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March 30
18:00—18:50
Pro: School of Mathematics and Statistics — To build a world-class university, academic research should come first
Con: Philosophy — To build a world-class university, education and teaching should come first
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Sender: EPR (Jingzhong), Group: Philo
Title: Re: Schedule for the semifinals (please pin this) (reposted)
Station: Peking University Weiming BBS (Tuesday, March 27, 2007 15:21:52), internal message
Of course a university should prioritize education; the people in a university are called “professors” and “lecturers,” so if they neither teach nor lecture, what are they for? But then one doesn’t know what the administrators in a university are for; it seems as though administrators are there specifically to promote academic research? If professors and students are the masters of the university, then such a university would of course put education and teaching first. But if that gang of administrators is allowed to become the masters of the university, then academic research should be made primary; otherwise how are the administrators’ performance records supposed to come out? Still, building a world-class university really should put academic research first—but if it really gets built into a T*D “world-class university,” then the spirit of Peking University will be dead!
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Sender: elgooG (I find it hard to take), Group: Philo
Title: Re: Schedule for the semifinals (please pin this) (reposted)
Station: Peking University Weiming BBS (Tuesday, March 27, 2007 17:06:47), internal message
Frankly speaking, what is supposedly learned as education in the university is, for many people, something that is almost never used again after they get a job. Take the philosophy we study, for example: perhaps some classmates, once they find employment, will never come into contact with it again. This is a waste of resources. Besides, the disconnect between education and real life is itself a major drawback; have you not seen the students next door pushing their bicycles after losing their jobs?
So a university might as well appropriately reduce its investment in and scale of education, and use the resources saved for training all kinds of practical technical personnel (for instance, by building more technical schools). The university itself, meanwhile, should be centered on academic research. — There are not many people who truly choose to devote their lives to scholarship, and as for the cultivation of character and manners, if it still hasn’t been instilled by the time one reaches high school, then perhaps coming to university for education won’t change much either.
Most people take the college entrance exam in order to find a better job in the future. Rather than letting these people waste their youth in university, it would be better simply to build universities into academic research institutes. The aspirations we once had when entering university have long since been lost within the university.
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Sender: EPR (Jingzhong), Group: Philo
Title: Re: Schedule for the semifinals (please pin this) (reposted)
Station: Peking University Weiming BBS (Tuesday, March 27, 2007 17:52:58), internal message
I said that a university should prioritize education, but I did not say that more funds should be poured into education. China’s total investment in education is far too low, yet the proportion used for higher education is too high; it would be better to invest more in primary education and vocational and technical education.
If one says, “Most people take the college entrance exam in order to find a better job in the future,” then that idea is itself wrong. It would be better to do as you said: build more technical schools and train more practical technical personnel, so that students who want to find good jobs do not all rush headlong into universities; it would be better for them to choose vocational and technical schools, which would make it easier to find jobs.
What is a university for? First and foremost, a university is for “cultivating people.” Of course one can say that character and such things should be taught in middle school, but what a university is to cultivate is not ordinary people, but “intellectuals.” What use are intellectuals? Intellectuals are the conscience of society, but they are of no practical use at all. Intellectuals are not necessarily scholars doing academic work, but wherever they are, they bear some responsibility toward their times—whether by leading the times or by questioning and rebelling against them, intellectuals cannot submit to the times or to society. A university is precisely meant to cultivate people like this who “keep a distance” from the times and from society (as Wu Guosheng often says).
A university should also value academic research, but doing research is not like engineering construction; it is not something that can be done the way one invests in a factory. The problem now is that universities neither value education nor value academic research; instead they make “striving to become first-rate” the priority. Even the debate over whether to emphasize education or academic research has become a debate over how to better “strive to become first-rate.” Such a university is neither founded on education nor founded on academic research, but on being “first-rate.” It is truly depressing.
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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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