Abstract:
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of
institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared
governance. It is true that as compared with their counterparts in mainland
China, professors in Macau enjoy more academic freedom in terms of what
research to do and how they teach their classes. But they face increasing
restrictions in research and teaching, and lack power in academic programing
and the selection of their colleagues and academic managers. Using general
statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university,
this chapter illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the
structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The
findings have an important implication for the development of higher education
in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and
commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge to
academic freedom in one place in China but it is a challenge that higher
education faces elsewhere, too.
Situated at the west of the Pearl River estuary opposite Hong Kong,
Macau has a population of over 650,000. Colonized by Portugal in 1553, Macau
was returned to China in 1999 and since then has been under the “One country, Two
systems” arrangement with mainland China, operating on a capitalist system
rather than the current socialism-based one of mainland China. Macau has
inherited from the Portuguese a political system that is semi-democratic and
predominantly authoritarian, which meshes well with Chinese authoritarianism.
Such a political system will inevitably have an impact on its colleges and
universities and consequently on a faculty’s professional identity and their
academic freedom.[1]
With a relatively short history of higher
education, faculty professionalization has never developed in Macau as it has
in the West. Macau’s first higher
educational institution (HEI), the College of St. Paul, established by missionaries
in 1594, was closed in 1762 and attempts to build colleges did not succeed
until 1981 when Macau’s major university, the University of East Asia, was
built. At present there are 10 post-secondary schools of different orientations
and sizes, most of them focused on vocational training.
What is the Macau faculty’s professional
identity, what is their academic freedom like, and how
do they experience decision-making and thus control? What are the political, cultural and
individual obstacles to the
development of academic professionalism and freedom? In the following pages, I will 1) briefly
introduce the key features of higher education in Macau, especially as related
to issues of faculty professionalization; 2) define the professional identity
of faculty; 3) introduce the method of my qualitative research, i.e., a case
study of faculty at a university in Macau; 4) report the findings, illustrating
how faculty experience decision-making, and discuss the structural, cultural,
and individual factors influencing the formation of faculty’s professional
identity; 5) conclude, emphasizing the
role of individual faculty members in enhancing their professional identity and
academic freedom.
In-depth studies on higher education in Macau
are rare, and rarer is the study of faculty’s professional identity and
academic freedom. This study fills a gap in this intellectual pursuit and has some
important implications for both policymakers and practitioners in Macau and
elsewhere regarding the status of the academic profession.
Some Key Features of Higher
Education in Macau
The short history of higher education in Macau has not allowed
much time for faculty professionalization. The College of St. Paul (sometimes
called the St. Paul University College), financed by the Portuguese king and
the city senate and supplemented by donations from other Catholics and lay
people, has left little legacy. The college was small, with fewer than 100
students and 10 teachers and taught languages, including Latin, Japanese and
Chinese, theology, philosophy, ethics, and arts. Later physics, astronomy and
medicine were added (Li 2001:79-87, 109, 137-39). The college was closed in 1762 as a result of
the Rites Controversy when Jesuits were arrested and transported to Portugal.
For over
two hundred years the Portuguese Macau government did not establish another HEI.
In 1900-1904, Gezhi College moved to Macau but did not last long. Chinese
scholars then established Huaqiao (overseas) University (1950), Huanan (south
China) University (1950), Yuehai Wen Shang (humanities and business) College
(1949), and Zhongshan College of Education (Zhongshan Jiaoyu Xueyuan) (1950), but
they soon closed for lack of both social and political support. Students had to
go elsewhere for their college education (Lau 2002; Ma 2010). In 1981, some
Hong Kong businessmen were able to convince the Macau government to allow them
to establish the University of East Asia (UEA), mainly a market-oriented and
commercialized business school (Ma 2010:33).
Things
changed in 1988 when the government purchased UEA and changed its name to the
University of Macau (UM). Humanities, science, technology and the social
sciences were gradually introduced. Meanwhile, other colleges and universities
were established. Table 1 is a summary of the colleges and universities currently
in Macau, including the date of their establishment and the number of students
and faculty as of 2012/2013.
Table 1: HEIs in Macau as of 2012/2013
|
Year established
|
Number of students as of 2013 (full- time unless
specified)
|
Number of faculty members as of 2013 (both part time and
full time)
|
Ownership of the school
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
1981 (UEA)
1991 (UM)
|
8,481
|
598
|
Public
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
1991
|
2,961
|
351
|
Public
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
1995
|
1,573
|
109
|
Public
|
Macau Security Force Superior School (MSFSS)
|
1988
|
73
|
42
|
Public
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
1992 (AIOU)*
2011 (CityU)
|
1,296 + 482 (part-time)=1,778
|
109
|
Private
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
1996 (IIUM)**
2009 (USJ)
|
1,684
|
145
|
Private
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau (KWNCM)
|
1999
|
246+59 (part-time)=305
|
32
|
Private
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
2000
|
10,365
|
466
|
Private
|
Macau Institute of Management (MIM)
|
1984
|
362 (part-time)
|
38
|
Private
|
Macau Millennium College (MMC) ***
|
2001
|
194
|
26
|
Private
|
Sources of data: Mark Bray et al., with Roy Butler, Philip Hui,
Ora Kwo & Emily Mang (2002), Higher
Education in Macau, pp. 19-26; Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau
government (2013), Tertiary Education
Services Office Annual Book 2012.
*AIOU: The Asia
International Open University (Macau), the previous name of CityU.
**IIUM: The
Inter-University Institute of Macau, a joint initiative by the Catholic
University of Portugal and the Diocese of Macau now called USJ.
***The Macau
Millennium College’s Chinese name is Zhong Xi Chuangxin Xueyuan (Sino-Western
Innovation College), under the auspices of SJM (Sociedade de Jogos de Macau,
S.A.), a corporation whose main business is gambling.
From the
names of the HEIs in Macau in Table 1, one can see that most of them, MPI, IFT,
KWNCM, MSFSS, MIM, and MMC, are focused on vocational training. That raises the
question of the mission of higher education, but most importantly the identity
and calling of the faculty. If vocational training is the main goal of higher
education, one might not expect much academic training of the faculty. Thus we
see in Table 2 that a large percentage of faculty in Macau’s HEIs work on a part-time basis and do not have
a PhD.
Table
2: The Number of Full-time and Part-time Faculty and Those without a PhD degree
2012/2013
|
Full-time
|
Part-time
|
% of Part-time faculty
|
% of faculty members without a PhD
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
524
|
74
|
12%
|
30%
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
232
|
119
|
34%
|
60%
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
73
|
36
|
33%
|
71%
|
Macau Security Force Superior School
|
2
|
40
|
95%
|
70%
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
48
|
61
|
56%
|
41%
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
68
|
77
|
53%
|
69%
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau
|
21
|
11
|
34%
|
66%
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
275
|
191
|
41%
|
52%
|
Macau Institute of Management
|
5
|
33
|
87%
|
85%
|
Macau Millennium College
|
5
|
21
|
81%
|
35%
|
Total
|
|
|
35%
|
49%
|
Source of data: Tertiary Education Services Office of
Macau government (2013), Tertiary
Education Services Office Annual Book 2012, pp. 119
More than a third of college and university
faculty in Macau have little job security as part-timers and about half, as
indicated by the lack of a PhD, are not fully professionalized. They therefore do
not enjoy the kind of professional autonomy and academic freedom faculty are
assumed under Western traditions to enjoy. Moreover, there is no tenure system
in Macau, so one can argue that even full-time faculty have no job security and
consequently do not enjoy much academic freedom. Dismissals rarely happen, but
in 2014 two full-time professors were sacked partly because of their political
views (Hao 2015). If full-time faculty with PhDs can be dismissed for political
reasons, part-time faculty are especially vulnerable.
But
what is academic freedom and how is it linked to academic professional
identity?
Academic Freedom and Professionalism: An Academic Identity
In China, professionalism
did not come into being until after the self-strengthening movement in the
1860s when technical intellectuals began to grow. Peking University, a modern
HEI, was established only in 1898. Faculty governance (or shared governance)
and academic freedom, both
indicators of academic professionalism
and identity, were introduced at Peking University in the early twentieth century
by Cai Yuanpei, the university president (1912-1927). A faculty senate (教授会) and faculty governance committee (行政会) were established. The faculty
senate’s job was to design academic policies and assess academic qualities, and
the faculty governance committee would serve like a board of trustees, assessing and making policies both
academic and beyond (Du 2017). However, since then the faculty governance
role has been markedly diminished under the authoritarianism of the Nationalist
Party, Mao Zedong’s dictatorship, and authoritarianism since the Deng Xiaoping
era. Presently, authoritarianism is the order of the day in both mainland China
and Macau, severely limiting a tradition of professionalism and academic
freedom, the major guarantee of quality in higher education.
What is
professionalism anyway? In this paper I assume professionalism as a universal
value and will use the development of professionalism in the U.S. as a
comparison point. The sociology of professions has long considered the meaning
of professionalism and professionalization (Abbott 1988; Aronowitz and DiFazio
1994; Brint 1994; Clark 2008; Collins 1990; Freidson 1970, 1973; Hao 2003; Larson 1977). The professionalism
of college teaching, i.e., the creation and transmission of knowledge (see also
the discussion of Kant and Durkheim in Chapter 2), may be what Clark (2008:319)
regards as the logic or identity of the profession. It is the social function
discharged by the professional scholar, according to the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) (Gerber 2014:52), and a calling, as Clark (2008:325-26) observes, that
“transmutes narrow self-interest into other-regarding and ideal-regarding
interests: one is linked to fellow workers and to a version of a larger common
good. It has moral content, contributing to civic virtue.” Here the professor
finds “the fascinations of research and the enchantments of teaching,” or “the
demon who holds the very fibers” of his or her very life, and “the rewards of
personal fulfillment and a sense of societal service.”
To
fulfill this academic calling, i.e., the creation of scientific knowledge and
education as “the cornerstone of the structure of society,” whose progress is
“essential to civilization,” “the professorial office should be one both of
dignity and of independence” (AAUP 2001, 294; see also Weber 1973). This means
that faculty needs to have academic freedom and the means to exercise that
freedom. In 1915, when the AAUP was established, its first job was to define
academic freedom. Its 1940 statement on academic freedom is a classic: 1) the
freedom to do research and publish the results; 2) the freedom to discuss
subject matter in the classroom; and 3) the freedom to write and speak as citizens
without institutional censorship or unwanted sanction (AAUP 2001; Gerber 2014;
Ruch 2001; Teichler et al. 2013).
As is
also discussed in Chapter 2, in a 1957 statement, American Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter defined the “four essential freedoms” of a university
as: the freedom to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught, how
it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study (cited in Thelin 2004).
More importantly, these matters are reserved for the direct control of the faculty,
not for either the president or the trustees (Birnbaum and Eckel 2005).
To
guarantee academic freedom in the terms outlined above, shared governance has
developed, where faculty play an important role in core academic areas like
recruitment of new faculty, tenure and promotion, and academic programing. Faculty
should enjoy “a large degree of autonomy from lay control and normal
organizational control” (Clark 2008:123) in relation to the trustees of the
governing board and the administrators of colleges and universities (see also
Pennock et al. 2015). “The governing board and president should, on questions
of faculty status [the recruitment of new faculty, promotion, and dismissal],
as in other matters where the faculty has primary responsibility [educational
policies], concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for
compelling reasons which should be stated in detail” (AAUP 2001:221). Although
the selection of academic deans and other chief academic officers is the
responsibility of the president, it should be done “with the advice of, and in
consultation with, the appropriate faculty” (AAUP 2001:219).
The
process of achieving shared governance is the process of professionalization,
i.e., establishing mechanisms that will
foster the identity and calling of the profession and guarantee its autonomy
“in selecting the economic terms of work, the location and social organization
of work, and the technical content of the work” (Freidson 1970:44). This
negotiation of professional autonomy or academic freedom is usually done
between professional associations and other stakeholders in higher education.
AAUP, for example, “has been engaged in developing standards for sound academic
practice and in working for the acceptance of these standards by the community
of higher education” and by the society in general, including the state (AAUP
2001, ix).
Academic
professionalization is thus a process of constantly defining the boundaries of
academic freedom and defending faculty autonomy. In the U.S. for example, one
survey found that between 1970 and 2001 those who reported either faculty
determination or joint control with administrators in the recruitment of new
faculty members rose from 31 to 73 percent, and those who reported substantial
faculty control over tenure and promotion decisions rose from 36 to 71 percent (for
the statistics in this and the following paragraph, see Gerber 2014:159-160).
Those who reported substantial faculty control over the curriculum and degree
requirements rose from 80 percent to 90 percent.
Faculty
determination or joint authority in the selection of department chairs rose
from 22 percent in 1970 to 54 percent in 2001. Only four percent said that
faculty had no role at all. However, the faculty influence in the selection of
deans and vice presidents and presidents was small: 32 percent in 2001,
although still an increase from 14 percent in 1970, with only five percent
saying that faculty played no role at all. Moreover, more than 90 percent of
the institutions surveyed had some kind of senate, chaired mostly by an elected
faculty member. This could mean “fully collaborative decision making” or
“simple consultation” or “information sharing” (Gerber 2014:160).
Granted
that faculty power in the U.S. has been eroded to some extent in the last
decade (see Chapter 2), university teaching in the U.S. is still a very strong
profession, and it is fair to assume that in general professors in the U.S.
enjoy more academic freedom than in most other parts of the world. Thus, to use
faculty governance as developed in the U.S. as an indicator of professional
identity development in Macau would help us see more clearly the status of the
academic profession and identity of the professor. That is what I will do
below.
A Note on Our Research Methods
The university studied,
hereafter called the University, has both undergraduate and graduate programs,
and a fairly large faculty. Most of the faculty members are recruited
internationally. A majority have a Chinese cultural background, but they tend
to be returned students from the West, who were professionalized in the West
before they came to Macau. The University can be characterized as a “striving”
institution (Gonzales et al. 2014): it places great emphasis on improving its
position in international university rankings, has made great investment in
recruiting productive researchers and has distributed a huge amount of money
for research. Research support and most faculty benefits are in general superior
to many in the U.K. or the U.S.
The
research team interviewed faculty members, administrators, and students,
altogether 44 from the University: nine assistant professors, eight associate
professors, 10 full professors, six administrators, and 11 students, both
undergraduate and graduate. Most interviews lasted from one to one and a half
hours, but several lasted for two hours, and a couple of interviews were
through emails. We also interviewed three professors from three other
institutions of higher education to give us a sense of conditions elsewhere in
the region. The interviews were done in professors’ offices or cafes between
2013 and 2014.
I have not set out to look for deviant cases
to refine or reconstruct the theory of university governance, neither in analyzing
the case University nor in reporting individual faculty members’ points of view
(see Small 2009 about such methodological issues). The ultimate purpose of the paper
is to examine the mechanisms and processes of professionalization or the lack
thereof in a striving university. This method is in line with Clyde Mitchell’s
and Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, which seeks to uncover social
mechanisms, trace processes, and to understand the larger forces shaping those
mechanisms and processes, whether in unique or in deviant cases (see Small
2009).
The
research methods used here are also in line with Robert Yin’s (1989) principle
of sequential interviewing in that each case in our study (i.e., each
interviewee) “provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the question
at hand” (Small 2009, 24-25). I have used a similar set of questions with
different stakeholders, but they have all focused on the role of faculty in
research, teaching and service, from the perspective of various professors as
well as students. Interviews were conducted more like discussions,
explorations, and explanations than questions and answers. The objective is
saturation, i.e., team members are fairly confident that the cases we have
studied have provided us with most if not all the necessary information
regarding the status of professionalism in the region.
Findings and Discussion
The Role of Faculty
in Personnel Matters
As discussed above, professionalization
in the form of shared governance means that the faculty play a crucial role in the
recruitment of new faculty members and in promotion. Normally, the dean and the
president are not involved directly in the processes and will go along with committee
decisions. For the dean or the president to disapprove of a candidate without
compelling reasons would be a serious violation of shared governance and an
encroachment on professional autonomy and academic freedom. However, in our
case University, while faculty members may be involved in the selection of job
candidates, the rectors (presidents) can, and sometimes do, reject job
candidates approved by the faculty level committees usually headed either by a
dean or a vice president. (Since all the academic deans, vice presidents and
the president were men at the time of research, I will use “he” to refer to any
one of them.) This has caused discomfort among faculty, as one professor
comments (Interview Notes, Full5):
The rector
is too micro-managing. When we hire a faculty member, even if this is only an
assistant professor, he would use his veto power. But are you qualified to make
such decisions? What are your fields of study? You cannot possibly know every
field, right?
Usually the reasons given
are either that the candidate does not come from a prestigious university or he
or she does not have enough publications. Whatever the reason, the faculty role
is diminished.
