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Pompous academicians should stop their arrogant worship of material success
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AN ONLINE picture of a disheveled old man sitting cross-legged in a university classroom went viral recently.
The gaunt, mustached, gray-haired man was photographed sitting behind a desk and reading a speech from notes to an invisible audience.
What was oddest about him is that he wore a black, old-fashioned jacket and a pair of black cloth shoes, but had no socks on.
Since fewer people nowadays wear cloth shoes, something often associated with poverty, the old man seems to be an anachronism. His humble looks, however, belied his respectable profession.
The scruffy man turned out to be none other than Li Xiaowen, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Li, 66, is a leading expert of remote sensing technology in the world. Public curiosity prompted a background search on Li.
Educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1980s, he returned to the University of Electronic Science and Technology in the southwestern city of Chengdu, his alma mater, where he now is a professor of automatic engineering. The revelation of his identity stirred an uproar. People used to the pompous attire and arrogance of some scholars were naturally amazed. Here is an academic who looks so unkempt and indeed, undignified, and doesn’t fit their stereotypical view of flamboyant scholars at all.
The low-profile academician has been affectionately compared to the “sweeping monk,” a legendary figure in a novel written by Louis Cha, a Hong Kong-based writer famous for his stories of knighthood and sword play set in ancient China, a popular genre.
In the novel, the “sweeping monk” is a recluse who lives in a Buddhist temple, surrounded by kung fu masters and swordsmen. A superb martial artist, the monk reduces himself to the obscure role of an orderly, who sweeps the monastery’s floor and lies low to avoid attention. The comparison drawn between the fictitious kung fu master and academician Li is not just an attempt at humor, but also suggests public disenchantment with academia today.
The reason Li shot to fame almost overnight is that he doesn’t lead the high-flying life of some peers, who behave more like businessmen than teachers.
In contrast to a few peers whose interest lies primarily in more lucrative enterprises, Li is committed wholeheartedly to academic research and the imparting of knowledge to his students, to the extent that he doesn’t bother with what clothes to wear to impress his patrons — students. To him, appearance counts much less than substance, whereas the dress code is a big concern for some image-conscious professors.
Such commitment is scarce among quite a few scholars, who seldom show up in classrooms to fulfill their due responsibility as teachers, but even when they do, they often mislead and insult students with blatantly pernicious views.
Money grabbing scholars
Examples abound of these demagogues. Dong Fan, associate professor at Beijing Normal University, never fails to surprise us with brazen justifications for skyrocketing home prices. We got a sense of his money-grabbing proclivity when he once told his students that they shouldn’t say he taught them if they cannot amass a personal fortune of 40 million yuan (US$6.5 million) by the age of 40. How much Dong, 47, makes himself is, of course, beside the point.
In another case, Yin Xiaobing, an associate professor teaching an MBA program at southwestern China’s Yunnan University — He also sits on the boards of three listed companies and likes to fool around in his BMW — advised fellow teachers not to devote too much energy to academic research. Otherwise, it would be “a disaster.” For what? Opportunities to get rich, obviously.
It doesn’t matter whether they are truly erudite or not. Their showmanship, name brand attire, as well as haughty airs, earn them publicity that honest, down-to-earth academics like Li don’t.
However, this time, the cult of Li suggested a widespread yearning for the ivory tower to cleanse itself of mercenary influence, to return to its roots and do its job.
Academician Li may look scruffy and not in the least like a great scholar. But the definition of academic greatness has long been distorted by success in material terms. With his thrift, modesty and simplicity, Li has been a welcome aberration that challenges that particular definition.
In essence, a great scholar is like a book that should not be judged by its cover, but by how many minds it can enlighten.
In promoting the academic “sweeping monk” that is Li, the public is expecting him to serve as an exemplar for junior peers. But apart from commending or idolizing the humble academician, there is a more important undertaking.
University faculty should be strictly assessed and promoted on merit, and those who behave more like showbiz artists and demagogues than real scholars ought to be shown the door.
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