Forty-five professors of northeast China's elite Jilin University who tutor doctoral students no longer hold their posts in Nov. 2005 due to their failure in teacher's performance appraisal, which experts cited as "a quake in China's higher educational reform".
According to the appraisal mapped out by the university authority, professors who tutor doctoral students have to meet the standards like being Ph.D themselves, conducting valuable research projects and having attained adequate research outlay.
In Chinese colleges and universities, a "tutor of doctoral students" becomes an ideal post which even enjoys higher advantages than the professorship, though no such laws in China have specify this de facto status.
Conventionally, Chinese educational circle takes for granted that "tutor of doctoral students" is a lifetime post despite the fact that the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) opposes that.
In China, the glory and the lifetime status of teaching doctoral students make some professors self-complacent and they do not make much progress in academic researches once they have attained the post and even abuse the post to make money.
Qiu Shilun, vice president of Jilin University, said the 45 dismissed professors in his university failed with the appraisal of academic researches this year as the research programs they conducted was insufficient and so had to resign.
Experts said Jilin University's reform may lead to a nationwide revamp of the higher education system and more competitive mechanism will be introduced.
Actually, the conflict between the structure of the Chinese higher education and the specific education reality has become more intensified than ever in 2005 and some universities never cease their reforming attempts.
In prestigious Beijing University, 49 associate professors attained the qualification to tutor doctoral students this year and lecturers in departments of history, education and foreign languages can also apply the qualification, in accordance with a reform plan drafted by the university in April 2005.
In China, the attainments of college and university teachers are usually assessed mainly by the number of the theses they published but, as a matter of fact, the quality of their theses often cannot match the quantities because teachers have little time to contemplate their dissertations when they are bent on working as many papers as possible, said Zhou Qifeng, president of Jilin University.
Fortunately, Beijing University currently introduce a new mechanism on encouraging theses of high quality, said Cheng Yuzhui, director of the sociological department of the school.
Cheng noted that if a teacher can write a thesis to the recognition of the department's independent academic committee in one semester, he does not need to receive the annual paper-number-count appraisal by the school authority.
Experts say the school's efforts can do away with plagiarism and low-quality theses currently prevailing in the academic circle.
Minister of Education Zhou Ji said that institutions of higher learning in China should be given more autonomy in educational structural reform and professors should actively guide students in scientific researches since students can acquire knowledge through practice instead of learning from books alone.