Home » Opinion » Chinese Views
Pro-rich teaching as polluting as pop-star culture
By Ni Tao |
November 25, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
POOR class attendance is often a source of embarrassment for teachers.
Embarrassment drove Fudan University philosophy professor Zhang Qingxiong to lose his cool on November 10 when he found 35 students were absent from his class.
Later he learned that Hong Kong celebrity actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai was visiting the campus, and the "truants," who are paramilitary soldiers studying at Fudan, were deployed to manage crowds of jostling student fans. This led Zhang to decry what he saw as Fudan students' betrayal of its rich academic traditions.
While Professor Zhang's devotion to academic research is laudable, he seems clueless about what is really turning students away from classrooms, including his. As a graduate of Fudan, I know its campus culture well enough to know that his assertion is a broad stroke.
Fudan students idolize academic stars as much as cultural icons. When Michael Sandel, acclaimed Harvard professor, spoke at the school in May, he was honored by an auditorium packed with engaged students, many of whom sat in aisles, and by their highly interactive and curious nature. Who's to say Fudan students are epicurean bozos unworthy of their school?
In fact, we ought to look beyond a single "truanting" episode. Students now desert classrooms for various personal reasons, chasing stars is just one of them.
Their unannounced absence represents an absence among university bureaucracy and faculty of the right sense of their mission. Except for the excess of academic papers published annually, Chinese universities are such dull places that almost all students occasionally or regularly cut class.
One reason is that obsession with status and job prospects has galvanized Chinese teachers to relentlessly devote more of their time to surviving the "publish or perish" unspoken law and ingratiating themselves with power. Consequently, less time and energy is spent on developing riveting curriculum.
What teachers do, students imitate. How can we expect students not to take cues when their professors themselves are engaged in profitable businesses on the side, at the expense of teaching?
Some professors are so in thrall to Mammon that they "play truant" too. Back at Fudan, I once took a course on political economy. The lecturer, swamped with his consulting service for businesses, taught in person only twice a semester and left the remaining teaching to his assistant. I skipped a few classes. I'm not proud of it, but it's clear who's more at fault.
Universities worldwide are trying to justify the increasingly high costs of their courses with the expected earning power that degrees are supposed to provide, and nobody seems to bother raising questions any more over deadening scholarship.
This makes occasional student revolt all the more remarkable.
Chinese students who cut class have expressed disapproval of money-grubbing professors who neglect serious teaching.
Their American peers, however, have demonstrated how "serious" teaching can also contain flaws that encourage mercantile enterprise.
Harvard students taking an introductory economics course taught by renowned professor Gregory Mankiw walked out of his class on November 2 in protest against perceived pro-rich bias in his lectures.
Falsehood
At a time when the defunct Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired many local mutations, such as Occupy Harvard, the students' walkout should have some implications for China, where quite a few economists proudly see themselves as Mankiw's soulmates and endorse his theory as if it were the Holy Bible.
When interviewed by National Public Radio about whether equal opportunity is a pretense given the yawning wealth gap, Mankiw demurred. In his usual reasoning, inequality doesn't matter if it can be justified by "equal opportunity."
So is opportunity equal? The editorial in the latest issue of The New Republic, a leading US commentary magazine, opined that "the country's most selective schools continue the deeply unfair practice of favoring legacies in their admissions process."
Equal opportunity is a falsehood, and since it's a falsehood, it undermines Mankiw's analysis of the so-called "politics of envy," which bespeaks his pretensions. He hasn't responded to my e-mailed queries for comment.
Opportunities in China are seldom equal. It was recently reported that young people have fled in droves the expensive metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou back to their home provinces for career opportunities, only to find nepotism is more rife there.
This necessitates reckoning with the myth in China about the free market. Free market promotes efficiency, its advocates argue. But efficiency doesn't guarantee an ensuing "common prosperity," as late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had hoped for.
The backlash against Mankiw dramatizes not just the already heated debate in the US on inequality. It's relevant for China as well, for its economy and higher education.
When young people in the cradle of neo-liberal economics are stripping the veneer off the dour faces of priggish economists and discovering their complicity in compounding social injustice, why the urge in China to feed our students a similarly dubious diet? And why the belief that pop culture is the only "spiritual pollution"?
