The Graduate Education In Our Country Academic Power And Administrative Power In Positioning And Preliminary Study Of The Relationship

As two kinds of power forms of different nature and level, academic power and administrative power are integral parts of the power system inside colleges and universities. Both of them are complementary to each other with the same responsibility to support the whole development goal of school. However, when dealing with specific practical education management work, there exist some conflicts between academic power and administrative power due to the differences on value orientation and behavior type. Basically, colleges and universities are academic organization in nature which means academic power should be the supreme power body. With the organization size increasing gradually, the good functional condition within the colleges and universities depends on the powerful administrative management system more and more. Administrative power requires the inferiors imitate the superiors and unified standard which is naturally different from the freedom and democracy of great value to academic power. As a result, a lot disharmony phenomenon comes up. Although the efficiency of administrative power is very important to the aggressive expansion of higher education scale in China, academic power has to be put into the dominant position in order to maintain the overall quality of higher education which is the basic principle of academic activities.Currently, the pace of reform in Chinese higher education construction is obviously falling behind pace of the reform in social and economic construction. The political power and administrative power are still in the leading position inside colleges and universities. This kind of management pattern has played a significant role in promoting the rapid development of Chinese higher education in the planned economy era. According to the continuous development of society and economy, especially the strong demand of scientific and technical innovation, the current management pattern has many drawbacks which bring up problems like focusing on the official position, academic hegemony and corruption, as well as the declination of education quality. Facing the new situation, colleges and universities have to make academic power the core part of inside management and set up the scientific and rational internal management structure and operating mechanism in which academic power and administrative power could cooperate and supervise each other. Academic power and administrative power are not opposite concepts, but on the contrary they depend on each other and can promote one another. The democratic decision made by academic power can only be implemented by administrative power and the concrete practical work of administrative power has to be led by academic power. To sum up, administrative power is the academic power in process, both the two kinds of power aim to keep academic activities going orderly.In recent years, as the postgraduate enrollment scale in our country increasing gradually, postgraduate education, considered as the driving force of scientific and technical innovation, has already become the independent and significant management part in colleges and universities. Comparing to the comprehensive undergraduate education, postgraduate education more focuses on professional knowledge and research ability. The unified education goal makes it easy to define the functional division of academic power and administrative power and the academic power is supposed to be in a more important position without any doubt. Besides, teachers and students concerned in postgraduate education are more self-conscious and more independent on academic work which may lead to more conflicts between academic and administrative power. So this research based on current theories mainly focuses on postgraduate education and tries to find out the real problems between academic power and administrative power in postgraduate education management area in Chinese colleges and universities by text analysis and face-to-face interview, and then addresses some operational and specific solutions. To make the point more clear, the researcher use the case study method on postgraduate education in Fudan University, reflecting the common problems existing in internal management field of Chinese colleges and universities, raising up some improving strategies accordingly to provide some reforming suggestions to other colleges and universities in China.