Deans also have much more power than in the U.S.
and Europe in general. They decide the composition of the recruitment and
promotion committees; the identities of the members and how they are selected are
not public. At the meetings, the administrator directs where the discussion
goes (Interview Notes, Full10). Faculty’s, especially junior faculty’s, voices
are seldom heard, if ever (Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc1). The dean, in
consultation with the rector, decides which department can have new hires and
what kind. Sometimes the rector or vice rector makes that decision directly
with the department chair with little consultation with the dean. The dean
decides whether one’s promotion application can even be processed, his power
expanding especially when the criteria are not clear (Interview Notes, Assoc2).
Professors thus do not have real autonomy in choosing their own colleagues as
academic professionalization and freedom would require. Rather the dean is
often the person who decides the composition of the department, and sometimes
it is the rector who makes that decision.
Rather
than faculty determination or joint authority in the selection of department
chairs (see also Interview Notes, Admin2, Assoc5), in our case University these
are appointed by the dean and the rector with no consultation with the faculty.
Because of the lack of faculty participation in selecting department chairs,
people feel less of an attachment to the department, and the department chairs
feel they have more responsibility to the management than to the faculty and
students. The same problem applies to the higher management positions. The
appointment of deans, vice rectors and the rector may go through an open
international search. Faculty members may be invited to presentations and give
their opinions, but it is not clear how much their comments count (Interview
Notes, Assoc4, Assoc5, Full2). Many believe that participation is only a formality
(Interview Notes, Assoc2, Full5).
With
the mainlandization of Macau, it is not even clear whether the selections of
higher-level managers will go through an international search and involve
faculty participation, let alone lower level managers. In its most recent
selection of the rector position, for example, no faculty member was invited to
be part of the selection committee. It was not clear if even more than one
candidate was invited to a campus interview. Even though the committee held
meetings to ask for faculty opinion, it was not at all clear whether any
faculty opinions mattered. As a result of such selection methods, the managers
are obligated to serve the will of the higher authorities rather than the need
of faculty and students. We will discuss further the problem of mainlandization
later in the chapter.
The Role of Faculty
in Research and Teaching Policies
Professors at the
University are required to publish in SCI, SSCI, and A&HCI journals so that
they can increase the University’s citation indexes in its pursuit of world
rankings. These requirements are not usually negotiated with the faculty and
furthermore are driven very much by a science-based model (Interview Notes,
Full1) not fully applicable to humanities and social sciences. As one professor
says (Interview Notes, Full1),
I don’t write many journal
articles. I write books, I write chapters of books, occasionally, unlike
journal articles. And for me it’s not very interesting to write journal
articles. It has limited impact. But if a book is well received, it can have
considerable impact. But in the science field books are of second grade.
He
complains that his books and book chapters are not worth as much as a journal
article. Others point out that although books are representations of one’s
system of knowledge (Interview Notes, Assoc2, Assis2, Assoc2), they are not
valued, since they do not count in international rankings.
The University not only emphasizes
journal articles but requires that they be in English and published by
international publishers, especially for junior and middle-level faculty
members. Most international journals are not very interested in publishing
research on Macau. But that’s not the university’s concern. The editor of one
of the top journals in China studies once told me that he is not interested in
publishing Macau studies since it will not help his citation indexes. One
professor tells us that even scholarly research on Chinese literature must be
written in English in order to be recognized as important. This is like
requiring an American university paper on Shakespeare to be written in Chinese
to be considered valuable research. Local studies must be published
internationally, too, or they are not given much credit (Interview Notes,
Assoc6). Works published locally in Chinese are not counted by international
rating regimes and are therefore rarely valued by the administrators (see also
Interview Notes, Full2) who make their decisions top-down. Faculty protests are usually futile. In a
word, faculty may be free to do whatever research they want to do, but they
feel less free to publish their findings in whatever venues they choose.
The
pursuit of rankings has not only forced the faculty to change the way they do
their work but has also resulted in a change of values and professional
identity. In order to increase the production of indexed journal articles,
faculty members are assigned to research, balanced, or teaching tracks. Each
track carries an indexed journal paper production quota. Faculty unable to fulfill the quota are bumped
down to a lower track to teach more courses, which is often viewed as a
punishment, thus eroding the core values of education, rendering teaching more
or less meaningless and depriving teachers of their sense of calling and
professional identity. As a result, traditional teachers “feel very very
depressed, demoralized.” “The university ranking might have risen, but the idea
of the university is lost. Humanism is lost. People’s respect for you is lost”
(Interview Notes, Full3). Furthermore, dividing professors against their own desires
into three classes—researchers, researchers/teachers, and teachers—makes it
harder to build an academic community. It goes against “von Humboldt’s concept of the university, where teaching and
research are integrally linked—the Humboldtian model has been the guiding
principle of the American research university since the beginning” (Altbach and
Finkelstein 2014).
Finally, program changes and creations are basically
decided by administrators, rather than being bottom-up proposals based on what
faculty believe to be educational needs (Interview Notes, Full10). An academic
program is initiated or approved because the managers believe it is useful to
their own purposes, such as university rankings or government needs, rather
than what faculty believe to be educational or social needs.
As Chapters 2, 4 and 5 point out,
ideological control in China is thereby very much strengthened. That has a
ripple effect in Macau. For example, the faculty have to get approval from the
management when they invite guest speakers from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Professors who lean towards Taiwan independence or Hong Kong autonomy are often
denied entry into Macau at the customs. Faculty members on research trips to
Taiwan are required to report to the university authorities whom they have met
and what they have done. In both research and teaching policies, the faculty
are deprived of participation in much of the decision-making processes, and
their professional status and academic freedom are very much strained.
Faculty Involvement in
University Governance Organizations
The senate (at the
university level) and the academic council (AC, at the faculty/college level)
at our case University are only advisory bodies, according to the University’s
organizational charter published in 2013. The issues involving ACs are strictly
about curricular changes (abolition and creation of programs, program revision)
and student education (qualifications of graduate and postgraduate students). Again
decisions are made top-down, and only rubber-stamp approvals are sought at the
AC meeting. Even if an initiative is raised bottom-up, the dean can refuse to
take it to the AC meeting, since he is the chair of the AC and decides what
will be on the agenda. “Resolutions” passed at the AC may go nowhere unless
they involve minor decisions about things like course descriptions. As one
administrator comments (Interview Notes, Admin5 ),
Things
started at the top and often it is just a gesture of giving the endorsement by
the people, by the staff below without them having any real input in the
decision. By the time to discuss them, it is already decided, you know, so the
input of the staff doesn’t mean a lot… This generates a lot of bad morale from
people, because they feel like nobody really listens to them.
As a result, except in
rare cases when the dean is more democratic, people seldom speak out at their
AC meetings because they think that whatever they say is not going to be heeded
anyway. One professor calls it “learned helplessness.” The AC, faculty members
say, is just like the National People’s
Congress on the mainland at which people’s job is to raise their hands to
endorse the Party decisions (Interview Notes, Full5; Interview Notes full6 for
the same point).
There
is a faculty association, but its role is limited to organizing year-end
parties. It has made proposals to the University management regarding faculty
welfare, but they have gone nowhere. It has not been able to influence
personnel and educational policies at the University. The weakness of the
faculty association mirrors the weakness of the student associations (Interview
Notes, PhD1, UG3, UG4). There are faculty and university level student
associations. But even if they may participate in senate and AC meetings, they
seldom speak. This inactivity on the part of both faculty and student
organizations affects not only the professional identity of the professors but
the identity of the university as well.
The Creation of a
Docile Faculty and Study Body: The Opposite of a Professional Identity
The lack of shared
governance described above has resulted in the creation of a docile and
alienated faculty whose interests are constantly threatened as a result of their
loss of autonomy and academic freedom. As one professor points out (Interview
Notes, Full8),
Because there is no tenure
system, if you speak out, you may have your job in jeopardy, or various
interests affected, just like in China. Who dares to speak? Younger faculty
feel that they are too junior to speak out. Senior faculty want to protect the
benefits they have already obtained. But of course, not speaking out is against
everyone’s interest.
Several other faculty members also say that the lack of
tenure plays a key role in such docility (Interview Notes, Assoc3, Full6,
Full8). This lack of professional protection leads to much discontent,
mistreatment of faculty, low faculty morale, and alienation on the part of the
faculty. And there is almost no recourse. A professor comments
(Interview Notes, Full9):
It’s almost like they’re being hit by a big
truck or smashed on the ground because a dean or a department head does not
like that individual and then that individual is crushed and the individual
either seems to not know his rights or cannot find out what his rights are…
There is no staff faculty association worth its mettle that could at least
intervene on behalf of faculty and could say that we must have an appeals
process, that we must have it clearly written what the rights and what the
duties and what the obligations are of people, of faculty member, of staff, and
of deans and department heads and all that…
Those
who choose to speak out will do so at selected moments (Interview Notes,
Assoc2). But in general, the faculty are
docile, withdrawn, alienated, and demoralized despite being well-paid, with
good benefits and conference and research grants (Interview Notes, Full9,
Assoc2, Assoc3).
A
docile and obedient faculty leads to a docile student body, as we have also
mentioned above, and together they create a passive learning environment. There
are no faculty or student forums on politically controversial issues. In 2008,
the Macau government was going to legislate Article 23 of the Basic Law, a bill
on state subversion. This was controversial because people were concerned about
freedom of speech. Once the law was passed, what was allowed before might be
considered as illegal. So some faculty members decided to organize a forum to
discuss this matter, and they invited scholars from Hong Kong. Then just before
the forum, they cancelled the event because the University said that the space
that had been assigned to the forum was now unavailable. There has never been a
forum on the true nature of the “One country, Two systems” formula, or the Hong
Kong democracy movement. In the 2014 Hong Kong movement on universal suffrage,
there was almost no voice coming from Macau colleges and universities. Students
of communications at our case University did design a very professional flier
and it was posted in several places on campus, voicing their support of the
movement in Hong Kong. Some yellow ribbons were tied on the handrails of a bridge
on campus. But such activities never became a movement—people did not even know
who the leaders of these activities were. So their effect was very limited.
Two
professors comment that students at the University do not have the ability to
talk about politics (Interview Notes, Assis3). If protests are part of college
life and education in the US (Rivard 2014), that is not happening at our case University.
One student’s comment is apt here: the ethos of the university is harmony, not
vitality (Interview Notes, MA1). The
mission of the university is to train obedient workers rather than thinkers
(see Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc2, MA1, UG1). Increasingly the university generally
approves only professors who follow the Party line or who present on
non-political topics to come to speak on campus. The lower level managers
quickly follow the cue. In 2017 a professor was inviting a controversial
mainland scholar to speak on their academic forum. He asked the department
chair to write an invitation letter, but the latter refused. Even if a meeting
on a controversial topic such as the Cultural Revolution or national minority
issues was held, the organizers would make sure that it was as low-key as
possible. Academic freedom is eroded, the faculty is losing its identity and
calling, and students are losing opportunities to learn to be critical
thinkers.
Factors Affecting an Academic Professional Identity Formation
Given the issues of
vocationalization, part-time employment and corporatized governance discussed
above, what might be some of the political/structural, cultural, and individual
factors that make it difficult for the faculty to form a professional identity
and exercise academic freedom?
Chief among the political and structural factors is the
influence of mainland China. Under the “One country, Two systems” principle, Macau
is supposed to be a largely free society. Politically, however, it resembles China in
its authoritarianism, although there are some limited democratic practices in
the election of legislators and the Chief Executive (CE). In the so-called
“executive-led” system, the CE has the power to make all the important
decisions of the land. The legislature does not have the power to make laws but
can only improve and approve bills submitted by the government. The CE is
responsible to those who elect him, i.e., a 400 member committee, most of whom
are pro-government representatives of social organizations, and to the Central
government that appoints him. Increasingly the CE is required to answer to the
Central government rather than to the people of Macau. This corresponds to the
university system where the rectors are the decision makers and faculty have little
or no role to play regarding university policies. The rectors answer to the
Chief Executive, even to the Central government, and need not consult the
faculty to make decisions.
If the mainland Chinese system does not allow for much
academic freedom (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5), professors in Macau feel the
effect. For example, the Central government has an office in Macau, called the
Central Liaison Office (CLO), which coordinates the relationship between Macau
and the Central government. One interviewee
reports that when they invited the Consul of the American Consulate General in
Hong Kong and Macau to give a talk at the University, both the CLO and the
Macau government were upset and told them next time to report such invitations
beforehand (Interview Notes, Admin1). One faculty member reports that he heard that
a student was paid by the CLO to record his class. Another faculty member
reports that his relationship with Hong Kong and Macau democracy activists was
being investigated. A third faculty member reports that she and others were
told by the government to stay quiet on controversial issues in Macau.
A student organization used
to hold exhibitions in June of each year to commemorate the 1989 student
democracy movement in China, but they stopped the practice several years ago
when student organizers were called to meet officials from the CLO to talk
about it (Interview Notes, Full10). They were also asked about what professors
discussed in class. Some student organizers were from mainland China and had
family members who were civil servants there. They were afraid that their
activities in Macau would harm the opportunities of their family members back
home.
Apparently there is a
concerted effort in controlling what happens on campus. The mainland government
is increasingly concerned about the political inclinations and activities of
faculty and students in Macau for fear that Macau would become Hong Kong. As a
result self-censorship is now on the rise, and faculty and students are
becoming more docile.
Increasing political
control in Macau culminated in the dismissal of two professors from two
different universities in 2014, apparently for political reasons (Hao 2014). The
reason for no contract renewal regarding one of them was ostensibly violating
professional ethics to ask students to attend his political activities for
extra credit. But the actual reasons were his political activities: the
evidence the university presented included a letter of complaint about him
passing out election fliers outside a high school and a newspaper article
complaining that he should not comment on how the legislators should be
elected. There were also reports on their investigation of his class
assignments. It turned out that what he required was for students to attend two
or three out of 12 political gatherings in Macau and to write a report for
extra credit. And this was a political science class.
Another professor was fired
because he commented that the CE did not have charisma. The rector said openly
that the professor could not criticize the CE and comment on politics in Macau.
That he was invited to go to a meeting in Portugal about Macau politics was
also a reason for firing him. The lack of a tenure system only better serves
that control. If the University is treated as a government department
(Interview Notes, Admin1) as on the mainland, professional autonomy, identity and
academic freedom are likely to suffer. Professors are supposed to be free to
teach the way they think appropriate and to participate in political activities
off campus as long as such activities follow professional ethics.
Culturally, Macau is basically Chinese. If American culture
supports faculty governance, the Chinese hierarchical culture does not. To conform
to Confucianism, faculty obey the deans, deans obey the rector, the rector obeys
the University Council (UC, or the board of trustees) chair, the UC chair obeys
the CE of Macau, and the CE obeys the chief of China. They all have to say yes
to their superiors (Interview Notes, Admin2).
One
professor interviewed believes that this is in fact a mixture of Western
management style and Eastern culture (Interview Notes, Assis6; see also Full6,
Admin5). Indeed corporatization, part of academic capitalism (Gonzales et al. 2014;
Hao 2015; see also Chapter 2 and other chapters in the book), is on the rise in
American higher education and perhaps Macau university leaders have learned the
Western corporate management style. In one professor’s words, the management
and faculty have combined the problematic elements of two cultures when they
should be combining the best elements of both (Interview Notes, Full8).
That is
a very interesting observation. So why have both administrators and faculty
members chosen a system that largely goes against traditions of academic
freedom and professionalism? That brings us to the last issue of analysis:
individual factors.
One
interviewee observes that those Chinese who have been bathed in American
culture cannot wash their Chinese cultural traces away. Once they are back in China,
their Chinese culture comes alive again, and the American culture fades
(Interview Notes, Assoc6). Another interviewee comments that anyone [foreign
teachers] who jumps into Chinese culture will be tainted (Interview Notes,
Assis1).
Nevertheless,
despite structural and cultural influences it is individual managers who choose
top-down management style, and individual faculty members who choose whether
and how to speak out. As one interviewee further explains (Interview Notes,
Admin5):
I am an American, I am an
outsider, and I came here recognizing this is not America… That there are
certain ways people censure themselves, given the realities the central
government probably discourages parades or whatever, it is never… no one ever
told me I don’t do something, or I did something wrong, but on the other hand,
I am not saying anything controversial. I just, maybe it is just stereotype or
generalization that I just presumed it wasn’t going to be the way when I was
coming in… So different cultural
tradition and different kind of political system, there is a different rule
whether it is official or not official. And I am not saying that is good
or I think it should be like that, there ought to be freedom of speech or of
doing things, but I know that, you know, it is not… I am a visitor, it is not my country…I figure there are some
tradeoffs, benefits and costs.
