IN the intense global competition for talents, Chinese universities have made no secret of their ambition to vault into the ranks of the world's best institutions.

Given the vast resources at their disposal, this once-unattainable aspiration is no longer a pipe dream.

But before that can happen, Chinese higher education authorities need to undertake some serious reforms to come up with a winning formula.

After several unfruitful years of casting about for a shortcut to success and renown, these universities are finally zeroing in on the need to establish a relevant general education curriculum.

Their latest obsession with general education attempts to address the perceived lack in students of critical thinking, which many blame for China's continued failure to nurture the right kind of talents to challenge dogmas and drive innovation.

By definition, general education refers to a holistic approach to higher education. Students bred with this pedagogy are exposed to multidisciplinary courses regardless of their specific majors. For instance, every undergraduate in Harvard University is required to pore over some works on civic traditions, be they Socrates or Locke, among a selected number of classics. But general education goes much deeper than reading classics.

Robert Zimmer, president of University of Chicago, told reporters at Fudan University on April 30, "The way we approach general education in Chicago is not knowledge-based, but thought-based."

By instilling in students a penchant to think beyond their areas of interest or specialization, general education can serve as an antidote to the pervasive parochialism and short-term thinking that have plagued higher education of late.

The situation is all the more dismal in China, where higher education has virtually become synonymous with technical and vocational training. Schools caught up in reckless expansion and enrollment have lost sight of their primary mission and societal role.

As the National College Entrance Examination approaches, many students will predictably be scrambling to enter fields like finance and business management that promise quick money and reputation. And again, predictably, the humanities with a focus beyond mundane pursuits, such as philosophy and history, will be marginalized because they are financially less rewarding.

Critical money

With the increasing commercialization of higher education and with universities pandering to the business community for funds to fuel their growth, critical thinking will predictably become more scarce.

After all, how critical can one be of the flow of money that is critical to his academic research or future career?

Southern Weekly published a story on May 28 quoting Weng Yinlin, a property developer, as saying "the media is the largest force behind surging home prices."

By signing deals with developers and running sensational coverage that can spark panic buying, many news outlets are helping sustain the housing frenzy, the report said.

One doesn't have to read beyond three lines of some news reports to know the author has been either bought off or brainwashed by the official-developer nexus. Seldom are glowing statistics scrutinized in these reports, so long as they come from supposedly reliable sources.

That's where general education comes in, either as a self-interested move by Chinese colleges to help them attain the universal recognition they crave or as a change of tack after bouts of soul-searching over their shortcomings.

General education has thus barged onto center stage during seminars attended by Chinese and foreign educators. During this year's Chinese-foreign rectors forum, a biennial event held under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Yale University president Richard Levin noted that underdeveloped general education may eventually take the grace out of China's new educational strut.

"The leaders of China have been very explicit in recognizing that two elements are missing in their universities' multidisciplinary breadth and the cultivation of critical thinking," Levin said at the forum on May 3 in Nanjing.

Fudan University president Yang Yuliang concurs. "General education should teach students to trace the origins of certain kinds of knowledge, which is the most important," Yang said in a speech on May 26 marking the 15th anniversary of the founding of the university's Nordic Studies Center.

To promote exchange across disciplines and free thinking, Fudan took an unprecedented step in 2005 to divide and intermingle its some 3,000 freshmen from different departments into four study groups, or shuyuans, where they took the same courses and lived together for a year - before, as sophomores, they began to explore their fields of interest.

Similar reforms of general education also are underway in other Chinese ivory towers. Almost every university has now developed its mandatory, core curriculum. But in many institutions, elective courses still dwarf general studies, both in number and in academic rigor.

Old habits die hard. Some unpleasant ones live on beyond the time-honored shuyuan system.

In days of yore, Chinese men of letters used to be locked in "mutual disparagement," meaning literary rivals spoke contemptuously of each other and traded insults.

This tradition is alive and well among the modern-day literati in an even more vicious form.

The highly distinct separation of disciplines and sub-disciplines has practically turned some teachers into self-shackled slaves who cannot toil in fields other than their own.

Turf mentality

"Some mediocre researchers have a strong 'turf' mentality. They leave their mark in an area and claim it exclusively as their own so that others cannot trespass. This will only build higher barriers between disciplines," Fudan's president Yang said in an interview published on May 27 in the online edition of People's Daily.

As a student of political science back at college, I recall my mentor once lamenting how today's academia has become a world split along rigid lines - not so much from the diversification of knowledge as from their unfounded obsession with becoming renowned in a narrow field. Sociologists scoff at political scientists for being "shallow," while political scientists scorn researchers of international politics as "lacking in theoretical sophistication."

That reminds me of Max Weber, the great German thinker widely admired as the last person on this planet with an encyclopedic repository of knowledge. In a witty riposte to his critics for writing outside his discipline, Weber quipped that "I'm not a donkey. And I don't have a field."

Noted finance scholar Lang Xianping probably never had his "Weberesque" epiphany, as he blithely said in 2008 that "the purpose of getting a doctoral degree is to help the candidate better defend his bias."

If these poisonous ideas gain currency - and some of them already have - how can we expect critical thinking to flourish?

To make general education work, Chinese universities might first of all tear down artificial fences to let tethered "donkeys" run free.