Research On The Governance Path Of Chinese Public Universities

At present, there exists a potential performance crisis in our public universities, which takes the form of the low efficiency in the educational input and output, the decline in the quality of education, the low academic productivity, and the inadequacy of innovation ability. The root of the crisis lies in the deficiency and ineffectiveness of our university institution and university governance structure. As a result, the key to enhancing the performance of our public universities is to optimize the governance path of our university.The functions, the organizational attributes and the external environment of university determine the different university governance forms. With a history of nearly1000years, university has formed both united and complicated functions and attributes. After the founding of new China, great changes have taken place in China’s social environment. Meanwhile, the reform and exploration of university governance has been carried out for more than60years, which can be divided into highly centralized management period, chaotic decentralized governance period and limited decentralization governance period at different stages.While the reform of our university governance has made great achievements, there are major problems to be solved in the new period. In the external governance, authorities tend to interfere in university’s self-management excessively and employ improper methods to manage the university; the traditional cooperation among enterprises, research institutes and universities doesn’t make the university establish a close, long-term and stable strategic synergy with the external entities. Synergy, therefore, has not been brought into full play. In the internal governance, the power structure is unbalanced, such as the political power and administrative power in a strong position, market power and social power being marginalized, academic power and democratic power weakened, student power being absent.In the following period, Chinese public university governance reform is a complex operation, which involves the university’s internal and external governance, the coordination and restructuring of multiple and conflicting interests. In the meantime, the reform must conform to the requirements and constraints imposed by the political and cultural system with Chinese characteristics. In the new period, the following aspects should be emphasized to optimize the governance of our public university:In the external governance, to optimize the relationship among university, government, research institute, enterprise and intermediary agent by means of synergetic innovation; to optimize the government’s resource allocation by implementing the education voucher. In the internal governance, to balance the allocation of power through reforming the board of trustees; to perfect the institution of managing the university in accordance with law by drawing up university statutes.