Indeed, if one is an
American or Australian or Brit one learns to adapt to an authoritarian culture.
This adaptation is easier for the faculty members who are trained abroad but have
a Chinese background. Very few can escape from the political and cultural
constraints.
When
asked whether the faculty association should be more active in protecting
faculty interests like class scheduling or track assignments, some association
leaders’ response is that after seeing what happened in the Cultural
Revolution, etc., they hate politics and do not want to be troublemakers.
Others, however, want to be more involved and more active (Interview Notes,
Assis9). These are apparently individual choices. Most faculty members choose
not to speak out at AC meetings, as we discussed above. But there are some
people who do speak out, even though selectively. Some are afraid of joining
the faculty association for fear of being viewed as troublemakers, potential
enemies, the opposition (Interview Notes, Full9). But others do join. One dean
or president is more democratic than another. These are individual choices.
It is
true that structural/political and cultural factors greatly influence
individual behavior, but ultimately it is individuals who make the choice to
practice and obey top-down management style or to resist. And resistance need not be confrontational. But
given the general political atmosphere in China and Macau, academic freedom and
professionalism on the part of faculty are going to be an uphill battle if some
want to fight it.
Conclusions
To sum up, higher education in
Macau has a relatively short history and is very much characterized by academic
capitalism such as vocationalization, casualization of faculty, and political
and commercial corporatization that reflect the nature of the government system
in Macau and China. These are not conducive to the development of an academic
professional identity. Our case study of one university illustrates how weak or
no faculty shared governance erodes academic freedom and professional identity
formation in terms of who to teach, what to teach, and how to teach. Such weakness can be the result of structural
factors related to the hegemony of mainland China and to the executive-led
political system of Macau, as well as to cultural factors related to a
Confucian ethos. But both the political system and cultural constraints are
made by individuals. So they can also be results of individual choices. The
formation of a professional identity, or professionalization, and the extent to
which academic freedom can be exercised, are the aggregate outcome of
individual decisions made by both the management and faculty.
What is
the implication of this study, then? While it is difficult to change the
structural factors, faculty themselves may have some room to maneuver in their
own reactions and responses. Following Clark’s (2008, 131) remark:
When
the faculty member feels that this sensitive right [pursuit of one’s scholarly
interests] is infringed, he will run up the banners of academic freedom and
inquiry, or he will fret and become a festering sore in the body politic of the
campus, or he will retreat to apathy and his country house, or he will make it
known in other and greener pastures that he will listen to the siren call of a
good offer.
That is a range of
responses. In the face of political and cultural obstacles that hinder the
formation of a professional identity and practice of academic freedom, some
faculty members indeed choose to rediscover their purpose and assert themselves
(see also Irvine 2012, 391) under the banner of professionalism, a professional
identity, an academic calling, academic freedom, autonomy, and scientific
pursuits. They organize and strive to build an academic community and shared
governance. In Macau, though, such individuals are few and far between. Others
choose passive resistance, symbolic compliance, professional pragmatism,
various cunning maneuvers, and games-playing (Mok and Cheung 2011; Teelken
2012). Still others retreat to “learned helplessness,” “just collect your pay
and say nothing” (Interview Notes, Full6). A majority of the faculty members in
Macau adopt these last two attitudes and behavior. An increasing number of professors
at our case University have left the university or are actively looking for
another job.
Whatever
faculty members choose to do, it is a choice. It is true that faculty members
can easily succumb to powerful structural and cultural forces, but as Gerber
(2014, 168) points out, “faculty members themselves must bear some of the
responsibility for the retreat from higher education’s democratic purposes that
has already occurred in American colleges and universities.” The same is true of
the faculty in Macau who are involved in building a “contemporary” university.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The
system of professions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Altbach,
P. G. & Finkelstein, M. J. (2014). Essay on the way many reformers of
higher education are ignoring the faculty role. Inside
Higher Ed. October 7.
Aronowitz, S. & DiFazio, W. (1994). The jobless
future: Sci-Tech and the dogma of work. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bray M. with R. Butler, P. Hui, O. Kwo & E. Mang (2002), Higher Education in Macau: Growth and Strategic
Development. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre.
Birnbaum, R. & Eckel, P. D. (2005).
The dilemma of presidential leadership. In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdahl, & P.
J. Gumport (Eds.) American higher
education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges (pp. 340-365). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brint, S. (1994). In an age of experts: The changing role of
professionals in politics and public life. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Clark, B. R. (2008). On
higher education: Selected writings, 1956-2006. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Collins, R. (1990). Market closure and the
conflict theory of the professions. In M. Burrage and R. Torstendhl (Eds.) Professions in theory and history (pp. 25-43). Newbury
Park: Sage Publications.
Du, Shengyan. (2017), “Zhongguo gaodeng jiaoyu zhidu de
lishi, xianzhuang jiqi gaige luxian tu” (The history, status quo, and reform
challenges in China’s higher education). Pp. 515-51 in Zhidong Hao (ed.) Yaowang xingkong: Zhongguo zhengzhi tizhi
gaige de kunjing yu chulu (Stargazing: The dilemma of and prospects for
China’s political reform). New Taipei: Zhizhi xueshu chubanshe.
Freidson, E.
(1970). Profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Gerber, L. G. (2014). The
rise & decline of faculty governance: professionalization and the modern
American university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gonzales, L. D., Martinez, E. & Ordu, C. (2014). Exploring
faculty experiences in a striving university through the lens of academic
capitalism. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7)
1097-1115.
Hao, Z. (2003). Intellectuals
at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers.
Albany: SUNY Press.
----------. (2014). “Jiaoshou jiepin yu xueshu ziyou: Cong Aomen
liangwei jiaoshou bei jiepin
tanqi” (Professors’
dismissal and academic freedom: on the sacking of two professors in
Macau, Financial Times, Chinese website version,Nov. 25.
---------. (2017).
“What It Is Like and What Needs to Be Done: A Status Report on Higher
Education in Macau and Its Research.” Pp. 181-94 in Jisun Jung, Hugo Horta, and
Akiyoshi Yonezawa (eds.) Higher Education
Research as a Field of Study in Asia: History, Development and Future. New
York: Springer.
Irvine, C. (2012). Taking on “Best Practices”: A novel
response to managerialism in higher education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and
Culture, 12(3)389-404.
Larson, M. S. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A
sociological analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lau, S. P.
(2002). Aomen Jiaoyu Shi (A history
of education in Macau). Beijing: Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe (People’s education
press).
Li, X. (2001). 2001. Aomen Sheng
Baolu Xueyuan Yanjiu (A study on the College of St. Paul in Macau). Macau:
Aomen Ribao Chubanshe (Macao Daily press).
Ma, Z. (2010). “Wenhua Shiye xia de Aomen Gaodeng Jiaoyu”
(The transformation of Macau’s higher education in a cultural perspective). Gaojiao Tansuo (Higher Education Exploration), No. 2, 2010.
Mok, K. H. and Cheung, A. B. L.
(2011). Global aspirations and strategizing for world-class status: New form of
politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 33(3) 231-251.
Pennock, L. Jones, G. A., Leclerc J. M. Li, S.
X. (2015). Assessing the role and structure of academic senates in Canadian
universities, 2000–2012. Higher
Education, DOI 10.1007/s10734-014-9852-8.
Rivard, R. 2014. At William Peace, departing president is
criticized by many but loved by the board. Inside
Higher Ed, October 15.
Ruch, R. S. (2001). Higher ed., Inc.: The rise of the for-profit
university. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Small, M. L. (2009). “How many
cases do I need?” On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1)5-38.
Teelken, C. (2012). Compliance
or pragmatism: How do academics deal with managerialism in higher education? A
comparative study in three countries. Studies
in Higher Education, 37(3)271-290.
Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau government
(2013), Tertiary Education Services
Office Annual Book 2012. Macau: Tertiary Education Services Office.
Teichler, U., Arimoto, A. &
Cummings, W. K. (2013). The changing
academic profession: Major findings of a comparative survey. Dordrecht
Heidelberg: Springer.
Thelin, J. R. (2004). A history of American higher education. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Weber, M. (1973). On universities: The power of the state and
the dignity of the academic calling in imperial Germany, translated, edited
and with an Introductory Note by Edward Shils. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Yin, R. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods. London: Sage Publications.
[1] For an introduction to Macau and its brief history of higher education in the
following pages, see also Zhidong Hao (2017).
Abstract:
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of
institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared
governance. It is true that as compared with their counterparts in mainland
China, professors in Macau enjoy more academic freedom in terms of what
research to do and how they teach their classes. But they face increasing
restrictions in research and teaching, and lack power in academic programing
and the selection of their colleagues and academic managers. Using general
statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university,
this chapter illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the
structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The
findings have an important implication for the development of higher education
in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and
commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge to
academic freedom in one place in China but it is a challenge that higher
education faces elsewhere, too.
Situated at the west of the Pearl River estuary opposite Hong Kong,
Macau has a population of over 650,000. Colonized by Portugal in 1553, Macau
was returned to China in 1999 and since then has been under the “One country, Two
systems” arrangement with mainland China, operating on a capitalist system
rather than the current socialism-based one of mainland China. Macau has
inherited from the Portuguese a political system that is semi-democratic and
predominantly authoritarian, which meshes well with Chinese authoritarianism.
Such a political system will inevitably have an impact on its colleges and
universities and consequently on a faculty’s professional identity and their
academic freedom.[1]
With a relatively short history of higher
education, faculty professionalization has never developed in Macau as it has
in the West. Macau’s first higher
educational institution (HEI), the College of St. Paul, established by missionaries
in 1594, was closed in 1762 and attempts to build colleges did not succeed
until 1981 when Macau’s major university, the University of East Asia, was
built. At present there are 10 post-secondary schools of different orientations
and sizes, most of them focused on vocational training.
What is the Macau faculty’s professional
identity, what is their academic freedom like, and how
do they experience decision-making and thus control? What are the political, cultural and
individual obstacles to the
development of academic professionalism and freedom? In the following pages, I will 1) briefly
introduce the key features of higher education in Macau, especially as related
to issues of faculty professionalization; 2) define the professional identity
of faculty; 3) introduce the method of my qualitative research, i.e., a case
study of faculty at a university in Macau; 4) report the findings, illustrating
how faculty experience decision-making, and discuss the structural, cultural,
and individual factors influencing the formation of faculty’s professional
identity; 5) conclude, emphasizing the
role of individual faculty members in enhancing their professional identity and
academic freedom.
In-depth studies on higher education in Macau
are rare, and rarer is the study of faculty’s professional identity and
academic freedom. This study fills a gap in this intellectual pursuit and has some
important implications for both policymakers and practitioners in Macau and
elsewhere regarding the status of the academic profession.
Some Key Features of Higher
Education in Macau
The short history of higher education in Macau has not allowed
much time for faculty professionalization. The College of St. Paul (sometimes
called the St. Paul University College), financed by the Portuguese king and
the city senate and supplemented by donations from other Catholics and lay
people, has left little legacy. The college was small, with fewer than 100
students and 10 teachers and taught languages, including Latin, Japanese and
Chinese, theology, philosophy, ethics, and arts. Later physics, astronomy and
medicine were added (Li 2001:79-87, 109, 137-39). The college was closed in 1762 as a result of
the Rites Controversy when Jesuits were arrested and transported to Portugal.
For over
two hundred years the Portuguese Macau government did not establish another HEI.
In 1900-1904, Gezhi College moved to Macau but did not last long. Chinese
scholars then established Huaqiao (overseas) University (1950), Huanan (south
China) University (1950), Yuehai Wen Shang (humanities and business) College
(1949), and Zhongshan College of Education (Zhongshan Jiaoyu Xueyuan) (1950), but
they soon closed for lack of both social and political support. Students had to
go elsewhere for their college education (Lau 2002; Ma 2010). In 1981, some
Hong Kong businessmen were able to convince the Macau government to allow them
to establish the University of East Asia (UEA), mainly a market-oriented and
commercialized business school (Ma 2010:33).
Things
changed in 1988 when the government purchased UEA and changed its name to the
University of Macau (UM). Humanities, science, technology and the social
sciences were gradually introduced. Meanwhile, other colleges and universities
were established. Table 1 is a summary of the colleges and universities currently
in Macau, including the date of their establishment and the number of students
and faculty as of 2012/2013.
Table 1: HEIs in Macau as of 2012/2013
|
Year established
|
Number of students as of 2013 (full- time unless
specified)
|
Number of faculty members as of 2013 (both part time and
full time)
|
Ownership of the school
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
1981 (UEA)
1991 (UM)
|
8,481
|
598
|
Public
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
1991
|
2,961
|
351
|
Public
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
1995
|
1,573
|
109
|
Public
|
Macau Security Force Superior School (MSFSS)
|
1988
|
73
|
42
|
Public
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
1992 (AIOU)*
2011 (CityU)
|
1,296 + 482 (part-time)=1,778
|
109
|
Private
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
1996 (IIUM)**
2009 (USJ)
|
1,684
|
145
|
Private
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau (KWNCM)
|
1999
|
246+59 (part-time)=305
|
32
|
Private
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
2000
|
10,365
|
466
|
Private
|
Macau Institute of Management (MIM)
|
1984
|
362 (part-time)
|
38
|
Private
|
Macau Millennium College (MMC) ***
|
2001
|
194
|
26
|
Private
|
Sources of data: Mark Bray et al., with Roy Butler, Philip Hui,
Ora Kwo & Emily Mang (2002), Higher
Education in Macau, pp. 19-26; Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau
government (2013), Tertiary Education
Services Office Annual Book 2012.
*AIOU: The Asia
International Open University (Macau), the previous name of CityU.
**IIUM: The
Inter-University Institute of Macau, a joint initiative by the Catholic
University of Portugal and the Diocese of Macau now called USJ.
***The Macau
Millennium College’s Chinese name is Zhong Xi Chuangxin Xueyuan (Sino-Western
Innovation College), under the auspices of SJM (Sociedade de Jogos de Macau,
S.A.), a corporation whose main business is gambling.
From the
names of the HEIs in Macau in Table 1, one can see that most of them, MPI, IFT,
KWNCM, MSFSS, MIM, and MMC, are focused on vocational training. That raises the
question of the mission of higher education, but most importantly the identity
and calling of the faculty. If vocational training is the main goal of higher
education, one might not expect much academic training of the faculty. Thus we
see in Table 2 that a large percentage of faculty in Macau’s HEIs work on a part-time basis and do not have
a PhD.
Table
2: The Number of Full-time and Part-time Faculty and Those without a PhD degree
2012/2013
|
Full-time
|
Part-time
|
% of Part-time faculty
|
% of faculty members without a PhD
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
524
|
74
|
12%
|
30%
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
232
|
119
|
34%
|
60%
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
73
|
36
|
33%
|
71%
|
Macau Security Force Superior School
|
2
|
40
|
95%
|
70%
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
48
|
61
|
56%
|
41%
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
68
|
77
|
53%
|
69%
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau
|
21
|
11
|
34%
|
66%
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
275
|
191
|
41%
|
52%
|
Macau Institute of Management
|
5
|
33
|
87%
|
85%
|
Macau Millennium College
|
5
|
21
|
81%
|
35%
|
Total
|
|
|
35%
|
49%
|
Source of data: Tertiary Education Services Office of
Macau government (2013), Tertiary
Education Services Office Annual Book 2012, pp. 119
More than a third of college and university
faculty in Macau have little job security as part-timers and about half, as
indicated by the lack of a PhD, are not fully professionalized. They therefore do
not enjoy the kind of professional autonomy and academic freedom faculty are
assumed under Western traditions to enjoy. Moreover, there is no tenure system
in Macau, so one can argue that even full-time faculty have no job security and
consequently do not enjoy much academic freedom. Dismissals rarely happen, but
in 2014 two full-time professors were sacked partly because of their political
views (Hao 2015). If full-time faculty with PhDs can be dismissed for political
reasons, part-time faculty are especially vulnerable.
But
what is academic freedom and how is it linked to academic professional
identity?
Academic Freedom and Professionalism: An Academic Identity
In China, professionalism
did not come into being until after the self-strengthening movement in the
1860s when technical intellectuals began to grow. Peking University, a modern
HEI, was established only in 1898. Faculty governance (or shared governance)
and academic freedom, both
indicators of academic professionalism
and identity, were introduced at Peking University in the early twentieth century
by Cai Yuanpei, the university president (1912-1927). A faculty senate (教授会) and faculty governance committee (行政会) were established. The faculty
senate’s job was to design academic policies and assess academic qualities, and
the faculty governance committee would serve like a board of trustees, assessing and making policies both
academic and beyond (Du 2017). However, since then the faculty governance
role has been markedly diminished under the authoritarianism of the Nationalist
Party, Mao Zedong’s dictatorship, and authoritarianism since the Deng Xiaoping
era. Presently, authoritarianism is the order of the day in both mainland China
and Macau, severely limiting a tradition of professionalism and academic
freedom, the major guarantee of quality in higher education.
