Recent Personnel Reforms of Public Universities in China and in Italy: a Comparison
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http://ijhe.sciedupress.com International Journal of Higher Education Vol. 7, No. 1; 2018 Recent Personnel Reforms of Public Universities in China and in Italy: A Comparison Sha Ha1 1 School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, China Correspondence: Dr. Sha Ha, Assistant Professor at Guangzhou University, Address: Kelai Apartment E 21A, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, China Received: December 24, 2017 Accepted: January 11, 2018 Online Published: January 26, 2018 doi:10.5430/ijhe.v7n1p87 URL: https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v7n1p87 Abstract Purpose of the present research is an investigation of the most recent personnel reforms of higher education institutions in China and in Italy. A one-to-one comparison between the two realities would have been unrealistic, given the enormous differences between the two Countries in size and historical development. We focused our analysis on some basic issues common to both higher education institutions, such as the degree of the academic autonomy from the political power in the academic governance and the quality of the knowledge production and transfer to the society. The Sun Yat-Sen and the Guangzhou Universities in the Guangdong Province of China, and the Universities of Padua and Ca’ Foscari in the Venetian Region of Italy, have been chosen as case studies. In China the personnel reforms introduced by the central government in the period 1995-2014, were accompanied by a relevant financial support by the central and regional authorities, which helped the national universities to attain high standards of excellence in the technological domain. Those remarkable financial investments by the central and regional authorities are paying off, contributing to the technological advancement of the Country. As for the Italian public universities, a very innovative reform law was introduced by the ‘Ministry of Education, University and Research’ in December 2010, which granted a high level of governance autonomy to those institutions. Unfortunately, the great financial crisis that hit the Country in the same period of time caused a strong reduction of the public funds to universities and a consequent brain drain of young post graduates toward Northern Europe and North America. In spite of this temporary shortage of funds, Italian public universities have maintained their high level of excellence in science, technology and humanities, as evidenced by the increasing number of their bilateral cooperation agreements, concerning student mobility and joint research activities with foreign universities all over the world, China included. Keywords: Personnel Reforms, Academic Autonomy, New Public Management Paradigm, Human Resources Management 1. Introduction Italy and China, despite their considerable differences in size and history, have been for centuries the two main centers of irradiation of culture in the Eurasian continent. The city state of Rome, originated in central Italy in the 8th century B.C., became at the beginning of the new millennium the center of an empire spanning from Western Europe to the Balkans, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Anatolian peninsula. With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, in the 5th century A.D., due to nomadic invasions from Northern and Eastern Europe, the spiritual heir of the Roman Emperor became the Bishop of Rome, Head of the Catholic Christian Church, whose monasteries and cathedrals became centers of knowledge. At the turn of the first millennium A.D. from those early schools originated the first modern universities of the western world, either through spontaneous initiatives of communities of ‘clerici et magistri’ (students and teachers), as in the case of the University of Bologna (established in 1088 A.D.) and the University of Padova (established in 1222 A.D.) or by will of monarchs, as the University of Paris (established in 1170 A.D.), the University of Cambridge (established in 1209 A.D.), the University of Naples (established in 1224 A.D.) and many others in the following centuries (Cantor,1993). As for China, over two thousand years ago the system of ‘Imperial Examinations’ was introduced under the Han Dynasty, with the purpose of selecting public managers, thus signing the transition from an aristocratic to a meritocratic ruling system (Fairbank, 1992). For almost Published by Sciedu Press 87 ISSN 1927-6044 E-ISSN 1927-6052 http://ijhe.sciedupress.com International Journal of Higher Education Vol. 7, No. 1; 2018 two millennia the two higher education systems followed divergent development routes. The modern Chinese university system was born toward the end of the Qing Dynasty, in 1898, in the wake of the Hundred Days Reform by the young Guangxu Emperor, and it continued its development under the republican power, but it was interrupted with the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, in October 1949, the development of the higher education system became one of the first priorities of the new government, but the forced industrialization, following Soviet Russian models, and the subsequent ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the Seventies, strongly conditioned that development. The ‘New Course’ of Chinese politics, introduced in China with the 14th Congress of the CPC, in 1992, which officially announced the establishment of a market economy ‘with Chinese characteristics’, stimulated a radical reform of the higher education system. As for Western Europe, the period between the signing of the ‘Treaties of Rome’ in April 1957, which created the ‘European Coal and Steel Community’ (CECA), and the establishment of the European Union (EU) in November 1993, saw the development of an intense reform of the Western European higher education system, with the purpose of creating a common European educational platform, from which descended in 1987 the ‘Erasmus Project’ concerning the students mobility all over the Union and, in 2006, the “Erasmus Mundus Actions’, concerning the students mobility all over the world. A one-to-one comparison between the Higher Education systems of China and Italy would have been unrealistic, given the enormous differences in size, historical development and social structure between the two Countries. The present research is focusing instead on some basic issues common to both realities, such as the academic autonomy from the political power and the implementation of a knowledge transfer from university to the society (the so called ‘third mission’): the personnel reforms played a vital role in the renewal of the university system in both Countries. A related question required an answer:”Did the recent Chinese and Italian personnel reforms of public universities succeed in creating the premises for a competitive knowledge production?” The study of the reforms of the personnel of public universities must take into account the social and economic development that characterizes the context (Whetten, 2009). According to the terminology introduced by A. S. Tsui (2006, 2007), two distinct methodological approaches have been adopted: the ‘inside-out approach’ (which considers the Chinese university reforms as specific to the Chinese present-day society) and the ‘outside-in approach’ (which interprets those reforms according to models developed in the Western World). In China, after the 14th Congress of the CPC, held in Beijing in October 12-18, 1992, the Central Government started a radical reform process of its Higher Education System, which is not yet concluded (Wu, 2015). As for the Western context, the last quarter of the past millennium and the first decade of this one were characterized by the general acceptance, at a governmental level, of the so called ‘New Public Management Paradigm (NPM)’ (Barzelay,1999; Jones, Guthrie & Steam, 2001), consisting in the adoption by public institutions (universities included), of organizational and operational models similar to those utilized by private enterprises. From NPM also derived the attribution to public universities of the ‘third mission’, consisting of knowledge transfer from universities to the society (through patents, spin offs etc.), in addition to their ‘first mission’ of teaching and their ‘second mission’ of performing scientific research. 1.1 Literature Review The materials utilized in this research can be divided into: - documents from the Chinese Communist Party, the Government of the P.R. China, the Government of Guangdong Province, the Central Administration of the Sun Yat-Sen University and the Central Administration of the Guangzhou University, available in the web as PDF files (in Chinese) (see Sections 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3); - documents from the Italian ‘Ministry of Education, University and Research’ (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, MIUR), published in the ‘Gazzetta Ufficiale’, available in the web as PDF files (in Italian) (see Sections 3, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3) and reports from the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the ‘Federazione Lavoratori della Conoscenza – CGIL’ (see Section 3.1 and Section 4); - research papers from Chinese journals (available in the web as PDF files in Chinese or in English) (see Section 2); - research papers on Chinese and Western University Reforms, published in International journals and reports from the European Union or other international Institutions (in English) (see Section 2 and Section 3); - scholarly books (in English) on the History of Chinese Imperial Examinations (Fairbank, 1992) and on the History of Medieval Europe (Cantor, 1993) (see