduate education. In the
last several years in China, this situation was so serious that the ministry of
education of the people’s republic of China lunched a policy that the colleges have the right to
fire those professors who refuse to give the lecture to undergraduate students.
This policy has curbed the phenomenon to some extent.
Question: Is it reasonable to force the professors to focus
on teaching?
References
BOER F. D. (2015). Why We Should Fear University, Inc. The New York Times, Sep 13, 2015.
China Focus. (2018). All professors must give
lectures to undergraduate students. Baidu.
Retrieved from https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1615586024439685054&wfr=spider&for=pc
Coughlan. S. (2014). What
makes a global top 10 university? BBC News education correspondent. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-29086590
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