ON a sunny afternoon this past weekend, I took my 9-year-old old son for a walk around the campus of Shanghai Maritime University, which is near our home.

We strolled under the canopy of a long row of camphor trees, which are older than me, breathing air sweetened by the first bloom of sweet osmanthus. The buildings are, it is true, just beige concrete matchboxes, but at least they are not too tall, they are mellowed by half a century and some are being covered with ivy.

If anything, those ancient camphor trees are eminently real, free of falsifications, plagiarism, or enhancements. Since we no longer have the leisure to wait for trees to grow to their height, the standard practice today is simply to transplant them.

But the brave new world is already stalking us. From the campus we get a clear view of the landmark Shanghai Financial Tower and the ever-growing Shanghai Center. You know real estate developers are lurking about, ready to pounce.

Therefore, this campus days are numbered. Since last year, almost half of the original campus has been partitioned off with an iron wall, waiting for development. The whole campus will be turned over to developers by the end of this year.

In line with the prevailing custom, the university will get a new lease on life in a glittering 1.3-square-km Lingang campus in the southeastern part of Pudong New Area, around 80 km away from where it is now. The area is dominated by state-of-the-art modern edifices, boulevards, and acres of manicured lawn.

Towards the end of our tour, my son asked: "For universities, which kind is better, the bigger one or the smaller one?" In Chinese, the word for university is daxue, in which da can mean greater or bigger.

This seemingly simple question is actually quite to the point. What interests university deans and presidents today? Larger campuses, taller buildings, and bigger enrollment.

The more idealistically minded will be more concerned with a "first-rate university," which refers to the number of academic papers published in first-rate international learned journals.

The Oriental Morning Post reported on Monday that Fudan University president Yang Yuliang vowed to restore the school to its past glory.

"There are some people today who tend to monetize anything, be it knowledge or power, not excluding the affinity between teachers and students. There is a conspicuous lack of sincerity, and appreciation of the spirit of plain living and high thinking," Yang said.

But if Yang is earnest about making a real change, he should not underestimate the odds against him, for Chinese universities today are already heavily bureaucratized.

For example, as Fudan is a university at vice-ministerial level, president Yang is essentially a vice minister-level official, among the most privileged in China, enjoying perks in housing, medical care, and use of official cars. Therefore, within campuses, there has been also a growing tendency for administrative power to override scholarly authority.

According to professor Wang Yiqiu, who was once vice dean of Beijing University (Beida) before 1999, it was still very difficult at that time to find someone among the Beida faculty to double as head of a college or department, because that extra administrative work would compromise their studies.

Today these titles are highly coveted and competed for, for titles mean power, resources, projects, funding, and prestige.

In 2009, of the 80 scholars newly elected to the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, more than 80 percent of them hold administrative titles.

That same year, of the 100 college teachers honored nationally as "outstanding college teachers," around 90 percent of them are actually Party secretaries, presidents, heads, directors, or chiefs. When these pseudo-scholars become managers of a university, they are little different from officials, in their obsession with creating political assets that will help promote them.

Thus, depending on their perception, building "world-class" universities can be about the number of published papers, or just about building size, glamour and cost.

It was blogged earlier this year that there were five-star hotels even in the backwater Yunnan Agricultural University and Kunming Technology University, ostensibly for the purpose of facilitating scholarly exchanges.

In the impoverished Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China, Ningxia University has a plush hotel complete with luxury suites, presidential suite, KTV, spa, and gym. Obviously, many university presidents' perception of a great university is purely GDP-style, the more the better.

These problems have deep roots.

What's the purpose of education?

If education is to equip students to contribute to the creation of wealth, we should not be surprised that economics courses are oversubscribed, East or West.

But education should look beyond wealth, or knowledge. It should, first of all, concern itself with the purpose of human existence, the limitations of human knowledge, the frailty of humanity in this vast universe, with a view to cultivating in scholars a sense of humility, rather than hubris.

In his Lakeside Meditations, classics scholar Chien Mu (1895-1990) observes that in Chinese traditions, nature is heaven.

And when human effort is pitted against heaven, it is always informed by an acute sense of the harmony between heaven and mankind.

Tian ren he yi

In modern Western history, this knowledge of the proper place of humanity in the universe (liberal studies) lagged far behind natural studies, and the only thing to make up for this, Chien believed, was to revisit the Chinese conception of tian ren he yi, or the oneness of heaven and human beings.

In the recent issue of the Weekly Standard, Joseph Epste2in discusses the failure of liberal arts in America in his "Who killed the liberal arts? And why we should care."

He writes that "For the ancient Greeks, the liberal arts were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present."

Education today is more like vocational training, with students trained almost from the cradle to smash the many tests that stand in their way. Those who succeed are those who are better at taking examinations, who comprise a dystopia peopled by "young men and women driven by high, but empty, ambition."

In our haste to clutter our brain with so-called knowledge, we have lost the appreciation of tabula rasa, leisure and emptiness.

Chien Mu compared a modern man's tendency to clutter a house with things, to the exclusion of light and air, to the ancient who knew more about the value of an empty house, and who guarded his house jealously for fear of letting anything in.

"He will often clean up, so that he can sit in leisure. He prefers his heart not to be disturbed by material things, just as on a Saturday afternoon when you fantasize about the primordial past and the nature ... All great religions, art and literature start there."

Of course none of us has leisure to fantasize today. Chien made this observation more than 60 years ago, before the time of TV, the Internet, and iPhones and iPads.