Experience and Practice of University Governance

Experiential school running is a customary practice formed in the long-term school running, that is, path dependence. Even in the case of major changes in external social needs and environment, they still stick to established habits and rarely carry out major reforms.

Generally speaking, China's accumulated experience in running a school is manifested in two forms: one is a continuation of customary practices, such as the macro-level higher education management system, school-running system and investment system; Middle-level students are "strict in" and "wide out" and enroll students by major; Strengthen the teaching management of specialized seawater desalination courses and related academic year system in the process of personnel training at the micro level; Strengthen specialized courses and ignore general courses, attach importance to compulsory courses and ignore elective courses in curriculum setting. All of them are long-term "experience in running a school", which has been deeply rooted in the management system of universities. The second is to learn from the practices of foreign universities, which the academic circles call exotic or western experience. In fact, a considerable part of the inherited customary practices belong to imported western experience. Especially after the founding of New China, the practice of completely copying the Soviet Union's higher education has unconsciously become our "experience in running a school", which still has great market and influence.

Whether it is our own accumulated experience or the experience learned from the west, these early higher education experiences are mainly based on personal experience in running schools and theoretical experience based on personal value judgment. Looking back today, the western experience still has a certain scope of application, but generally speaking, the western higher education experience is the experience of universities with a long history, the experience of elite education, and the experience of countries with higher levels of productivity development. Of course, we can't deny the value of western experience, because they are also the wealth of human civilization; Nor can it be denied that it has brought a frame of reference to China's higher education, so that we have the goal of catching up.

In recent years, "following, running and leading" has become a popular discourse in the field of higher education in China. The following is to admit that China's higher education is imitating or following the historical track; Running side by side means that the level of higher education in China is at the same level as that in western countries. Leading not only shows that China's higher education is full of confidence in its future development, but also shows that its future development must rely on its own exploration, hoping to be able to lead China and the world's higher education forward. The judgment of running with is more in line with historical facts, but whether it reaches the level of running side by side at present needs specific analysis; It seems that there is still a certain distance to achieve the grand goal of leading, and to truly achieve the leading from following to running side by side, we need to get out of the historical inertia and break through the previous experience in running schools.

2. Limitations of school-running experience.

The application of western higher education experience in China has its limitations. Many effective experiences of western universities generally appear "unaccustomed to the environment" in China, and the reason is that the cultural soil between the East and the West is quite different. Therefore, any country should find its own way and sum up the experience of higher education suitable for its own soil. We must have a clear understanding of this.

From a deeper perspective, any higher education experience has traces of a specific era, perhaps a major historical event, or a turning point in socio-economic and population development, which may make higher education enter a painful or brand-new era. For example, the rise of German higher education after the Franco-Prussian War; Another example is the rapid development of American public universities after the promulgation of the Land Grant Act, which accelerated the overall transformation of higher education in these two countries, including internal organizational structure, internal governance system, specialty setting and curriculum setting. After more than one hundred years' development, higher education in China has formed a strong historical inertia and accumulated a lot of experience in running schools. However, with the reform and development of China's higher education entering the "deep water area", we feel to varying degrees that the experience and ideas of higher education formed in the past obviously lag behind the requirements of the new era. For example, many university administrators have hardly received general education, innovation and entrepreneurship education, interdisciplinary education, credit system, massive open online courses and flipping classrooms ... But now these have become the development direction and reform focus of higher education at present and in the future, and higher education in China is entering an important historical turning point.

At the same time, China's current university governance model draws lessons from the experience in the economic field and deserves deep reflection. Today, the internal governance system of many universities in China is mainly based on the "score system", which is similar to the management model of the production team in that year. "Score" covers almost all the activities of universities, and some universities even apply the performance management of "score system" to the extreme, such as calculating the scores of scientific research achievements, including scientific research projects, awards and funds. The teaching workload is divided into work points, including the workload of class hours, the workload of guiding papers and the workload of guiding students to participate in academic competitions. Social services, work scores, etc., are almost everything. On the surface, the performance management of "division of labor" makes university management more refined and professional, which seems to be "scientific". As we all know, the performance management model based on "division of labor" is a typical "first generation" enterprise management model, which completely deviates from the university attribute.

University is the leader of social civilization and the academic unity of scholars. The use of "division of labor system" in university performance management can only show that universities are gradually losing the leading role of society, and the starting point of management is similar to the primitive and backward state. The performance management of "integral system" has been in the form of a double-edged sword since it entered the university. The marginal effect of its academic productivity is decreasing, resulting in the effect of bad money expelling good money, and the negative impact is gradually increasing, destroying the academic ecology of universities. At the specific stage of university development, the implementation of "division of labor" performance management may achieve unexpected results and help improve management efficiency, but the disadvantages of this governance model are gradually emerging, which is difficult to sustain and easy to breed academic misconduct.

However, this performance management based on "work sharing system" has become the best way to improve the efficiency of running a university. In this regard, we must carry out profound reflection. Because in the final analysis, the "division of labor" governance model in universities is based on the assumption of economic man in the economic field, which deviates from academic culture, the value orientation of universities and the connotative development of universities; It not only distorts the organizational attributes of universities, but also confuses their value standards. If the internal governance of universities still adopts performance management based on "work sharing system", it is impossible to become a world-class university. Therefore, how to govern universities has become a proposition that must be answered to promote the modernization of governance level and governance capacity of higher education in China, which is directly related to the quality and level of running universities in China.