What is
professionalism anyway? In this paper I assume professionalism as a universal
value and will use the development of professionalism in the U.S. as a
comparison point. The sociology of professions has long considered the meaning
of professionalism and professionalization (Abbott 1988; Aronowitz and DiFazio
1994; Brint 1994; Clark 2008; Collins 1990; Freidson 1970, 1973; Hao 2003; Larson 1977). The professionalism
of college teaching, i.e., the creation and transmission of knowledge (see also
the discussion of Kant and Durkheim in Chapter 2), may be what Clark (2008:319)
regards as the logic or identity of the profession. It is the social function
discharged by the professional scholar, according to the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) (Gerber 2014:52), and a calling, as Clark (2008:325-26) observes, that
“transmutes narrow self-interest into other-regarding and ideal-regarding
interests: one is linked to fellow workers and to a version of a larger common
good. It has moral content, contributing to civic virtue.” Here the professor
finds “the fascinations of research and the enchantments of teaching,” or “the
demon who holds the very fibers” of his or her very life, and “the rewards of
personal fulfillment and a sense of societal service.”
To
fulfill this academic calling, i.e., the creation of scientific knowledge and
education as “the cornerstone of the structure of society,” whose progress is
“essential to civilization,” “the professorial office should be one both of
dignity and of independence” (AAUP 2001, 294; see also Weber 1973). This means
that faculty needs to have academic freedom and the means to exercise that
freedom. In 1915, when the AAUP was established, its first job was to define
academic freedom. Its 1940 statement on academic freedom is a classic: 1) the
freedom to do research and publish the results; 2) the freedom to discuss
subject matter in the classroom; and 3) the freedom to write and speak as citizens
without institutional censorship or unwanted sanction (AAUP 2001; Gerber 2014;
Ruch 2001; Teichler et al. 2013).
As is
also discussed in Chapter 2, in a 1957 statement, American Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter defined the “four essential freedoms” of a university
as: the freedom to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught, how
it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study (cited in Thelin 2004).
More importantly, these matters are reserved for the direct control of the faculty,
not for either the president or the trustees (Birnbaum and Eckel 2005).
To
guarantee academic freedom in the terms outlined above, shared governance has
developed, where faculty play an important role in core academic areas like
recruitment of new faculty, tenure and promotion, and academic programing. Faculty
should enjoy “a large degree of autonomy from lay control and normal
organizational control” (Clark 2008:123) in relation to the trustees of the
governing board and the administrators of colleges and universities (see also
Pennock et al. 2015). “The governing board and president should, on questions
of faculty status [the recruitment of new faculty, promotion, and dismissal],
as in other matters where the faculty has primary responsibility [educational
policies], concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for
compelling reasons which should be stated in detail” (AAUP 2001:221). Although
the selection of academic deans and other chief academic officers is the
responsibility of the president, it should be done “with the advice of, and in
consultation with, the appropriate faculty” (AAUP 2001:219).
The
process of achieving shared governance is the process of professionalization,
i.e., establishing mechanisms that will
foster the identity and calling of the profession and guarantee its autonomy
“in selecting the economic terms of work, the location and social organization
of work, and the technical content of the work” (Freidson 1970:44). This
negotiation of professional autonomy or academic freedom is usually done
between professional associations and other stakeholders in higher education.
AAUP, for example, “has been engaged in developing standards for sound academic
practice and in working for the acceptance of these standards by the community
of higher education” and by the society in general, including the state (AAUP
2001, ix).
Academic
professionalization is thus a process of constantly defining the boundaries of
academic freedom and defending faculty autonomy. In the U.S. for example, one
survey found that between 1970 and 2001 those who reported either faculty
determination or joint control with administrators in the recruitment of new
faculty members rose from 31 to 73 percent, and those who reported substantial
faculty control over tenure and promotion decisions rose from 36 to 71 percent (for
the statistics in this and the following paragraph, see Gerber 2014:159-160).
Those who reported substantial faculty control over the curriculum and degree
requirements rose from 80 percent to 90 percent.
Faculty
determination or joint authority in the selection of department chairs rose
from 22 percent in 1970 to 54 percent in 2001. Only four percent said that
faculty had no role at all. However, the faculty influence in the selection of
deans and vice presidents and presidents was small: 32 percent in 2001,
although still an increase from 14 percent in 1970, with only five percent
saying that faculty played no role at all. Moreover, more than 90 percent of
the institutions surveyed had some kind of senate, chaired mostly by an elected
faculty member. This could mean “fully collaborative decision making” or
“simple consultation” or “information sharing” (Gerber 2014:160).
Granted
that faculty power in the U.S. has been eroded to some extent in the last
decade (see Chapter 2), university teaching in the U.S. is still a very strong
profession, and it is fair to assume that in general professors in the U.S.
enjoy more academic freedom than in most other parts of the world. Thus, to use
faculty governance as developed in the U.S. as an indicator of professional
identity development in Macau would help us see more clearly the status of the
academic profession and identity of the professor. That is what I will do
below.
A Note on Our Research Methods
The university studied,
hereafter called the University, has both undergraduate and graduate programs,
and a fairly large faculty. Most of the faculty members are recruited
internationally. A majority have a Chinese cultural background, but they tend
to be returned students from the West, who were professionalized in the West
before they came to Macau. The University can be characterized as a “striving”
institution (Gonzales et al. 2014): it places great emphasis on improving its
position in international university rankings, has made great investment in
recruiting productive researchers and has distributed a huge amount of money
for research. Research support and most faculty benefits are in general superior
to many in the U.K. or the U.S.
The
research team interviewed faculty members, administrators, and students,
altogether 44 from the University: nine assistant professors, eight associate
professors, 10 full professors, six administrators, and 11 students, both
undergraduate and graduate. Most interviews lasted from one to one and a half
hours, but several lasted for two hours, and a couple of interviews were
through emails. We also interviewed three professors from three other
institutions of higher education to give us a sense of conditions elsewhere in
the region. The interviews were done in professors’ offices or cafes between
2013 and 2014.
I have not set out to look for deviant cases
to refine or reconstruct the theory of university governance, neither in analyzing
the case University nor in reporting individual faculty members’ points of view
(see Small 2009 about such methodological issues). The ultimate purpose of the paper
is to examine the mechanisms and processes of professionalization or the lack
thereof in a striving university. This method is in line with Clyde Mitchell’s
and Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, which seeks to uncover social
mechanisms, trace processes, and to understand the larger forces shaping those
mechanisms and processes, whether in unique or in deviant cases (see Small
2009).
The
research methods used here are also in line with Robert Yin’s (1989) principle
of sequential interviewing in that each case in our study (i.e., each
interviewee) “provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the question
at hand” (Small 2009, 24-25). I have used a similar set of questions with
different stakeholders, but they have all focused on the role of faculty in
research, teaching and service, from the perspective of various professors as
well as students. Interviews were conducted more like discussions,
explorations, and explanations than questions and answers. The objective is
saturation, i.e., team members are fairly confident that the cases we have
studied have provided us with most if not all the necessary information
regarding the status of professionalism in the region.
Findings and Discussion
The Role of Faculty
in Personnel Matters
As discussed above, professionalization
in the form of shared governance means that the faculty play a crucial role in the
recruitment of new faculty members and in promotion. Normally, the dean and the
president are not involved directly in the processes and will go along with committee
decisions. For the dean or the president to disapprove of a candidate without
compelling reasons would be a serious violation of shared governance and an
encroachment on professional autonomy and academic freedom. However, in our
case University, while faculty members may be involved in the selection of job
candidates, the rectors (presidents) can, and sometimes do, reject job
candidates approved by the faculty level committees usually headed either by a
dean or a vice president. (Since all the academic deans, vice presidents and
the president were men at the time of research, I will use “he” to refer to any
one of them.) This has caused discomfort among faculty, as one professor
comments (Interview Notes, Full5):
The rector
is too micro-managing. When we hire a faculty member, even if this is only an
assistant professor, he would use his veto power. But are you qualified to make
such decisions? What are your fields of study? You cannot possibly know every
field, right?
Usually the reasons given
are either that the candidate does not come from a prestigious university or he
or she does not have enough publications. Whatever the reason, the faculty role
is diminished.
Deans also have much more power than in the U.S.
and Europe in general. They decide the composition of the recruitment and
promotion committees; the identities of the members and how they are selected are
not public. At the meetings, the administrator directs where the discussion
goes (Interview Notes, Full10). Faculty’s, especially junior faculty’s, voices
are seldom heard, if ever (Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc1). The dean, in
consultation with the rector, decides which department can have new hires and
what kind. Sometimes the rector or vice rector makes that decision directly
with the department chair with little consultation with the dean. The dean
decides whether one’s promotion application can even be processed, his power
expanding especially when the criteria are not clear (Interview Notes, Assoc2).
Professors thus do not have real autonomy in choosing their own colleagues as
academic professionalization and freedom would require. Rather the dean is
often the person who decides the composition of the department, and sometimes
it is the rector who makes that decision.
Rather
than faculty determination or joint authority in the selection of department
chairs (see also Interview Notes, Admin2, Assoc5), in our case University these
are appointed by the dean and the rector with no consultation with the faculty.
Because of the lack of faculty participation in selecting department chairs,
people feel less of an attachment to the department, and the department chairs
feel they have more responsibility to the management than to the faculty and
students. The same problem applies to the higher management positions. The
appointment of deans, vice rectors and the rector may go through an open
international search. Faculty members may be invited to presentations and give
their opinions, but it is not clear how much their comments count (Interview
Notes, Assoc4, Assoc5, Full2). Many believe that participation is only a formality
(Interview Notes, Assoc2, Full5).
With
the mainlandization of Macau, it is not even clear whether the selections of
higher-level managers will go through an international search and involve
faculty participation, let alone lower level managers. In its most recent
selection of the rector position, for example, no faculty member was invited to
be part of the selection committee. It was not clear if even more than one
candidate was invited to a campus interview. Even though the committee held
meetings to ask for faculty opinion, it was not at all clear whether any
faculty opinions mattered. As a result of such selection methods, the managers
are obligated to serve the will of the higher authorities rather than the need
of faculty and students. We will discuss further the problem of mainlandization
later in the chapter.
The Role of Faculty
in Research and Teaching Policies
Professors at the
University are required to publish in SCI, SSCI, and A&HCI journals so that
they can increase the University’s citation indexes in its pursuit of world
rankings. These requirements are not usually negotiated with the faculty and
furthermore are driven very much by a science-based model (Interview Notes,
Full1) not fully applicable to humanities and social sciences. As one professor
says (Interview Notes, Full1),
I don’t write many journal
articles. I write books, I write chapters of books, occasionally, unlike
journal articles. And for me it’s not very interesting to write journal
articles. It has limited impact. But if a book is well received, it can have
considerable impact. But in the science field books are of second grade.
He
complains that his books and book chapters are not worth as much as a journal
article. Others point out that although books are representations of one’s
system of knowledge (Interview Notes, Assoc2, Assis2, Assoc2), they are not
valued, since they do not count in international rankings.
The University not only emphasizes
journal articles but requires that they be in English and published by
international publishers, especially for junior and middle-level faculty
members. Most international journals are not very interested in publishing
research on Macau. But that’s not the university’s concern. The editor of one
of the top journals in China studies once told me that he is not interested in
publishing Macau studies since it will not help his citation indexes. One
professor tells us that even scholarly research on Chinese literature must be
written in English in order to be recognized as important. This is like
requiring an American university paper on Shakespeare to be written in Chinese
to be considered valuable research. Local studies must be published
internationally, too, or they are not given much credit (Interview Notes,
Assoc6). Works published locally in Chinese are not counted by international
rating regimes and are therefore rarely valued by the administrators (see also
Interview Notes, Full2) who make their decisions top-down. Faculty protests are usually futile. In a
word, faculty may be free to do whatever research they want to do, but they
feel less free to publish their findings in whatever venues they choose.
The
pursuit of rankings has not only forced the faculty to change the way they do
their work but has also resulted in a change of values and professional
identity. In order to increase the production of indexed journal articles,
faculty members are assigned to research, balanced, or teaching tracks. Each
track carries an indexed journal paper production quota. Faculty unable to fulfill the quota are bumped
down to a lower track to teach more courses, which is often viewed as a
punishment, thus eroding the core values of education, rendering teaching more
or less meaningless and depriving teachers of their sense of calling and
professional identity. As a result, traditional teachers “feel very very
depressed, demoralized.” “The university ranking might have risen, but the idea
of the university is lost. Humanism is lost. People’s respect for you is lost”
(Interview Notes, Full3). Furthermore, dividing professors against their own desires
into three classes—researchers, researchers/teachers, and teachers—makes it
harder to build an academic community. It goes against “von Humboldt’s concept of the university, where teaching and
research are integrally linked—the Humboldtian model has been the guiding
principle of the American research university since the beginning” (Altbach and
Finkelstein 2014).
Finally, program changes and creations are basically
decided by administrators, rather than being bottom-up proposals based on what
faculty believe to be educational needs (Interview Notes, Full10). An academic
program is initiated or approved because the managers believe it is useful to
their own purposes, such as university rankings or government needs, rather
than what faculty believe to be educational or social needs.
As Chapters 2, 4 and 5 point out,
ideological control in China is thereby very much strengthened. That has a
ripple effect in Macau. For example, the faculty have to get approval from the
management when they invite guest speakers from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Professors who lean towards Taiwan independence or Hong Kong autonomy are often
denied entry into Macau at the customs. Faculty members on research trips to
Taiwan are required to report to the university authorities whom they have met
and what they have done. In both research and teaching policies, the faculty
are deprived of participation in much of the decision-making processes, and
their professional status and academic freedom are very much strained.
Faculty Involvement in
University Governance Organizations
The senate (at the
university level) and the academic council (AC, at the faculty/college level)
at our case University are only advisory bodies, according to the University’s
organizational charter published in 2013. The issues involving ACs are strictly
about curricular changes (abolition and creation of programs, program revision)
and student education (qualifications of graduate and postgraduate students). Again
decisions are made top-down, and only rubber-stamp approvals are sought at the
AC meeting. Even if an initiative is raised bottom-up, the dean can refuse to
take it to the AC meeting, since he is the chair of the AC and decides what
will be on the agenda. “Resolutions” passed at the AC may go nowhere unless
they involve minor decisions about things like course descriptions. As one
administrator comments (Interview Notes, Admin5 ),
Things
started at the top and often it is just a gesture of giving the endorsement by
the people, by the staff below without them having any real input in the
decision. By the time to discuss them, it is already decided, you know, so the
input of the staff doesn’t mean a lot… This generates a lot of bad morale from
people, because they feel like nobody really listens to them.
As a result, except in
rare cases when the dean is more democratic, people seldom speak out at their
AC meetings because they think that whatever they say is not going to be heeded
anyway. One professor calls it “learned helplessness.” The AC, faculty members
say, is just like the National People’s
Congress on the mainland at which people’s job is to raise their hands to
endorse the Party decisions (Interview Notes, Full5; Interview Notes full6 for
the same point).
There
is a faculty association, but its role is limited to organizing year-end
parties. It has made proposals to the University management regarding faculty
welfare, but they have gone nowhere. It has not been able to influence
personnel and educational policies at the University. The weakness of the
faculty association mirrors the weakness of the student associations (Interview
Notes, PhD1, UG3, UG4). There are faculty and university level student
associations. But even if they may participate in senate and AC meetings, they
seldom speak. This inactivity on the part of both faculty and student
organizations affects not only the professional identity of the professors but
the identity of the university as well.
The Creation of a
Docile Faculty and Study Body: The Opposite of a Professional Identity
The lack of shared
governance described above has resulted in the creation of a docile and
alienated faculty whose interests are constantly threatened as a result of their
loss of autonomy and academic freedom. As one professor points out (Interview
Notes, Full8),
Because there is no tenure
system, if you speak out, you may have your job in jeopardy, or various
interests affected, just like in China. Who dares to speak? Younger faculty
feel that they are too junior to speak out. Senior faculty want to protect the
benefits they have already obtained. But of course, not speaking out is against
everyone’s interest.