It appears that filled classrooms are not necessarily a good sign.
Embarrassment drove Fudan University philosophy professor Zhang Qingxiong to lose his cool on November 10 when he found 35 students were absent from his class.
Later he learned that Hong Kong celebrity actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai was visiting the campus, and the "truants," who are paramilitary soldiers studying at Fudan, were deployed to manage crowds of jostling student fans. This led Zhang to decry what he saw as Fudan students' betrayal of its rich academic traditions.
While Professor Zhang's devotion to academic research is laudable, he seems clueless about what is really turning students away from classrooms, including his. As a graduate of Fudan, I know its campus culture well enough to know that his assertion is a broad stroke.
Fudan students idolize academic stars as much as cultural icons. When Michael Sandel, acclaimed Harvard professor, spoke at the school in May, he was honored by an auditorium packed with engaged students, many of whom sat in aisles, and by their highly interactive and curious nature. Who's to say Fudan students are epicurean bozos unworthy of their school?
In fact, we ought to look beyond a single "truanting" episode. Students now desert classrooms for various personal reasons, chasing stars is just one of them.
Their unannounced absence represents an absence among university bureaucracy and faculty of the right sense of their mission. Except for the excess of academic papers published annually, Chinese universities are such dull places that almost all students occasionally or regularly cut class.
One reason is that obsession with status and job prospects has galvanized Chinese teachers to relentlessly devote more of their time to surviving the "publish or perish" unspoken law and ingratiating themselves with power. Consequently, less time and energy is spent on developing riveting curriculum.
What teachers do, students imitate. How can we expect students not to take cues when their professors themselves are engaged in profitable businesses on the side, at the expense of teaching?
Some professors are so in thrall to Mammon that they "play truant" too. Back at Fudan, I once took a course on political economy. The lecturer, swamped with his consulting service for businesses, taught in person only twice a semester and left the remaining teaching to his assistant. I skipped a few classes. I'm not proud of it, but it's clear who's more at fault.
Universities worldwide are trying to justify the increasingly high costs of their courses with the expected earning power that degrees are supposed to provide, and nobody seems to bother raising questions any more over deadening scholarship.
This makes occasional student revolt all the more remarkable.
Chinese students who cut class have expressed disapproval of money-grubbing professors who neglect serious teaching.
Their American peers, however, have demonstrated how "serious" teaching can also contain flaws that encourage mercantile enterprise.
Harvard students taking an introductory economics course taught by renowned professor Gregory Mankiw walked out of his class on November 2 in protest against perceived pro-rich bias in his lectures.
Falsehood
At a time when the defunct Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired many local mutations, such as Occupy Harvard, the students' walkout should have some implications for China, where quite a few economists proudly see themselves as Mankiw's soulmates and endorse his theory as if it were the Holy Bible.
When interviewed by National Public Radio about whether equal opportunity is a pretense given the yawning wealth gap, Mankiw demurred. In his usual reasoning, inequality doesn't matter if it can be justified by "equal opportunity."
So is opportunity equal? The editorial in the latest issue of The New Republic, a leading US commentary magazine, opined that "the country's most selective schools continue the deeply unfair practice of favoring legacies in their admissions process."
Equal opportunity is a falsehood, and since it's a falsehood, it undermines Mankiw's analysis of the so-called "politics of envy," which bespeaks his pretensions. He hasn't responded to my e-mailed queries for comment.
Opportunities in China are seldom equal. It was recently reported that young people have fled in droves the expensive metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou back to their home provinces for career opportunities, only to find nepotism is more rife there.
This necessitates reckoning with the myth in China about the free market. Free market promotes efficiency, its advocates argue. But efficiency doesn't guarantee an ensuing "common prosperity," as late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had hoped for.
The backlash against Mankiw dramatizes not just the already heated debate in the US on inequality. It's relevant for China as well, for its economy and higher education.
When young people in the cradle of neo-liberal economics are stripping the veneer off the dour faces of priggish economists and discovering their complicity in compounding social injustice, why the urge in China to feed our students a similarly dubious diet? And why the belief that pop culture is the only "spiritual pollution"?
It appears that filled classrooms are not necessarily a good sign.
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