Governance Structure Of University Funds Based On System Management Theory

This article aims to investigate into popular governance problems faced by most Chinese universities, by analyzing the governance structure of Tianjin University as a sample, with the experiences learned from other foreign and native universities as necessary object of reference. As China's first university, Tianjin University, although pioneering in many aspects, especially in its constitution drafting and governance, faces as many problems as other universities on how to adapt to modern environment. Sorting out what Tianjin University should be dealing with helps to set model for other institutions. This study tries to employ the System Management Theory to construct a synthetic understanding of the factors that affect governance of universities, and what this essay believes is that to take a breakthrough to reform higher education institutes, we should reflect with a view of the systemic philosophy and pay attention to their inter-connected and mutually-influenced individual subsystems. Along with which and, in hope of being useful, several suggestions are provided.As producer of knowledge, modern universities around the world are all inevitably involved in international competition and face with world-wide challenges. They have to adjust and adapt themselves to meet the demands from the state and society, but in most regions the attempt to reform universities only results in passive reaction to the social change, complicating itself by simply expanding the number of institutions rather than improving functional sufficiency of the whole mechanism. Take Chinese universities for example, all of them have the problems of excessive political intervention, isolation from the outside world, as well as lagging behind social needs. Thus, their inner governance cannot escape from being too political-oriented and insufficient. Thirty years of recreation and reform of Chinese universities achieved little dued to intention of the government to align universities with other public administrations which execute orders unconditionally, disregarding their special quality as ought to be independent academic institutes. To clear such misconception the systemic philosophy should be introduced to understand what a proper university administration should be. The System Management Theory, derived from such trend of philosophy, sees the society as a whole system with numerous inter-connected subsystems playing their parts, each with unique function and each connection between them is unique. This might help policy makers single out the higher education institutes as distinct from other social organization, with fostering academic advancement as its prior principle pivoting running of whole university administration, and that would be the key to the thriving of future Chinese universities.