Several other faculty members also say that the lack of
tenure plays a key role in such docility (Interview Notes, Assoc3, Full6,
Full8). This lack of professional protection leads to much discontent,
mistreatment of faculty, low faculty morale, and alienation on the part of the
faculty. And there is almost no recourse. A professor comments
(Interview Notes, Full9):
It’s almost like they’re being hit by a big
truck or smashed on the ground because a dean or a department head does not
like that individual and then that individual is crushed and the individual
either seems to not know his rights or cannot find out what his rights are…
There is no staff faculty association worth its mettle that could at least
intervene on behalf of faculty and could say that we must have an appeals
process, that we must have it clearly written what the rights and what the
duties and what the obligations are of people, of faculty member, of staff, and
of deans and department heads and all that…
Those
who choose to speak out will do so at selected moments (Interview Notes,
Assoc2). But in general, the faculty are
docile, withdrawn, alienated, and demoralized despite being well-paid, with
good benefits and conference and research grants (Interview Notes, Full9,
Assoc2, Assoc3).
A
docile and obedient faculty leads to a docile student body, as we have also
mentioned above, and together they create a passive learning environment. There
are no faculty or student forums on politically controversial issues. In 2008,
the Macau government was going to legislate Article 23 of the Basic Law, a bill
on state subversion. This was controversial because people were concerned about
freedom of speech. Once the law was passed, what was allowed before might be
considered as illegal. So some faculty members decided to organize a forum to
discuss this matter, and they invited scholars from Hong Kong. Then just before
the forum, they cancelled the event because the University said that the space
that had been assigned to the forum was now unavailable. There has never been a
forum on the true nature of the “One country, Two systems” formula, or the Hong
Kong democracy movement. In the 2014 Hong Kong movement on universal suffrage,
there was almost no voice coming from Macau colleges and universities. Students
of communications at our case University did design a very professional flier
and it was posted in several places on campus, voicing their support of the
movement in Hong Kong. Some yellow ribbons were tied on the handrails of a bridge
on campus. But such activities never became a movement—people did not even know
who the leaders of these activities were. So their effect was very limited.
Two
professors comment that students at the University do not have the ability to
talk about politics (Interview Notes, Assis3). If protests are part of college
life and education in the US (Rivard 2014), that is not happening at our case University.
One student’s comment is apt here: the ethos of the university is harmony, not
vitality (Interview Notes, MA1). The
mission of the university is to train obedient workers rather than thinkers
(see Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc2, MA1, UG1). Increasingly the university generally
approves only professors who follow the Party line or who present on
non-political topics to come to speak on campus. The lower level managers
quickly follow the cue. In 2017 a professor was inviting a controversial
mainland scholar to speak on their academic forum. He asked the department
chair to write an invitation letter, but the latter refused. Even if a meeting
on a controversial topic such as the Cultural Revolution or national minority
issues was held, the organizers would make sure that it was as low-key as
possible. Academic freedom is eroded, the faculty is losing its identity and
calling, and students are losing opportunities to learn to be critical
thinkers.
Factors Affecting an Academic Professional Identity Formation
Given the issues of
vocationalization, part-time employment and corporatized governance discussed
above, what might be some of the political/structural, cultural, and individual
factors that make it difficult for the faculty to form a professional identity
and exercise academic freedom?
Chief among the political and structural factors is the
influence of mainland China. Under the “One country, Two systems” principle, Macau
is supposed to be a largely free society. Politically, however, it resembles China in
its authoritarianism, although there are some limited democratic practices in
the election of legislators and the Chief Executive (CE). In the so-called
“executive-led” system, the CE has the power to make all the important
decisions of the land. The legislature does not have the power to make laws but
can only improve and approve bills submitted by the government. The CE is
responsible to those who elect him, i.e., a 400 member committee, most of whom
are pro-government representatives of social organizations, and to the Central
government that appoints him. Increasingly the CE is required to answer to the
Central government rather than to the people of Macau. This corresponds to the
university system where the rectors are the decision makers and faculty have little
or no role to play regarding university policies. The rectors answer to the
Chief Executive, even to the Central government, and need not consult the
faculty to make decisions.
If the mainland Chinese system does not allow for much
academic freedom (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5), professors in Macau feel the
effect. For example, the Central government has an office in Macau, called the
Central Liaison Office (CLO), which coordinates the relationship between Macau
and the Central government. One interviewee
reports that when they invited the Consul of the American Consulate General in
Hong Kong and Macau to give a talk at the University, both the CLO and the
Macau government were upset and told them next time to report such invitations
beforehand (Interview Notes, Admin1). One faculty member reports that he heard that
a student was paid by the CLO to record his class. Another faculty member
reports that his relationship with Hong Kong and Macau democracy activists was
being investigated. A third faculty member reports that she and others were
told by the government to stay quiet on controversial issues in Macau.
A student organization used
to hold exhibitions in June of each year to commemorate the 1989 student
democracy movement in China, but they stopped the practice several years ago
when student organizers were called to meet officials from the CLO to talk
about it (Interview Notes, Full10). They were also asked about what professors
discussed in class. Some student organizers were from mainland China and had
family members who were civil servants there. They were afraid that their
activities in Macau would harm the opportunities of their family members back
home.
Apparently there is a
concerted effort in controlling what happens on campus. The mainland government
is increasingly concerned about the political inclinations and activities of
faculty and students in Macau for fear that Macau would become Hong Kong. As a
result self-censorship is now on the rise, and faculty and students are
becoming more docile.
Increasing political
control in Macau culminated in the dismissal of two professors from two
different universities in 2014, apparently for political reasons (Hao 2014). The
reason for no contract renewal regarding one of them was ostensibly violating
professional ethics to ask students to attend his political activities for
extra credit. But the actual reasons were his political activities: the
evidence the university presented included a letter of complaint about him
passing out election fliers outside a high school and a newspaper article
complaining that he should not comment on how the legislators should be
elected. There were also reports on their investigation of his class
assignments. It turned out that what he required was for students to attend two
or three out of 12 political gatherings in Macau and to write a report for
extra credit. And this was a political science class.
Another professor was fired
because he commented that the CE did not have charisma. The rector said openly
that the professor could not criticize the CE and comment on politics in Macau.
That he was invited to go to a meeting in Portugal about Macau politics was
also a reason for firing him. The lack of a tenure system only better serves
that control. If the University is treated as a government department
(Interview Notes, Admin1) as on the mainland, professional autonomy, identity and
academic freedom are likely to suffer. Professors are supposed to be free to
teach the way they think appropriate and to participate in political activities
off campus as long as such activities follow professional ethics.
Culturally, Macau is basically Chinese. If American culture
supports faculty governance, the Chinese hierarchical culture does not. To conform
to Confucianism, faculty obey the deans, deans obey the rector, the rector obeys
the University Council (UC, or the board of trustees) chair, the UC chair obeys
the CE of Macau, and the CE obeys the chief of China. They all have to say yes
to their superiors (Interview Notes, Admin2).
One
professor interviewed believes that this is in fact a mixture of Western
management style and Eastern culture (Interview Notes, Assis6; see also Full6,
Admin5). Indeed corporatization, part of academic capitalism (Gonzales et al. 2014;
Hao 2015; see also Chapter 2 and other chapters in the book), is on the rise in
American higher education and perhaps Macau university leaders have learned the
Western corporate management style. In one professor’s words, the management
and faculty have combined the problematic elements of two cultures when they
should be combining the best elements of both (Interview Notes, Full8).
That is
a very interesting observation. So why have both administrators and faculty
members chosen a system that largely goes against traditions of academic
freedom and professionalism? That brings us to the last issue of analysis:
individual factors.
One
interviewee observes that those Chinese who have been bathed in American
culture cannot wash their Chinese cultural traces away. Once they are back in China,
their Chinese culture comes alive again, and the American culture fades
(Interview Notes, Assoc6). Another interviewee comments that anyone [foreign
teachers] who jumps into Chinese culture will be tainted (Interview Notes,
Assis1).
Nevertheless,
despite structural and cultural influences it is individual managers who choose
top-down management style, and individual faculty members who choose whether
and how to speak out. As one interviewee further explains (Interview Notes,
Admin5):
I am an American, I am an
outsider, and I came here recognizing this is not America… That there are
certain ways people censure themselves, given the realities the central
government probably discourages parades or whatever, it is never… no one ever
told me I don’t do something, or I did something wrong, but on the other hand,
I am not saying anything controversial. I just, maybe it is just stereotype or
generalization that I just presumed it wasn’t going to be the way when I was
coming in… So different cultural
tradition and different kind of political system, there is a different rule
whether it is official or not official. And I am not saying that is good
or I think it should be like that, there ought to be freedom of speech or of
doing things, but I know that, you know, it is not… I am a visitor, it is not my country…I figure there are some
tradeoffs, benefits and costs.
Indeed, if one is an
American or Australian or Brit one learns to adapt to an authoritarian culture.
This adaptation is easier for the faculty members who are trained abroad but have
a Chinese background. Very few can escape from the political and cultural
constraints.
When
asked whether the faculty association should be more active in protecting
faculty interests like class scheduling or track assignments, some association
leaders’ response is that after seeing what happened in the Cultural
Revolution, etc., they hate politics and do not want to be troublemakers.
Others, however, want to be more involved and more active (Interview Notes,
Assis9). These are apparently individual choices. Most faculty members choose
not to speak out at AC meetings, as we discussed above. But there are some
people who do speak out, even though selectively. Some are afraid of joining
the faculty association for fear of being viewed as troublemakers, potential
enemies, the opposition (Interview Notes, Full9). But others do join. One dean
or president is more democratic than another. These are individual choices.
It is
true that structural/political and cultural factors greatly influence
individual behavior, but ultimately it is individuals who make the choice to
practice and obey top-down management style or to resist. And resistance need not be confrontational. But
given the general political atmosphere in China and Macau, academic freedom and
professionalism on the part of faculty are going to be an uphill battle if some
want to fight it.
Conclusions
To sum up, higher education in
Macau has a relatively short history and is very much characterized by academic
capitalism such as vocationalization, casualization of faculty, and political
and commercial corporatization that reflect the nature of the government system
in Macau and China. These are not conducive to the development of an academic
professional identity. Our case study of one university illustrates how weak or
no faculty shared governance erodes academic freedom and professional identity
formation in terms of who to teach, what to teach, and how to teach. Such weakness can be the result of structural
factors related to the hegemony of mainland China and to the executive-led
political system of Macau, as well as to cultural factors related to a
Confucian ethos. But both the political system and cultural constraints are
made by individuals. So they can also be results of individual choices. The
formation of a professional identity, or professionalization, and the extent to
which academic freedom can be exercised, are the aggregate outcome of
individual decisions made by both the management and faculty.
What is
the implication of this study, then? While it is difficult to change the
structural factors, faculty themselves may have some room to maneuver in their
own reactions and responses. Following Clark’s (2008, 131) remark:
When
the faculty member feels that this sensitive right [pursuit of one’s scholarly
interests] is infringed, he will run up the banners of academic freedom and
inquiry, or he will fret and become a festering sore in the body politic of the
campus, or he will retreat to apathy and his country house, or he will make it
known in other and greener pastures that he will listen to the siren call of a
good offer.
That is a range of
responses. In the face of political and cultural obstacles that hinder the
formation of a professional identity and practice of academic freedom, some
faculty members indeed choose to rediscover their purpose and assert themselves
(see also Irvine 2012, 391) under the banner of professionalism, a professional
identity, an academic calling, academic freedom, autonomy, and scientific
pursuits. They organize and strive to build an academic community and shared
governance. In Macau, though, such individuals are few and far between. Others
choose passive resistance, symbolic compliance, professional pragmatism,
various cunning maneuvers, and games-playing (Mok and Cheung 2011; Teelken
2012). Still others retreat to “learned helplessness,” “just collect your pay
and say nothing” (Interview Notes, Full6). A majority of the faculty members in
Macau adopt these last two attitudes and behavior. An increasing number of professors
at our case University have left the university or are actively looking for
another job.
Whatever
faculty members choose to do, it is a choice. It is true that faculty members
can easily succumb to powerful structural and cultural forces, but as Gerber
(2014, 168) points out, “faculty members themselves must bear some of the
responsibility for the retreat from higher education’s democratic purposes that
has already occurred in American colleges and universities.” The same is true of
the faculty in Macau who are involved in building a “contemporary” university.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The
system of professions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Altbach,
P. G. & Finkelstein, M. J. (2014). Essay on the way many reformers of
higher education are ignoring the faculty role. Inside
Higher Ed. October 7.
Aronowitz, S. & DiFazio, W. (1994). The jobless
future: Sci-Tech and the dogma of work. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bray M. with R. Butler, P. Hui, O. Kwo & E. Mang (2002), Higher Education in Macau: Growth and Strategic
Development. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre.
Birnbaum, R. & Eckel, P. D. (2005).
The dilemma of presidential leadership. In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdahl, & P.
J. Gumport (Eds.) American higher
education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges (pp. 340-365). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brint, S. (1994). In an age of experts: The changing role of
professionals in politics and public life. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Clark, B. R. (2008). On
higher education: Selected writings, 1956-2006. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Collins, R. (1990). Market closure and the
conflict theory of the professions. In M. Burrage and R. Torstendhl (Eds.) Professions in theory and history (pp. 25-43). Newbury
Park: Sage Publications.
Du, Shengyan. (2017), “Zhongguo gaodeng jiaoyu zhidu de
lishi, xianzhuang jiqi gaige luxian tu” (The history, status quo, and reform
challenges in China’s higher education). Pp. 515-51 in Zhidong Hao (ed.) Yaowang xingkong: Zhongguo zhengzhi tizhi
gaige de kunjing yu chulu (Stargazing: The dilemma of and prospects for
China’s political reform). New Taipei: Zhizhi xueshu chubanshe.
Freidson, E.
(1970). Profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Gerber, L. G. (2014). The
rise & decline of faculty governance: professionalization and the modern
American university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gonzales, L. D., Martinez, E. & Ordu, C. (2014). Exploring
faculty experiences in a striving university through the lens of academic
capitalism. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7)
1097-1115.
Hao, Z. (2003). Intellectuals
at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers.
Albany: SUNY Press.
----------. (2014). “Jiaoshou jiepin yu xueshu ziyou: Cong Aomen
liangwei jiaoshou bei jiepin
tanqi” (Professors’
dismissal and academic freedom: on the sacking of two professors in
Macau, Financial Times, Chinese website version,Nov. 25.
---------. (2017).
“What It Is Like and What Needs to Be Done: A Status Report on Higher
Education in Macau and Its Research.” Pp. 181-94 in Jisun Jung, Hugo Horta, and
Akiyoshi Yonezawa (eds.) Higher Education
Research as a Field of Study in Asia: History, Development and Future. New
York: Springer.
Irvine, C. (2012). Taking on “Best Practices”: A novel
response to managerialism in higher education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and
Culture, 12(3)389-404.
Larson, M. S. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A
sociological analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lau, S. P.
(2002). Aomen Jiaoyu Shi (A history
of education in Macau). Beijing: Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe (People’s education
press).
Li, X. (2001). 2001. Aomen Sheng
Baolu Xueyuan Yanjiu (A study on the College of St. Paul in Macau). Macau:
Aomen Ribao Chubanshe (Macao Daily press).
Ma, Z. (2010). “Wenhua Shiye xia de Aomen Gaodeng Jiaoyu”
(The transformation of Macau’s higher education in a cultural perspective). Gaojiao Tansuo (Higher Education Exploration), No. 2, 2010.
Mok, K. H. and Cheung, A. B. L.
(2011). Global aspirations and strategizing for world-class status: New form of
politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 33(3) 231-251.
Pennock, L. Jones, G. A., Leclerc J. M. Li, S.
X. (2015). Assessing the role and structure of academic senates in Canadian
universities, 2000–2012. Higher
Education, DOI 10.1007/s10734-014-9852-8.
Rivard, R. 2014. At William Peace, departing president is
criticized by many but loved by the board. Inside
Higher Ed, October 15.
Ruch, R. S. (2001). Higher ed., Inc.: The rise of the for-profit
university. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Small, M. L. (2009). “How many
cases do I need?” On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1)5-38.
Teelken, C. (2012). Compliance
or pragmatism: How do academics deal with managerialism in higher education? A
comparative study in three countries. Studies
in Higher Education, 37(3)271-290.
Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau government
(2013), Tertiary Education Services
Office Annual Book 2012. Macau: Tertiary Education Services Office.
Teichler, U., Arimoto, A. &
Cummings, W. K. (2013). The changing
academic profession: Major findings of a comparative survey. Dordrecht
Heidelberg: Springer.
Thelin, J. R. (2004). A history of American higher education. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Weber, M. (1973). On universities: The power of the state and
the dignity of the academic calling in imperial Germany, translated, edited
and with an Introductory Note by Edward Shils. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Yin, R. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods. London: Sage Publications.
[1] For an introduction to Macau and its brief history of higher education in the
following pages, see also Zhidong Hao (2017).
