FIVE years ago, Zhu Qingshi was chosen as the helmsman of Shenzhen’s South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC), an institute spearheading educational reform in China. He is a physical chemist and former president of the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui Province.

    In the last five years, SUSTC has undergone quite a number of twists and turns with its development, and Zhu has often been in the eye of the storm. In September, he will wind up his tenure with a retirement from the position. He said SUSTC has met unprecedented difficulties, but his education ideals never swayed.

    Innovation with SUSTC

    Since its inception in 2007, SUSTC has amassed significant public attention for the high hopes placed on it as a revolutionary model for China’s higher education by breaking free of most government bureaucracy and forging a world-class university.

    Zhu said topping the agenda of SUSTC’s reform is a clear target of its development as a research-oriented university. The target was elaborated by him from three perspectives: the school is to be built into an instituion of higher education and scientific research base to cultivate student’s innovation; at least half of its funding should be supporting scientific research; teachers should invest half their time on research and another half on teaching while keeping the teacher-student ratio much lower than at other Chinese universities.

    Zhu said SUSTC made a breakthrough by recruiting top-level faculty and students with advanced management. He said SUSTC’s 45 students recruited in the first year showed strong innovation and research abilities when class teaching was still in an experimental phase of reform. One student received an enrollment offer from Oxford University and other students have expressed their willingness to continue studies with postgraduate programs.

    “We are almost at the same level with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology when it was established. Of course, there is a long way to go before we match up to world-renowned institutes such as the California Institute of Technology,” Zhu said.

    From idealist

    to pragmatist

    SUSTC intended to have complete autonomy to recruit students and confer degrees in 2011, but it made a compromise with the Ministry of Education, which required all students to take the National College Entrance Examinations, or Gaokao.

    The school eventually adopted a variety of factors to evaluate potential students. The NCEE score makes up 60 percent of the evaluation, senior high school grades make up 10 percent and an independent assessment carried out by SUSTC makes up 30 percent.

    Zhu said the recruitment policy was made with China’s educational reality in mind and for the sake of winning broader recognition. “Educational reform can be pushed forward only when it’s extensively accepted. Recruitment reform is a very complicated issue and it cannot be accomplished in one stroke, but has to be implemented gradually with firm steps,” Zhu said. “We didn’t abandon our own autonomy in recruitment, but altered it to reach a better solution.”

    Zhu admitted he had set an ambitious goal for reform in the beginning, which he considered very necessary because he wanted to set a target and raise the public’s awareness of the defects in China’s educational system.

    However, he soon realized that new routes had to be taken to achieve that goal, or else the school would be stuck in a dilemma because of unrealistic approaches.

    “Many of our reform measures were upheld in directives from the 3rd plenary session of the 18th CPPCC, which indicated that our direction of reform is correct and can be widely promoted,” Zhu said.

    He said that SUSTC wouldn’t lose its impetus for reform just because it has softened its stance on some issues, and he added that the reform of SUSTC has to undergo different stages. “It seems that SUSTC is less keen on reform, but what we’re doing is finding other approaches to implement reform,” he said.

    Modern university

    management

    Zhu said a major task with SUSTC’s reform is to have a clear statement of the responsibilities of its board of directors, Party committee and school administration committee.

    The school has a democratically elected professors’ association and an academic council to overlook academic decisions, such as appointing and recruiting professors. Another important step the school has taken is emphasizing professors’ voices in school affairs by appointing professors in half of the leadership positions.

    Zhu said an important change SUSTC has made with de-bureaucratization is implementing the corporate governance structure. However, he said the practice suffered significant setbacks under the current background in China. For example, talented people are unwilling to take jobs at SUSTC because it confers no government administrative ranks.

    One of Zhu’s key goals is to avoid having a system of administrative rank in his university, which he describes as the “biggest obstacle” to reform. However, doubts have been circulating that SUSTC lost in its battle against bureaucracy with the appointment of a former vice mayor of Shenzhen as the university’s Party chief in January.

    The school has not yet made an operation regulation. Zhu said the school is delaying such a regulation because no consensus has been reached, or else the regulation will hamper the reform.

    Zhu said a biggest bottleneck with SUSTC’s development is a lack of regulation guarantee.

    Speaking of his achievement at SUSTC, Zhu said he was confident that the reform has started to work because the direction of reform was echoed in decisions by the Central Government.

    “The past four years have been the most challenging and toughest years I’ve experienced. I have invested all my energy in reform, and I am glad to see we’re steadily moving forward,” he said. (Anna Zhao)