A Comparative Study On The Operating Mechanism Of Academic Committee And Academic Council

Academic affairs are the core content of the management of university affairs. Universities in UK and USA have established academic senate to be responsible for management of internal academic affairs. At present, UK and USA are recognized as leading countries in higher education, whose Academic senate systems represent their successful experience universities accumulate in terms of academic management. With the constant development of Chinese higher education, many universities and colleges have set up academic committees, which take charge of academic affairs, so as to guarantee their "academic characteristics" and promote academic prosperity. In fact, Chinese academic committee is an academic organization similar to academic senate. Given the fact that Chinese academic committee still has some problems, such as its undefined status and unsound system, it is of practical significance that we learn critically from foreign universities’ advanced experience in managing academic senate in order to perfect Chinese academic committee’s operational mechanism.This thesis begins with a detailed review of foreign and domestic researches on relevant academic organizations, on the basis of which, this thesis selected Hunan University in China, University of Edinburgh in the UK and University of Virginia in the USA, which are all public universities and ranks middle or upper in their respective domestic university’s rankings, as research subjects, compared and conducted a text analysis of these three universities’ academic committee and academic senate. After analyzing the operational mechanisms of the three universities’academic committee and academic senate, this thesis established the dimensions of comparison. This thesis aims to find the problems of Chinese universities’ academic committee through comparative analysis so as to learn from foreign universities’ advanced experience and improve Chinese universities’ academic committee system.The first part of this thesis introduces research background, significance, research status at home and abroad and clears research ideas and research methods. The second part defines such basic concepts as academic right, academic management, academic committee and academic senate based on previous research achievements. This part also formulates the theoretical foundation of this thesis, which has the modern university governance theory, linear-functional organization theory and committee system theory. It is under the guidance of these theories that this research is carried out. The third part is the main part of this thesis. Firstly, an overall analysis of the length and text structure of the guidance documents of the three universities’ academic committee and senate is conducted. Comparison dimensions are established:organizational philosophy, organizational structure, membership composition and parliamentary procedure. Secondly, a horizontal and longitudinal analysis of the four comparison dimensions is conducted. The similarities and differences of the three universities’ academic committee and senate and the existing problems of Chinese universities’ academic committee are summarized. The fourth part of this thesis is Reflections and Suggestions. Based on the previous analysis and the study of other domestic universities’ academic committee, this thesis concludes that Chinese universities’ academic committee have problems in its independence, structure, member composition and parliamentary procedure and thus put forward following suggestions:(1)keep academic committee relatively independent; (2)optimize its structure; (3)perfect its member composition; (4)standardize its parliamentary procedure; (5)improve its supervision and feedback mechanism.