Research On Academic Corruption In Universities

In recent years, the academic corruption in the universities of China has been becoming even worse. These phenomena have been seriously damaging the academic research environment, affecting the academic reputation, dampening the enthusiasm and creativity of the vast numbers of researchers and endangering the healthy development of science. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct an in-depth study of academic corruption and make feasible suggestions for the rectification of academic corruption. However, although the academic corruption has long attracted the attention of academics, the study of academic corruption in China is still not so comprehensive, systematic and theoretical. For example, by now still there is no universally accepted definition of academic corruption. So, it is necessary to make a comprehensive and systematic analysis of academic corruption.Starting from the definition of corruption, this paper advances some basic characteristics of academic corruption which are necessary for defining academic corruption, and then the paper defines the academic corruption. The paper believes that there is a certain difference among academic corruption, academic anomie, academic misconduct and educational corruption, and they should not be lumped together. According to the definition of academic corruption, the representatives of it are the corrupt deals in the project application, academic publishing, academic accreditation, academic awards, academic title assessment, and the "academic tyrants", inbreeding, the official and academic integration appeared in the recent years. The paper points out that academic corruption if not checked, would give universities and the society a series of negative effects. The causes of academic corruption could be explained by some cultural, economic and institutional reasons which are the negative impact of the feudal traditional culture and the imbalance of cultural value system, the low-cost and high-yield of academic corruption and the imbalanced allocation of academic resources, the overrun of the educational administrative department, the alienation of the administrative power and the academic power in the universities, the unscientific academic assessment system, the irrational academic publishing mechanism and the immoral social norm and so forth. Among them the unscientific academic assessment system could be broken down into the following five areas: the intervenes of the administrative power, the unscientific guidance of the academic assessment system, the injustice of the specific accreditation system and the lack of the anonymous accreditation system and expert checking system. Finally, in the light of the foregoing analysis, the paper proposes to strengthen the academic morality construction, intensify the academic monitoring efforts and strengthen the academic institution construction and other countermeasures for countering academic corruption.