Higher education governance reform and world class university construction in China : a perspective of academic life

Abstract

In keeping with the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s ambition to rejuvenate the country, China has set a goal of becoming a higher education superpower in terms of world-class universities (WCUs) by 2050. A series of state-led investment projects and governance reforms in the last decades have been playing a vital role in influencing the success and failure of achieving this goal. Existing studies on China's higher education governance and WCU construction have mainly focused on macro-level policy analysis, system-level comparison or quantitative inquiry, and lack empirical insight to understand how the governance works on the ground. This study suggests that, in order to explain the China model of governance and its real effects on WCU construction, an investigation into how governance policies and mechanisms have changed academic work and life at grassroots level is necessary. Situated in such research problem and research gap, this study focused on the academic life as a lens to examine how governance reforms, at both the systemic and institutional levels, have been incorporated in academics’ daily work and affected their subjectivity and behaviors, using BU in Beijing, China, as a case study. Drawing on the theories of triangle of coordination (Clark, 1983), academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004) and governmentality/performativity (Ball, 2003; Foucault, 1988), this study constructed a multi-leveled analytical framework that connected the structural-level governance transformation and the individual-level changes of academic life. An ethnographic approach was employed to explore BU teachers’ interpretations of the on-going governance reform and its impacts on their academic life. Three methods for collecting data were adopted: document collection and analysis, observation and interview. Through tracking the China model of higher education governance from the state-level policy network, to the institutional-level policy reconstruction and the individual-level academics’ subjectivity and behaviors, the study suggested that the Chinese party-state has strategically utilized neoliberal practices as policy tools to reform its higher education governance, while retained its authority on campuses through political stability maintenance. The coexistence of authoritarian and neoliberal practices in its governance strategy indicated the state’s attempt to fulfill its twin expectations on Chinese leading research universities, namely, WCU construction and political control. The state-controlled neoliberal reform was implemented at BU. It created anxieties over income, career and performance and a sense of meaninglessness associated with political life among teachers. As a technology of the self (Foucault, 1988), anxieties played an active role in developing teachers’ entrepreneurial self and constraining their academic self. Facing the dual forces of authoritarian power and neoliberal pressure, the entrepreneurial academics adopted an obedient careerist approach to their work. Thus, the state-controlled neoliberal governance managed to produce obedient and effective academic subjects, who actively governed and improved themselves in line with the university’s performance indicators and the state’s requirements. Such processes also led to unintended consequences: gaming behaviors, schizophrenic subjectivities and goal displacement. This study suggested that such unintended consequences have made China’s drive for WCU a false prosperity, despite the country’s impressive growth and improvement in research productivity and global university rankings.