Abstract:
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of
institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared
governance. It is true that as compared with their counterparts in mainland
China, professors in Macau enjoy more academic freedom in terms of what
research to do and how they teach their classes. But they face increasing
restrictions in research and teaching, and lack power in academic programing
and the selection of their colleagues and academic managers. Using general
statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university,
this chapter illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the
structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The
findings have an important implication for the development of higher education
in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and
commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge to
academic freedom in one place in China but it is a challenge that higher
education faces elsewhere, too.
Situated at the west of the Pearl River estuary opposite Hong Kong,
Macau has a population of over 650,000. Colonized by Portugal in 1553, Macau
was returned to China in 1999 and since then has been under the “One country, Two
systems” arrangement with mainland China, operating on a capitalist system
rather than the current socialism-based one of mainland China. Macau has
inherited from the Portuguese a political system that is semi-democratic and
predominantly authoritarian, which meshes well with Chinese authoritarianism.
Such a political system will inevitably have an impact on its colleges and
universities and consequently on a faculty’s professional identity and their
academic freedom.[1]
With a relatively short history of higher
education, faculty professionalization has never developed in Macau as it has
in the West. Macau’s first higher
educational institution (HEI), the College of St. Paul, established by missionaries
in 1594, was closed in 1762 and attempts to build colleges did not succeed
until 1981 when Macau’s major university, the University of East Asia, was
built. At present there are 10 post-secondary schools of different orientations
and sizes, most of them focused on vocational training.
What is the Macau faculty’s professional
identity, what is their academic freedom like, and how
do they experience decision-making and thus control? What are the political, cultural and
individual obstacles to the
development of academic professionalism and freedom? In the following pages, I will 1) briefly
introduce the key features of higher education in Macau, especially as related
to issues of faculty professionalization; 2) define the professional identity
of faculty; 3) introduce the method of my qualitative research, i.e., a case
study of faculty at a university in Macau; 4) report the findings, illustrating
how faculty experience decision-making, and discuss the structural, cultural,
and individual factors influencing the formation of faculty’s professional
identity; 5) conclude, emphasizing the
role of individual faculty members in enhancing their professional identity and
academic freedom.
In-depth studies on higher education in Macau
are rare, and rarer is the study of faculty’s professional identity and
academic freedom. This study fills a gap in this intellectual pursuit and has some
important implications for both policymakers and practitioners in Macau and
elsewhere regarding the status of the academic profession.
Some Key Features of Higher
Education in Macau
The short history of higher education in Macau has not allowed
much time for faculty professionalization. The College of St. Paul (sometimes
called the St. Paul University College), financed by the Portuguese king and
the city senate and supplemented by donations from other Catholics and lay
people, has left little legacy. The college was small, with fewer than 100
students and 10 teachers and taught languages, including Latin, Japanese and
Chinese, theology, philosophy, ethics, and arts. Later physics, astronomy and
medicine were added (Li 2001:79-87, 109, 137-39). The college was closed in 1762 as a result of
the Rites Controversy when Jesuits were arrested and transported to Portugal.
For over
two hundred years the Portuguese Macau government did not establish another HEI.
In 1900-1904, Gezhi College moved to Macau but did not last long. Chinese
scholars then established Huaqiao (overseas) University (1950), Huanan (south
China) University (1950), Yuehai Wen Shang (humanities and business) College
(1949), and Zhongshan College of Education (Zhongshan Jiaoyu Xueyuan) (1950), but
they soon closed for lack of both social and political support. Students had to
go elsewhere for their college education (Lau 2002; Ma 2010). In 1981, some
Hong Kong businessmen were able to convince the Macau government to allow them
to establish the University of East Asia (UEA), mainly a market-oriented and
commercialized business school (Ma 2010:33).
Things
changed in 1988 when the government purchased UEA and changed its name to the
University of Macau (UM). Humanities, science, technology and the social
sciences were gradually introduced. Meanwhile, other colleges and universities
were established. Table 1 is a summary of the colleges and universities currently
in Macau, including the date of their establishment and the number of students
and faculty as of 2012/2013.
Table 1: HEIs in Macau as of 2012/2013
|
Year established
|
Number of students as of 2013 (full- time unless
specified)
|
Number of faculty members as of 2013 (both part time and
full time)
|
Ownership of the school
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
1981 (UEA)
1991 (UM)
|
8,481
|
598
|
Public
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
1991
|
2,961
|
351
|
Public
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
1995
|
1,573
|
109
|
Public
|
Macau Security Force Superior School (MSFSS)
|
1988
|
73
|
42
|
Public
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
1992 (AIOU)*
2011 (CityU)
|
1,296 + 482 (part-time)=1,778
|
109
|
Private
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
1996 (IIUM)**
2009 (USJ)
|
1,684
|
145
|
Private
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau (KWNCM)
|
1999
|
246+59 (part-time)=305
|
32
|
Private
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
2000
|
10,365
|
466
|
Private
|
Macau Institute of Management (MIM)
|
1984
|
362 (part-time)
|
38
|
Private
|
Macau Millennium College (MMC) ***
|
2001
|
194
|
26
|
Private
|
Sources of data: Mark Bray et al., with Roy Butler, Philip Hui,
Ora Kwo & Emily Mang (2002), Higher
Education in Macau, pp. 19-26; Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau
government (2013), Tertiary Education
Services Office Annual Book 2012.
*AIOU: The Asia
International Open University (Macau), the previous name of CityU.
**IIUM: The
Inter-University Institute of Macau, a joint initiative by the Catholic
University of Portugal and the Diocese of Macau now called USJ.
***The Macau
Millennium College’s Chinese name is Zhong Xi Chuangxin Xueyuan (Sino-Western
Innovation College), under the auspices of SJM (Sociedade de Jogos de Macau,
S.A.), a corporation whose main business is gambling.
From the
names of the HEIs in Macau in Table 1, one can see that most of them, MPI, IFT,
KWNCM, MSFSS, MIM, and MMC, are focused on vocational training. That raises the
question of the mission of higher education, but most importantly the identity
and calling of the faculty. If vocational training is the main goal of higher
education, one might not expect much academic training of the faculty. Thus we
see in Table 2 that a large percentage of faculty in Macau’s HEIs work on a part-time basis and do not have
a PhD.
Table
2: The Number of Full-time and Part-time Faculty and Those without a PhD degree
2012/2013
|
Full-time
|
Part-time
|
% of Part-time faculty
|
% of faculty members without a PhD
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
524
|
74
|
12%
|
30%
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
232
|
119
|
34%
|
60%
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
73
|
36
|
33%
|
71%
|
Macau Security Force Superior School
|
2
|
40
|
95%
|
70%
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
48
|
61
|
56%
|
41%
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
68
|
77
|
53%
|
69%
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau
|
21
|
11
|
34%
|
66%
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
275
|
191
|
41%
|
52%
|
Macau Institute of Management
|
5
|
33
|
87%
|
85%
|
Macau Millennium College
|
5
|
21
|
81%
|
35%
|
Total
|
|
|
35%
|
49%
|
Source of data: Tertiary Education Services Office of
Macau government (2013), Tertiary
Education Services Office Annual Book 2012, pp. 119
More than a third of college and university
faculty in Macau have little job security as part-timers and about half, as
indicated by the lack of a PhD, are not fully professionalized. They therefore do
not enjoy the kind of professional autonomy and academic freedom faculty are
assumed under Western traditions to enjoy. Moreover, there is no tenure system
in Macau, so one can argue that even full-time faculty have no job security and
consequently do not enjoy much academic freedom. Dismissals rarely happen, but
in 2014 two full-time professors were sacked partly because of their political
views (Hao 2015). If full-time faculty with PhDs can be dismissed for political
reasons, part-time faculty are especially vulnerable.
But
what is academic freedom and how is it linked to academic professional
identity?
Academic Freedom and Professionalism: An Academic Identity
In China, professionalism
did not come into being until after the self-strengthening movement in the
1860s when technical intellectuals began to grow. Peking University, a modern
HEI, was established only in 1898. Faculty governance (or shared governance)
and academic freedom, both
indicators of academic professionalism
and identity, were introduced at Peking University in the early twentieth century
by Cai Yuanpei, the university president (1912-1927). A faculty senate (教授会) and faculty governance committee (行政会) were established. The faculty
senate’s job was to design academic policies and assess academic qualities, and
the faculty governance committee would serve like a board of trustees, assessing and making policies both
academic and beyond (Du 2017). However, since then the faculty governance
role has been markedly diminished under the authoritarianism of the Nationalist
Party, Mao Zedong’s dictatorship, and authoritarianism since the Deng Xiaoping
era. Presently, authoritarianism is the order of the day in both mainland China
and Macau, severely limiting a tradition of professionalism and academic
freedom, the major guarantee of quality in higher education.
What is
professionalism anyway? In this paper I assume professionalism as a universal
value and will use the development of professionalism in the U.S. as a
comparison point. The sociology of professions has long considered the meaning
of professionalism and professionalization (Abbott 1988; Aronowitz and DiFazio
1994; Brint 1994; Clark 2008; Collins 1990; Freidson 1970, 1973; Hao 2003; Larson 1977). The professionalism
of college teaching, i.e., the creation and transmission of knowledge (see also
the discussion of Kant and Durkheim in Chapter 2), may be what Clark (2008:319)
regards as the logic or identity of the profession. It is the social function
discharged by the professional scholar, according to the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) (Gerber 2014:52), and a calling, as Clark (2008:325-26) observes, that
“transmutes narrow self-interest into other-regarding and ideal-regarding
interests: one is linked to fellow workers and to a version of a larger common
good. It has moral content, contributing to civic virtue.” Here the professor
finds “the fascinations of research and the enchantments of teaching,” or “the
demon who holds the very fibers” of his or her very life, and “the rewards of
personal fulfillment and a sense of societal service.”
To
fulfill this academic calling, i.e., the creation of scientific knowledge and
education as “the cornerstone of the structure of society,” whose progress is
“essential to civilization,” “the professorial office should be one both of
dignity and of independence” (AAUP 2001, 294; see also Weber 1973). This means
that faculty needs to have academic freedom and the means to exercise that
freedom. In 1915, when the AAUP was established, its first job was to define
academic freedom. Its 1940 statement on academic freedom is a classic: 1) the
freedom to do research and publish the results; 2) the freedom to discuss
subject matter in the classroom; and 3) the freedom to write and speak as citizens
without institutional censorship or unwanted sanction (AAUP 2001; Gerber 2014;
Ruch 2001; Teichler et al. 2013).
As is
also discussed in Chapter 2, in a 1957 statement, American Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter defined the “four essential freedoms” of a university
as: the freedom to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught, how
it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study (cited in Thelin 2004).
More importantly, these matters are reserved for the direct control of the faculty,
not for either the president or the trustees (Birnbaum and Eckel 2005).
To
guarantee academic freedom in the terms outlined above, shared governance has
developed, where faculty play an important role in core academic areas like
recruitment of new faculty, tenure and promotion, and academic programing. Faculty
should enjoy “a large degree of autonomy from lay control and normal
organizational control” (Clark 2008:123) in relation to the trustees of the
governing board and the administrators of colleges and universities (see also
Pennock et al. 2015). “The governing board and president should, on questions
of faculty status [the recruitment of new faculty, promotion, and dismissal],
as in other matters where the faculty has primary responsibility [educational
policies], concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for
compelling reasons which should be stated in detail” (AAUP 2001:221). Although
the selection of academic deans and other chief academic officers is the
responsibility of the president, it should be done “with the advice of, and in
consultation with, the appropriate faculty” (AAUP 2001:219).
The
process of achieving shared governance is the process of professionalization,
i.e., establishing mechanisms that will
foster the identity and calling of the profession and guarantee its autonomy
“in selecting the economic terms of work, the location and social organization
of work, and the technical content of the work” (Freidson 1970:44). This
negotiation of professional autonomy or academic freedom is usually done
between professional associations and other stakeholders in higher education.
AAUP, for example, “has been engaged in developing standards for sound academic
practice and in working for the acceptance of these standards by the community
of higher education” and by the society in general, including the state (AAUP
2001, ix).
Academic
professionalization is thus a process of constantly defining the boundaries of
academic freedom and defending faculty autonomy. In the U.S. for example, one
survey found that between 1970 and 2001 those who reported either faculty
determination or joint control with administrators in the recruitment of new
faculty members rose from 31 to 73 percent, and those who reported substantial
faculty control over tenure and promotion decisions rose from 36 to 71 percent (for
the statistics in this and the following paragraph, see Gerber 2014:159-160).
Those who reported substantial faculty control over the curriculum and degree
requirements rose from 80 percent to 90 percent.
Faculty
determination or joint authority in the selection of department chairs rose
from 22 percent in 1970 to 54 percent in 2001. Only four percent said that
faculty had no role at all. However, the faculty influence in the selection of
deans and vice presidents and presidents was small: 32 percent in 2001,
although still an increase from 14 percent in 1970, with only five percent
saying that faculty played no role at all. Moreover, more than 90 percent of
the institutions surveyed had some kind of senate, chaired mostly by an elected
faculty member. This could mean “fully collaborative decision making” or
“simple consultation” or “information sharing” (Gerber 2014:160).
Granted
that faculty power in the U.S. has been eroded to some extent in the last
decade (see Chapter 2), university teaching in the U.S. is still a very strong
profession, and it is fair to assume that in general professors in the U.S.
enjoy more academic freedom than in most other parts of the world. Thus, to use
faculty governance as developed in the U.S. as an indicator of professional
identity development in Macau would help us see more clearly the status of the
academic profession and identity of the professor. That is what I will do
below.
A Note on Our Research Methods
The university studied,
hereafter called the University, has both undergraduate and graduate programs,
and a fairly large faculty. Most of the faculty members are recruited
internationally. A majority have a Chinese cultural background, but they tend
to be returned students from the West, who were professionalized in the West
before they came to Macau. The University can be characterized as a “striving”
institution (Gonzales et al. 2014): it places great emphasis on improving its
position in international university rankings, has made great investment in
recruiting productive researchers and has distributed a huge amount of money
for research. Research support and most faculty benefits are in general superior
to many in the U.K. or the U.S.
The
research team interviewed faculty members, administrators, and students,
altogether 44 from the University: nine assistant professors, eight associate
professors, 10 full professors, six administrators, and 11 students, both
undergraduate and graduate. Most interviews lasted from one to one and a half
hours, but several lasted for two hours, and a couple of interviews were
through emails. We also interviewed three professors from three other
institutions of higher education to give us a sense of conditions elsewhere in
the region. The interviews were done in professors’ offices or cafes between
2013 and 2014.
I have not set out to look for deviant cases
to refine or reconstruct the theory of university governance, neither in analyzing
the case University nor in reporting individual faculty members’ points of view
(see Small 2009 about such methodological issues). The ultimate purpose of the paper
is to examine the mechanisms and processes of professionalization or the lack
thereof in a striving university. This method is in line with Clyde Mitchell’s
and Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, which seeks to uncover social
mechanisms, trace processes, and to understand the larger forces shaping those
mechanisms and processes, whether in unique or in deviant cases (see Small
2009).
The
research methods used here are also in line with Robert Yin’s (1989) principle
of sequential interviewing in that each case in our study (i.e., each
interviewee) “provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the question
at hand” (Small 2009, 24-25). I have used a similar set of questions with
different stakeholders, but they have all focused on the role of faculty in
research, teaching and service, from the perspective of various professors as
well as students. Interviews were conducted more like discussions,
explorations, and explanations than questions and answers. The objective is
saturation, i.e., team members are fairly confident that the cases we have
studied have provided us with most if not all the necessary information
regarding the status of professionalism in the region.
Findings and Discussion
The Role of Faculty
in Personnel Matters
As discussed above, professionalization
in the form of shared governance means that the faculty play a crucial role in the
recruitment of new faculty members and in promotion. Normally, the dean and the
president are not involved directly in the processes and will go along with committee
decisions. For the dean or the president to disapprove of a candidate without
compelling reasons would be a serious violation of shared governance and an
encroachment on professional autonomy and academic freedom. However, in our
case University, while faculty members may be involved in the selection of job
candidates, the rectors (presidents) can, and sometimes do, reject job
candidates approved by the faculty level committees usually headed either by a
dean or a vice president. (Since all the academic deans, vice presidents and
the president were men at the time of research, I will use “he” to refer to any
one of them.) This has caused discomfort among faculty, as one professor
comments (Interview Notes, Full5):
The rector
is too micro-managing. When we hire a faculty member, even if this is only an
assistant professor, he would use his veto power. But are you qualified to make
such decisions? What are your fields of study? You cannot possibly know every
field, right?
Usually the reasons given
are either that the candidate does not come from a prestigious university or he
or she does not have enough publications. Whatever the reason, the faculty role
is diminished.
