The Enlightenment Of America’s Tenure System On Teachers’ Employment System Reform In Our Country

The development of a nation lies in high-caliber personnel, and the development of thepersonnel lies in education, while the key of education is the teaching faculty. Thus, theteaching system is very important for the universities and even the society or the country. Asone of the most developed country in its higher education in the world, America has many aeducational ideas and systems which are worthy of our reference and imitation. The tenuresystem is one of them. The tenure system emphasizes that once the university teachers areappointed as a tenured professor after a series of assessment, they cannot be fired withoutproper reasons and legal procedures. For a very long time, this system has been recognized asthe most effective system for choosing and encouraging teachers in the western countries. Ourcountry is actively promoting the reform of the teachers’employment system. Because thissystem is an important part of the teachers’personnel system, the outcome of the reformaffects the development of the higher education directly. During the process of the reform, ithas both theoretic meaning and practical value to study how to learn from the Americantenure system and combine it with our county’s employment system of university teachers inorder to further the reform of the teachers’ employment system and promote the faster andbetter development of the higher education.This study can be divided into four parts. The first part, starting from the tenure system,illustrates from three perspectives which are the protection for academic freedom, selectionand employment of excellent people and cultivation of organization culture to analyze thereason why the tenure system has made such great contributions to the higher education inAmerica in a short hundred years. The reasons are the values of the tenure system. The secondpart is about our country’s employment system of the university teachers.At first I summarizethe process of the reform of the teachers’ employment system in our country. Then I point outthe problems of our present teachers’ employment system from three aspects which are postmanagement, the evaluation system and the incentive mechanism. The third part is the keypart of the study. According to the last two parts, and in view of the disadvantages of theteachers’ employment system, I put forward the idea that bring in the American tenure systemcritically, combining it with our teachers’ employment system and set the basic structure ofour teachers’ employment system. In this part, firstly, I list some universities’ reform in this respect. Secondly, I come up with some constructive suggestions to further the teachers’employment system of our country.