Font size: 
Xie Yong holds only a junior college diploma, although he is famous for his research, writing, and work as deputy chief editor of the "Yellow River," a major literary magazine.
While people are applauding this bending of the rules, it does raise some concerns. Why is this such a hot issue? It's because virtually no other Chinese university would dare to do this. Before Chinese society was "liberated," it was not surprising for a university to retain a scholar with only a junior college diploma. But now, such a decision runs absolutely counter to China's systematic evaluation system for personnel and professionals.
Our present evaluation system highly values the number of degrees, papers, works and awards a faculty member possesses. Based on the worship of officialdom and emphasis on administration, it turns out that nearly all school resources are controlled by government officials, who have set up strict criteria for evaluating scholars and universities. For example, the "level" of an academic paper is evaluated according to the rank of the publication where the paper is published. It is the same with awards and projects.
In the eyes of Chinese university leaders, only government awards and projects are "real" awards and projects, and those provided by non-government organizations simply don't count. The logic here is: Only works recognized or needed by the government are academic. Moreover, the levels of government projects and awards all depend on the rank of the issuing government department. As a result, both university leaders and teachers pay attention to the key words "state-level" and "provincial level," and make every effort to obtain those.
Nevertheless, common sense tells us that it is ridiculous to bind academic level and administrative rank together and evaluate the former by the latter. This illustrates nothing except that our academic activities are highly controlled by the administrative power.
But why are all universities so zealous in following such an unscientific evaluation system? It is because universities have no resources other than those provided by the government. This determines that staff evaluations and administrative guidelines for running universities will all comply with criteria set by higher authorities.
Government forms for evaluating supervisors of Ph.D. students, institutes that offer Ph.D. programs and major disciplines are filled with numbers, such as the number of articles published in key publications, the number of state-level projects and awards, the percentage of teachers with Ph.D. degrees, etc.
These fixed criteria result in severe competition among Chinese universities. A university will fall into a very unfavorable position if its index in these criteria appears low. Therefore, unless the current evaluation system is changed, even if a university appreciates an outstanding scholar like Xie Yong, who has no high-level degree or high-ranking projects and awards, we must conclude that Xiamen University's decision to hire Xie will be a single exception to the rule. Unless universities can be independent from government resources and survive outside the system, there is unlikely to be another such case.
Some people view Xie Yong's employment as a good sign, but personally I think it is impossible for his example to multiply without a fundamental change in the education and academic system.
--
(Tao Dongfeng is a professor in the Chinese Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing. He is also editor-in-chief of the scholarly periodical "Culture Research." This article is translated and edited from the Chinese. @Copyright Tao Dongfeng.)