Deans also have much more power than in the U.S.
and Europe in general. They decide the composition of the recruitment and
promotion committees; the identities of the members and how they are selected are
not public. At the meetings, the administrator directs where the discussion
goes (Interview Notes, Full10). Faculty’s, especially junior faculty’s, voices
are seldom heard, if ever (Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc1). The dean, in
consultation with the rector, decides which department can have new hires and
what kind. Sometimes the rector or vice rector makes that decision directly
with the department chair with little consultation with the dean. The dean
decides whether one’s promotion application can even be processed, his power
expanding especially when the criteria are not clear (Interview Notes, Assoc2).
Professors thus do not have real autonomy in choosing their own colleagues as
academic professionalization and freedom would require. Rather the dean is
often the person who decides the composition of the department, and sometimes
it is the rector who makes that decision.
Rather
than faculty determination or joint authority in the selection of department
chairs (see also Interview Notes, Admin2, Assoc5), in our case University these
are appointed by the dean and the rector with no consultation with the faculty.
Because of the lack of faculty participation in selecting department chairs,
people feel less of an attachment to the department, and the department chairs
feel they have more responsibility to the management than to the faculty and
students. The same problem applies to the higher management positions. The
appointment of deans, vice rectors and the rector may go through an open
international search. Faculty members may be invited to presentations and give
their opinions, but it is not clear how much their comments count (Interview
Notes, Assoc4, Assoc5, Full2). Many believe that participation is only a formality
(Interview Notes, Assoc2, Full5).
With
the mainlandization of Macau, it is not even clear whether the selections of
higher-level managers will go through an international search and involve
faculty participation, let alone lower level managers. In its most recent
selection of the rector position, for example, no faculty member was invited to
be part of the selection committee. It was not clear if even more than one
candidate was invited to a campus interview. Even though the committee held
meetings to ask for faculty opinion, it was not at all clear whether any
faculty opinions mattered. As a result of such selection methods, the managers
are obligated to serve the will of the higher authorities rather than the need
of faculty and students. We will discuss further the problem of mainlandization
later in the chapter.
The Role of Faculty
in Research and Teaching Policies
Professors at the
University are required to publish in SCI, SSCI, and A&HCI journals so that
they can increase the University’s citation indexes in its pursuit of world
rankings. These requirements are not usually negotiated with the faculty and
furthermore are driven very much by a science-based model (Interview Notes,
Full1) not fully applicable to humanities and social sciences. As one professor
says (Interview Notes, Full1),
I don’t write many journal
articles. I write books, I write chapters of books, occasionally, unlike
journal articles. And for me it’s not very interesting to write journal
articles. It has limited impact. But if a book is well received, it can have
considerable impact. But in the science field books are of second grade.
He
complains that his books and book chapters are not worth as much as a journal
article. Others point out that although books are representations of one’s
system of knowledge (Interview Notes, Assoc2, Assis2, Assoc2), they are not
valued, since they do not count in international rankings.
The University not only emphasizes
journal articles but requires that they be in English and published by
international publishers, especially for junior and middle-level faculty
members. Most international journals are not very interested in publishing
research on Macau. But that’s not the university’s concern. The editor of one
of the top journals in China studies once told me that he is not interested in
publishing Macau studies since it will not help his citation indexes. One
professor tells us that even scholarly research on Chinese literature must be
written in English in order to be recognized as important. This is like
requiring an American university paper on Shakespeare to be written in Chinese
to be considered valuable research. Local studies must be published
internationally, too, or they are not given much credit (Interview Notes,
Assoc6). Works published locally in Chinese are not counted by international
rating regimes and are therefore rarely valued by the administrators (see also
Interview Notes, Full2) who make their decisions top-down. Faculty protests are usually futile. In a
word, faculty may be free to do whatever research they want to do, but they
feel less free to publish their findings in whatever venues they choose.
The
pursuit of rankings has not only forced the faculty to change the way they do
their work but has also resulted in a change of values and professional
identity. In order to increase the production of indexed journal articles,
faculty members are assigned to research, balanced, or teaching tracks. Each
track carries an indexed journal paper production quota. Faculty unable to fulfill the quota are bumped
down to a lower track to teach more courses, which is often viewed as a
punishment, thus eroding the core values of education, rendering teaching more
or less meaningless and depriving teachers of their sense of calling and
professional identity. As a result, traditional teachers “feel very very
depressed, demoralized.” “The university ranking might have risen, but the idea
of the university is lost. Humanism is lost. People’s respect for you is lost”
(Interview Notes, Full3). Furthermore, dividing professors against their own desires
into three classes—researchers, researchers/teachers, and teachers—makes it
harder to build an academic community. It goes against “von Humboldt’s concept of the university, where teaching and
research are integrally linked—the Humboldtian model has been the guiding
principle of the American research university since the beginning” (Altbach and
Finkelstein 2014).
Finally, program changes and creations are basically
decided by administrators, rather than being bottom-up proposals based on what
faculty believe to be educational needs (Interview Notes, Full10). An academic
program is initiated or approved because the managers believe it is useful to
their own purposes, such as university rankings or government needs, rather
than what faculty believe to be educational or social needs.
As Chapters 2, 4 and 5 point out,
ideological control in China is thereby very much strengthened. That has a
ripple effect in Macau. For example, the faculty have to get approval from the
management when they invite guest speakers from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Professors who lean towards Taiwan independence or Hong Kong autonomy are often
denied entry into Macau at the customs. Faculty members on research trips to
Taiwan are required to report to the university authorities whom they have met
and what they have done. In both research and teaching policies, the faculty
are deprived of participation in much of the decision-making processes, and
their professional status and academic freedom are very much strained.
Faculty Involvement in
University Governance Organizations
The senate (at the
university level) and the academic council (AC, at the faculty/college level)
at our case University are only advisory bodies, according to the University’s
organizational charter published in 2013. The issues involving ACs are strictly
about curricular changes (abolition and creation of programs, program revision)
and student education (qualifications of graduate and postgraduate students). Again
decisions are made top-down, and only rubber-stamp approvals are sought at the
AC meeting. Even if an initiative is raised bottom-up, the dean can refuse to
take it to the AC meeting, since he is the chair of the AC and decides what
will be on the agenda. “Resolutions” passed at the AC may go nowhere unless
they involve minor decisions about things like course descriptions. As one
administrator comments (Interview Notes, Admin5 ),
Things
started at the top and often it is just a gesture of giving the endorsement by
the people, by the staff below without them having any real input in the
decision. By the time to discuss them, it is already decided, you know, so the
input of the staff doesn’t mean a lot… This generates a lot of bad morale from
people, because they feel like nobody really listens to them.
As a result, except in
rare cases when the dean is more democratic, people seldom speak out at their
AC meetings because they think that whatever they say is not going to be heeded
anyway. One professor calls it “learned helplessness.” The AC, faculty members
say, is just like the National People’s
Congress on the mainland at which people’s job is to raise their hands to
endorse the Party decisions (Interview Notes, Full5; Interview Notes full6 for
the same point).
There
is a faculty association, but its role is limited to organizing year-end
parties. It has made proposals to the University management regarding faculty
welfare, but they have gone nowhere. It has not been able to influence
personnel and educational policies at the University. The weakness of the
faculty association mirrors the weakness of the student associations (Interview
Notes, PhD1, UG3, UG4). There are faculty and university level student
associations. But even if they may participate in senate and AC meetings, they
seldom speak. This inactivity on the part of both faculty and student
organizations affects not only the professional identity of the professors but
the identity of the university as well.
The Creation of a
Docile Faculty and Study Body: The Opposite of a Professional Identity
The lack of shared
governance described above has resulted in the creation of a docile and
alienated faculty whose interests are constantly threatened as a result of their
loss of autonomy and academic freedom. As one professor points out (Interview
Notes, Full8),
Because there is no tenure
system, if you speak out, you may have your job in jeopardy, or various
interests affected, just like in China. Who dares to speak? Younger faculty
feel that they are too junior to speak out. Senior faculty want to protect the
benefits they have already obtained. But of course, not speaking out is against
everyone’s interest.
Several other faculty members also say that the lack of
tenure plays a key role in such docility (Interview Notes, Assoc3, Full6,
Full8). This lack of professional protection leads to much discontent,
mistreatment of faculty, low faculty morale, and alienation on the part of the
faculty. And there is almost no recourse. A professor comments
(Interview Notes, Full9):
It’s almost like they’re being hit by a big
truck or smashed on the ground because a dean or a department head does not
like that individual and then that individual is crushed and the individual
either seems to not know his rights or cannot find out what his rights are…
There is no staff faculty association worth its mettle that could at least
intervene on behalf of faculty and could say that we must have an appeals
process, that we must have it clearly written what the rights and what the
duties and what the obligations are of people, of faculty member, of staff, and
of deans and department heads and all that…
Those
who choose to speak out will do so at selected moments (Interview Notes,
Assoc2). But in general, the faculty are
docile, withdrawn, alienated, and demoralized despite being well-paid, with
good benefits and conference and research grants (Interview Notes, Full9,
Assoc2, Assoc3).
A
docile and obedient faculty leads to a docile student body, as we have also
mentioned above, and together they create a passive learning environment. There
are no faculty or student forums on politically controversial issues. In 2008,
the Macau government was going to legislate Article 23 of the Basic Law, a bill
on state subversion. This was controversial because people were concerned about
freedom of speech. Once the law was passed, what was allowed before might be
considered as illegal. So some faculty members decided to organize a forum to
discuss this matter, and they invited scholars from Hong Kong. Then just before
the forum, they cancelled the event because the University said that the space
that had been assigned to the forum was now unavailable. There has never been a
forum on the true nature of the “One country, Two systems” formula, or the Hong
Kong democracy movement. In the 2014 Hong Kong movement on universal suffrage,
there was almost no voice coming from Macau colleges and universities. Students
of communications at our case University did design a very professional flier
and it was posted in several places on campus, voicing their support of the
movement in Hong Kong. Some yellow ribbons were tied on the handrails of a bridge
on campus. But such activities never became a movement—people did not even know
who the leaders of these activities were. So their effect was very limited.
Two
professors comment that students at the University do not have the ability to
talk about politics (Interview Notes, Assis3). If protests are part of college
life and education in the US (Rivard 2014), that is not happening at our case University.
One student’s comment is apt here: the ethos of the university is harmony, not
vitality (Interview Notes, MA1). The
mission of the university is to train obedient workers rather than thinkers
(see Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc2, MA1, UG1). Increasingly the university generally
approves only professors who follow the Party line or who present on
non-political topics to come to speak on campus. The lower level managers
quickly follow the cue. In 2017 a professor was inviting a controversial
mainland scholar to speak on their academic forum. He asked the department
chair to write an invitation letter, but the latter refused. Even if a meeting
on a controversial topic such as the Cultural Revolution or national minority
issues was held, the organizers would make sure that it was as low-key as
possible. Academic freedom is eroded, the faculty is losing its identity and
calling, and students are losing opportunities to learn to be critical
thinkers.
Factors Affecting an Academic Professional Identity Formation
Given the issues of
vocationalization, part-time employment and corporatized governance discussed
above, what might be some of the political/structural, cultural, and individual
factors that make it difficult for the faculty to form a professional identity
and exercise academic freedom?
Chief among the political and structural factors is the
influence of mainland China. Under the “One country, Two systems” principle, Macau
is supposed to be a largely free society. Politically, however, it resembles China in
its authoritarianism, although there are some limited democratic practices in
the election of legislators and the Chief Executive (CE). In the so-called
“executive-led” system, the CE has the power to make all the important
decisions of the land. The legislature does not have the power to make laws but
can only improve and approve bills submitted by the government. The CE is
responsible to those who elect him, i.e., a 400 member committee, most of whom
are pro-government representatives of social organizations, and to the Central
government that appoints him. Increasingly the CE is required to answer to the
Central government rather than to the people of Macau. This corresponds to the
university system where the rectors are the decision makers and faculty have little
or no role to play regarding university policies. The rectors answer to the
Chief Executive, even to the Central government, and need not consult the
faculty to make decisions.
If the mainland Chinese system does not allow for much
academic freedom (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5), professors in Macau feel the
effect. For example, the Central government has an office in Macau, called the
Central Liaison Office (CLO), which coordinates the relationship between Macau
and the Central government. One interviewee
reports that when they invited the Consul of the American Consulate General in
Hong Kong and Macau to give a talk at the University, both the CLO and the
Macau government were upset and told them next time to report such invitations
beforehand (Interview Notes, Admin1). One faculty member reports that he heard that
a student was paid by the CLO to record his class. Another faculty member
reports that his relationship with Hong Kong and Macau democracy activists was
being investigated. A third faculty member reports that she and others were
told by the government to stay quiet on controversial issues in Macau.
A student organization used
to hold exhibitions in June of each year to commemorate the 1989 student
democracy movement in China, but they stopped the practice several years ago
when student organizers were called to meet officials from the CLO to talk
about it (Interview Notes, Full10). They were also asked about what professors
discussed in class. Some student organizers were from mainland China and had
family members who were civil servants there. They were afraid that their
activities in Macau would harm the opportunities of their family members back
home.
Apparently there is a
concerted effort in controlling what happens on campus. The mainland government
is increasingly concerned about the political inclinations and activities of
faculty and students in Macau for fear that Macau would become Hong Kong. As a
result self-censorship is now on the rise, and faculty and students are
becoming more docile.
Increasing political
control in Macau culminated in the dismissal of two professors from two
different universities in 2014, apparently for political reasons (Hao 2014). The
reason for no contract renewal regarding one of them was ostensibly violating
professional ethics to ask students to attend his political activities for
extra credit. But the actual reasons were his political activities: the
evidence the university presented included a letter of complaint about him
passing out election fliers outside a high school and a newspaper article
complaining that he should not comment on how the legislators should be
elected. There were also reports on their investigation of his class
assignments. It turned out that what he required was for students to attend two
or three out of 12 political gatherings in Macau and to write a report for
extra credit. And this was a political science class.
Another professor was fired
because he commented that the CE did not have charisma. The rector said openly
that the professor could not criticize the CE and comment on politics in Macau.
That he was invited to go to a meeting in Portugal about Macau politics was
also a reason for firing him. The lack of a tenure system only better serves
that control. If the University is treated as a government department
(Interview Notes, Admin1) as on the mainland, professional autonomy, identity and
academic freedom are likely to suffer. Professors are supposed to be free to
teach the way they think appropriate and to participate in political activities
off campus as long as such activities follow professional ethics.
Culturally, Macau is basically Chinese. If American culture
supports faculty governance, the Chinese hierarchical culture does not. To conform
to Confucianism, faculty obey the deans, deans obey the rector, the rector obeys
the University Council (UC, or the board of trustees) chair, the UC chair obeys
the CE of Macau, and the CE obeys the chief of China. They all have to say yes
to their superiors (Interview Notes, Admin2).
One
professor interviewed believes that this is in fact a mixture of Western
management style and Eastern culture (Interview Notes, Assis6; see also Full6,
Admin5). Indeed corporatization, part of academic capitalism (Gonzales et al. 2014;
Hao 2015; see also Chapter 2 and other chapters in the book), is on the rise in
American higher education and perhaps Macau university leaders have learned the
Western corporate management style. In one professor’s words, the management
and faculty have combined the problematic elements of two cultures when they
should be combining the best elements of both (Interview Notes, Full8).
That is
a very interesting observation. So why have both administrators and faculty
members chosen a system that largely goes against traditions of academic
freedom and professionalism? That brings us to the last issue of analysis:
individual factors.
One
interviewee observes that those Chinese who have been bathed in American
culture cannot wash their Chinese cultural traces away. Once they are back in China,
their Chinese culture comes alive again, and the American culture fades
(Interview Notes, Assoc6). Another interviewee comments that anyone [foreign
teachers] who jumps into Chinese culture will be tainted (Interview Notes,
Assis1).
Nevertheless,
despite structural and cultural influences it is individual managers who choose
top-down management style, and individual faculty members who choose whether
and how to speak out. As one interviewee further explains (Interview Notes,
Admin5):
I am an American, I am an
outsider, and I came here recognizing this is not America… That there are
certain ways people censure themselves, given the realities the central
government probably discourages parades or whatever, it is never… no one ever
told me I don’t do something, or I did something wrong, but on the other hand,
I am not saying anything controversial. I just, maybe it is just stereotype or
generalization that I just presumed it wasn’t going to be the way when I was
coming in… So different cultural
tradition and different kind of political system, there is a different rule
whether it is official or not official. And I am not saying that is good
or I think it should be like that, there ought to be freedom of speech or of
doing things, but I know that, you know, it is not… I am a visitor, it is not my country…I figure there are some
tradeoffs, benefits and costs.
Indeed, if one is an
American or Australian or Brit one learns to adapt to an authoritarian culture.
