A devotional education reformer

By Gong Yidong (China Features)

2009-09-24

He has a hearing problem, and his right hand shakes. Yet, Liu Daoyu, in his seventies, still works four hours a day, offering his thoughts on China's higher education. His latest bombshell is a 7,000-word article in China's most revered newspaper Southern Weekend in late February, calling for an overhaul of the country's swelling universities.
The former president of Wuhan University, or Wuda, is convinced that education should be based on the ultimate value of Man and stripped of the shadow of bureaucratic system. "China's education still awaits a movement of enlightenment," he says, sitting in his humble flat amid the blooming cherry on campus.

Intention to save"an old cart"

   Born in a village of northern Hubei Province, Liu studied chemistry in Wuda in 1953, with an ambition to become China's Alfred Nobel. "Nobel's story implanted a seed of innovation in me when I was just 14," he recalls.
   Before 1949, Wuda was ranked as one of the top five universities in China, on a par with the universities of Peking, Tsinghua, National Central (Nanjing) and Zhejiang. But Wuda's reputation quickly decline after 1953 as the leftism set in. "Professors were caught with a sense of terror. Some were sent to the gymnasium to receive physical punishment, and nobody was in the mood to pursue research," Liu recalls.
   In the following couple of years, Wuda was enveloped by party fractions, and ended up with "a cart pulled by an old ox", as Liu put it. It slid to 22nd of the 23 universities under the supervision of Ministry of Education (MoE).
   Liu became a chemistry lecturer when he graduated in 1957. The university sent him to the Soviet Union for organic fluorine studies, a basic science for atomic industry, at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1962.
   "Unlike what I had expected, the postgraduate studies in the former Soviet Union were markedly independent and democratic. I was neither required to register for any compulsory course nor sit written examinations. All I had to was to write an original thesis, and pass an oral examination."
   Liu attributed the Big Brother's academic freedom to its western cultural background, which "tallied with my personality as well."
   In 973, ten years of his teaching in China, Liu was grasped by a streak of "political good fortune". He was singled out as deputy Party chief of Wuda. Four years later, he was transferred to Beijing as chief of the MoE's higher education department.
   Although blessed with an officialdom career ahead, Liu resigned in 1979 because he just wanted to go back to alma mater Wuda, and "end the shameful record and restore its past glory, " he says, disdaining power and fame.
   In the next three years, he refused the offers to hold the posts of the secretary general of Chinese Communist Youth League, education minister and the mayor of Wuhan.

Ploughing a test field

   The golden opportunity came in 1981, when Liu was named president of Wuda. In the prime of his life, the young leader was greatly encouraged by Party Secretary General Hu Yaobang, who said, "The process of reform allows for errors, but it's not allowed to stay unmoved and make no reform at all."
   After consulting with more than 30 professors and observers, Liu concluded that Wuda's stagnancy was due to the rampant leftist road and exclusionism thereupon outside scholars were unwelcome in Wuda. "'Close breeding'is harmful to innovation. Meanwhile, we must lift off the screws on people's minds and tap into their initiative and enthusiasm."
   A flurry of reforms, with students as the core, was carried out in Wuda, including the introduction of academic credits, double majors, a tutorial system and major transference, none of which were tried in China's universities since 1949.
   The most astounding policy was to abolish political instructors, whose mission was oversee students' ideologies. It system was established in the 1960s when "class struggle" was the dominant theme. "Obviously, such a practice was already out of date, so we cut it off," Liu says.
   As a part of the reform, a teacher stipulated three Allows and three Nots for students: allow to come, but not to come late; allow to read other books, but not to talk; allow to snooze, but not to snore.
   "The message is clear: teachers should improve their lecturing skills rather than imposing penalty points in a harsh way. On the other hand, the students have freedom, but not at the expense of sacrificing others' interests," Liu summarizes.
   Immersed in an overall renaissance that swept through China in the 1980s, Wuda witnessed the mushrooming of more than 400 student societies catering to their interests, among which there was even a Nazi research association with the aim of examining history to prevent such tragedies from being repeated. Some students set up a happy college, where elites from different departments gathered together for inter-disciplinary discussions of advanced subjects. "Cramming method of teaching or learning was not welcomed in the university," Liu says.
   Within a few years, Wuda was acclaimed a special zone of China's higher education sector, "because we infused a spirit of openness and democracy into the campus," Liu says.
   Liu's bold reforms made the university a magnet nationwide. Students from such prestigious universities like Peking, Tsinghua and Science and Technology of China applied to transfer to Wuda. "Birds will spontaneously fly to the sky without boundary, and people prefer an environment of freedom, right?" Liu says, eyes glistening.
   The unprecedented unleashing of freedom was also a catalyst driving scientific research. In 1985, Wuda generated nine first prizes in the national academic completions and rose to the second rank in MoE-supervised universities, second to Peking University only.

Unstoppable devotion

Liu, busy preparing the second development blueprint for Wuda, was unprepared when the political weather changed. On March 6, 1988, the 54-year-old received a notice from the ministry, declaring his removal from his post on the grounds of "routine election." But during the 1980s, all the university heads were appointed rather than elected.

Bidding farewell to the presidency, Liu's thoughts and acts kept moving.

"What's the explanation for China's backward education? An attributing factor is the lack of a systematic theory guiding education. Meanwhile, very few people dare to make real experiments in education."

"Worldwide, there are three leading schools of educational thought: John Dewey's Pragmatism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Naturalism and J.A.Comenius' Anti-intellectualism, but where is China's contribution? Even Confucius failed to come up with a principal theory."

Liu decided to turn his ideas into concrete things. Initially, he wanted to set up a private college. "But I curry no flavor with officials, make no social connections and offer no bribes, so I failed."

Then, he was employed by an experimental foreign language middle school named New Century as its headmaster. Everyday, he traveled 70 kilometers to the school on the outskirts of Wuhan and delivered a course Studies of Innovation to the students.

To his disappointment, the school went bankrupt in 2000, as the investor ran out of money.

In the past decade, Liu shifted his focus to the theoretical research of higher education. Delivering a seminar last December reviewing the experiences of China's education since 1978, when the government embarked on the road of economic reform. Liu criticized the government for replacing reform with unchecked development.

"China boasts the biggest college population, the largest campuses and is the second biggest academic paper generator in the world, but it can barely foster a world-class scholar or a school of thought.

"Why? We are used to taking students as raw materials that could be shaped along a standardized production line imposed by the educational management regime. A sad result is that their personalities and innovation capacities are much eroded," he sighs.

To him, the higher education should be left to educationists, and universities should strive to maintain its academic freedom, independence and truth.

He noted that the Southwest Associated University in the 1930s had brought about 172 academicians and two Nobel Prize laureates (Tsung-Dao Lee and Chenning Yang) at the time of WWII. "The miracle simply lies in the freedom it enjoyed, " he says.

"As the philosopher Kant said, enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Higher education in China is in need of genuine reform, right now," Liu raises his voice, looking at the cherry trees atop the Luojia Mountain beyond Wuda.

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