This adaptation is easier for the faculty members who are trained abroad but have
a Chinese background. Very few can escape from the political and cultural
constraints.
When
asked whether the faculty association should be more active in protecting
faculty interests like class scheduling or track assignments, some association
leaders’ response is that after seeing what happened in the Cultural
Revolution, etc., they hate politics and do not want to be troublemakers.
Others, however, want to be more involved and more active (Interview Notes,
Assis9). These are apparently individual choices. Most faculty members choose
not to speak out at AC meetings, as we discussed above. But there are some
people who do speak out, even though selectively. Some are afraid of joining
the faculty association for fear of being viewed as troublemakers, potential
enemies, the opposition (Interview Notes, Full9). But others do join. One dean
or president is more democratic than another. These are individual choices.
It is
true that structural/political and cultural factors greatly influence
individual behavior, but ultimately it is individuals who make the choice to
practice and obey top-down management style or to resist. And resistance need not be confrontational. But
given the general political atmosphere in China and Macau, academic freedom and
professionalism on the part of faculty are going to be an uphill battle if some
want to fight it.
Conclusions
To sum up, higher education in
Macau has a relatively short history and is very much characterized by academic
capitalism such as vocationalization, casualization of faculty, and political
and commercial corporatization that reflect the nature of the government system
in Macau and China. These are not conducive to the development of an academic
professional identity. Our case study of one university illustrates how weak or
no faculty shared governance erodes academic freedom and professional identity
formation in terms of who to teach, what to teach, and how to teach. Such weakness can be the result of structural
factors related to the hegemony of mainland China and to the executive-led
political system of Macau, as well as to cultural factors related to a
Confucian ethos. But both the political system and cultural constraints are
made by individuals. So they can also be results of individual choices. The
formation of a professional identity, or professionalization, and the extent to
which academic freedom can be exercised, are the aggregate outcome of
individual decisions made by both the management and faculty.
What is
the implication of this study, then? While it is difficult to change the
structural factors, faculty themselves may have some room to maneuver in their
own reactions and responses. Following Clark’s (2008, 131) remark:
When
the faculty member feels that this sensitive right [pursuit of one’s scholarly
interests] is infringed, he will run up the banners of academic freedom and
inquiry, or he will fret and become a festering sore in the body politic of the
campus, or he will retreat to apathy and his country house, or he will make it
known in other and greener pastures that he will listen to the siren call of a
good offer.
That is a range of
responses. In the face of political and cultural obstacles that hinder the
formation of a professional identity and practice of academic freedom, some
faculty members indeed choose to rediscover their purpose and assert themselves
(see also Irvine 2012, 391) under the banner of professionalism, a professional
identity, an academic calling, academic freedom, autonomy, and scientific
pursuits. They organize and strive to build an academic community and shared
governance. In Macau, though, such individuals are few and far between. Others
choose passive resistance, symbolic compliance, professional pragmatism,
various cunning maneuvers, and games-playing (Mok and Cheung 2011; Teelken
2012). Still others retreat to “learned helplessness,” “just collect your pay
and say nothing” (Interview Notes, Full6). A majority of the faculty members in
Macau adopt these last two attitudes and behavior. An increasing number of professors
at our case University have left the university or are actively looking for
another job.
Whatever
faculty members choose to do, it is a choice. It is true that faculty members
can easily succumb to powerful structural and cultural forces, but as Gerber
(2014, 168) points out, “faculty members themselves must bear some of the
responsibility for the retreat from higher education’s democratic purposes that
has already occurred in American colleges and universities.” The same is true of
the faculty in Macau who are involved in building a “contemporary” university.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The
system of professions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Altbach,
P. G. & Finkelstein, M. J. (2014). Essay on the way many reformers of
higher education are ignoring the faculty role. Inside
Higher Ed. October 7.
Aronowitz, S. & DiFazio, W. (1994). The jobless
future: Sci-Tech and the dogma of work. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bray M. with R. Butler, P. Hui, O. Kwo & E. Mang (2002), Higher Education in Macau: Growth and Strategic
Development. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre.
Birnbaum, R. & Eckel, P. D. (2005).
The dilemma of presidential leadership. In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdahl, & P.
J. Gumport (Eds.) American higher
education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges (pp. 340-365). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brint, S. (1994). In an age of experts: The changing role of
professionals in politics and public life. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Clark, B. R. (2008). On
higher education: Selected writings, 1956-2006. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Collins, R. (1990). Market closure and the
conflict theory of the professions. In M. Burrage and R. Torstendhl (Eds.) Professions in theory and history (pp. 25-43). Newbury
Park: Sage Publications.
Du, Shengyan. (2017), “Zhongguo gaodeng jiaoyu zhidu de
lishi, xianzhuang jiqi gaige luxian tu” (The history, status quo, and reform
challenges in China’s higher education). Pp. 515-51 in Zhidong Hao (ed.) Yaowang xingkong: Zhongguo zhengzhi tizhi
gaige de kunjing yu chulu (Stargazing: The dilemma of and prospects for
China’s political reform). New Taipei: Zhizhi xueshu chubanshe.
Freidson, E.
(1970). Profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Gerber, L. G. (2014). The
rise & decline of faculty governance: professionalization and the modern
American university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gonzales, L. D., Martinez, E. & Ordu, C. (2014). Exploring
faculty experiences in a striving university through the lens of academic
capitalism. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7)
1097-1115.
Hao, Z. (2003). Intellectuals
at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers.
Albany: SUNY Press.
----------. (2014). “Jiaoshou jiepin yu xueshu ziyou: Cong Aomen
liangwei jiaoshou bei jiepin
tanqi” (Professors’
dismissal and academic freedom: on the sacking of two professors in
Macau, Financial Times, Chinese website version,Nov. 25.
---------. (2017).
“What It Is Like and What Needs to Be Done: A Status Report on Higher
Education in Macau and Its Research.” Pp. 181-94 in Jisun Jung, Hugo Horta, and
Akiyoshi Yonezawa (eds.) Higher Education
Research as a Field of Study in Asia: History, Development and Future. New
York: Springer.
Irvine, C. (2012). Taking on “Best Practices”: A novel
response to managerialism in higher education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and
Culture, 12(3)389-404.
Larson, M. S. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A
sociological analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lau, S. P.
(2002). Aomen Jiaoyu Shi (A history
of education in Macau). Beijing: Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe (People’s education
press).
Li, X. (2001). 2001. Aomen Sheng
Baolu Xueyuan Yanjiu (A study on the College of St. Paul in Macau). Macau:
Aomen Ribao Chubanshe (Macao Daily press).
Ma, Z. (2010). “Wenhua Shiye xia de Aomen Gaodeng Jiaoyu”
(The transformation of Macau’s higher education in a cultural perspective). Gaojiao Tansuo (Higher Education Exploration), No. 2, 2010.
Mok, K. H. and Cheung, A. B. L.
(2011). Global aspirations and strategizing for world-class status: New form of
politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 33(3) 231-251.
Pennock, L. Jones, G. A., Leclerc J. M. Li, S.
X. (2015). Assessing the role and structure of academic senates in Canadian
universities, 2000–2012. Higher
Education, DOI 10.1007/s10734-014-9852-8.
Rivard, R. 2014. At William Peace, departing president is
criticized by many but loved by the board. Inside
Higher Ed, October 15.
Ruch, R. S. (2001). Higher ed., Inc.: The rise of the for-profit
university. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Small, M. L. (2009). “How many
cases do I need?” On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1)5-38.
Teelken, C. (2012). Compliance
or pragmatism: How do academics deal with managerialism in higher education? A
comparative study in three countries. Studies
in Higher Education, 37(3)271-290.
Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau government
(2013), Tertiary Education Services
Office Annual Book 2012. Macau: Tertiary Education Services Office.
Teichler, U., Arimoto, A. &
Cummings, W. K. (2013). The changing
academic profession: Major findings of a comparative survey. Dordrecht
Heidelberg: Springer.
Thelin, J. R. (2004). A history of American higher education. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Weber, M. (1973). On universities: The power of the state and
the dignity of the academic calling in imperial Germany, translated, edited
and with an Introductory Note by Edward Shils. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Yin, R. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods. London: Sage Publications.
[1] For an introduction to Macau and its brief history of higher education in the
following pages, see also Zhidong Hao (2017).
Abstract:
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of
institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared
governance. It is true that as compared with their counterparts in mainland
China, professors in Macau enjoy more academic freedom in terms of what
research to do and how they teach their classes. But they face increasing
restrictions in research and teaching, and lack power in academic programing
and the selection of their colleagues and academic managers. Using general
statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university,
this chapter illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the
structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The
findings have an important implication for the development of higher education
in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and
commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge to
academic freedom in one place in China but it is a challenge that higher
education faces elsewhere, too.
Situated at the west of the Pearl River estuary opposite Hong Kong,
Macau has a population of over 650,000. Colonized by Portugal in 1553, Macau
was returned to China in 1999 and since then has been under the “One country, Two
systems” arrangement with mainland China, operating on a capitalist system
rather than the current socialism-based one of mainland China. Macau has
inherited from the Portuguese a political system that is semi-democratic and
predominantly authoritarian, which meshes well with Chinese authoritarianism.
Such a political system will inevitably have an impact on its colleges and
universities and consequently on a faculty’s professional identity and their
academic freedom.[1]
With a relatively short history of higher
education, faculty professionalization has never developed in Macau as it has
in the West. Macau’s first higher
educational institution (HEI), the College of St. Paul, established by missionaries
in 1594, was closed in 1762 and attempts to build colleges did not succeed
until 1981 when Macau’s major university, the University of East Asia, was
built. At present there are 10 post-secondary schools of different orientations
and sizes, most of them focused on vocational training.
What is the Macau faculty’s professional
identity, what is their academic freedom like, and how
do they experience decision-making and thus control? What are the political, cultural and
individual obstacles to the
development of academic professionalism and freedom? In the following pages, I will 1) briefly
introduce the key features of higher education in Macau, especially as related
to issues of faculty professionalization; 2) define the professional identity
of faculty; 3) introduce the method of my qualitative research, i.e., a case
study of faculty at a university in Macau; 4) report the findings, illustrating
how faculty experience decision-making, and discuss the structural, cultural,
and individual factors influencing the formation of faculty’s professional
identity; 5) conclude, emphasizing the
role of individual faculty members in enhancing their professional identity and
academic freedom.
In-depth studies on higher education in Macau
are rare, and rarer is the study of faculty’s professional identity and
academic freedom. This study fills a gap in this intellectual pursuit and has some
important implications for both policymakers and practitioners in Macau and
elsewhere regarding the status of the academic profession.
Some Key Features of Higher
Education in Macau
The short history of higher education in Macau has not allowed
much time for faculty professionalization. The College of St. Paul (sometimes
called the St. Paul University College), financed by the Portuguese king and
the city senate and supplemented by donations from other Catholics and lay
people, has left little legacy. The college was small, with fewer than 100
students and 10 teachers and taught languages, including Latin, Japanese and
Chinese, theology, philosophy, ethics, and arts. Later physics, astronomy and
medicine were added (Li 2001:79-87, 109, 137-39). The college was closed in 1762 as a result of
the Rites Controversy when Jesuits were arrested and transported to Portugal.
For over
two hundred years the Portuguese Macau government did not establish another HEI.
In 1900-1904, Gezhi College moved to Macau but did not last long. Chinese
scholars then established Huaqiao (overseas) University (1950), Huanan (south
China) University (1950), Yuehai Wen Shang (humanities and business) College
(1949), and Zhongshan College of Education (Zhongshan Jiaoyu Xueyuan) (1950), but
they soon closed for lack of both social and political support. Students had to
go elsewhere for their college education (Lau 2002; Ma 2010). In 1981, some
Hong Kong businessmen were able to convince the Macau government to allow them
to establish the University of East Asia (UEA), mainly a market-oriented and
commercialized business school (Ma 2010:33).
Things
changed in 1988 when the government purchased UEA and changed its name to the
University of Macau (UM). Humanities, science, technology and the social
sciences were gradually introduced. Meanwhile, other colleges and universities
were established. Table 1 is a summary of the colleges and universities currently
in Macau, including the date of their establishment and the number of students
and faculty as of 2012/2013.
Table 1: HEIs in Macau as of 2012/2013
|
Year established
|
Number of students as of 2013 (full- time unless
specified)
|
Number of faculty members as of 2013 (both part time and
full time)
|
Ownership of the school
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
1981 (UEA)
1991 (UM)
|
8,481
|
598
|
Public
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
1991
|
2,961
|
351
|
Public
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
1995
|
1,573
|
109
|
Public
|
Macau Security Force Superior School (MSFSS)
|
1988
|
73
|
42
|
Public
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
1992 (AIOU)*
2011 (CityU)
|
1,296 + 482 (part-time)=1,778
|
109
|
Private
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
1996 (IIUM)**
2009 (USJ)
|
1,684
|
145
|
Private
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau (KWNCM)
|
1999
|
246+59 (part-time)=305
|
32
|
Private
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
2000
|
10,365
|
466
|
Private
|
Macau Institute of Management (MIM)
|
1984
|
362 (part-time)
|
38
|
Private
|
Macau Millennium College (MMC) ***
|
2001
|
194
|
26
|
Private
|
Sources of data: Mark Bray et al., with Roy Butler, Philip Hui,
Ora Kwo & Emily Mang (2002), Higher
Education in Macau, pp. 19-26; Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau
government (2013), Tertiary Education
Services Office Annual Book 2012.
*AIOU: The Asia
International Open University (Macau), the previous name of CityU.
**IIUM: The
Inter-University Institute of Macau, a joint initiative by the Catholic
University of Portugal and the Diocese of Macau now called USJ.
***The Macau
Millennium College’s Chinese name is Zhong Xi Chuangxin Xueyuan (Sino-Western
Innovation College), under the auspices of SJM (Sociedade de Jogos de Macau,
S.A.), a corporation whose main business is gambling.
From the
names of the HEIs in Macau in Table 1, one can see that most of them, MPI, IFT,
KWNCM, MSFSS, MIM, and MMC, are focused on vocational training. That raises the
question of the mission of higher education, but most importantly the identity
and calling of the faculty. If vocational training is the main goal of higher
education, one might not expect much academic training of the faculty. Thus we
see in Table 2 that a large percentage of faculty in Macau’s HEIs work on a part-time basis and do not have
a PhD.
Table
2: The Number of Full-time and Part-time Faculty and Those without a PhD degree
2012/2013
|
Full-time
|
Part-time
|
% of Part-time faculty
|
% of faculty members without a PhD
|
University of Macau (UM)
|
524
|
74
|
12%
|
30%
|
Macau Polytechnic Institute (MPI)
|
232
|
119
|
34%
|
60%
|
Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT)
|
73
|
36
|
33%
|
71%
|
Macau Security Force Superior School
|
2
|
40
|
95%
|
70%
|
City University of Macau (CityU)
|
48
|
61
|
56%
|
41%
|
University of St. Joseph (USJ)
|
68
|
77
|
53%
|
69%
|
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau
|
21
|
11
|
34%
|
66%
|
Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)
|
275
|
191
|
41%
|
52%
|
Macau Institute of Management
|
5
|
33
|
87%
|
85%
|
Macau Millennium College
|
5
|
21
|
81%
|
35%
|
Total
|
|
|
35%
|
49%
|
Source of data: Tertiary Education Services Office of
Macau government (2013), Tertiary
Education Services Office Annual Book 2012, pp. 119
More than a third of college and university
faculty in Macau have little job security as part-timers and about half, as
indicated by the lack of a PhD, are not fully professionalized. They therefore do
not enjoy the kind of professional autonomy and academic freedom faculty are
assumed under Western traditions to enjoy. Moreover, there is no tenure system
in Macau, so one can argue that even full-time faculty have no job security and
consequently do not enjoy much academic freedom. Dismissals rarely happen, but
in 2014 two full-time professors were sacked partly because of their political
views (Hao 2015). If full-time faculty with PhDs can be dismissed for political
reasons, part-time faculty are especially vulnerable.
But
what is academic freedom and how is it linked to academic professional
identity?
Academic Freedom and Professionalism: An Academic Identity
In China, professionalism
did not come into being until after the self-strengthening movement in the
1860s when technical intellectuals began to grow. Peking University, a modern
HEI, was established only in 1898. Faculty governance (or shared governance)
and academic freedom, both
indicators of academic professionalism
and identity, were introduced at Peking University in the early twentieth century
by Cai Yuanpei, the university president (1912-1927). A faculty senate (教授会) and faculty governance committee (行政会) were established. The faculty
senate’s job was to design academic policies and assess academic qualities, and
the faculty governance committee would serve like a board of trustees, assessing and making policies both
academic and beyond (Du 2017). However, since then the faculty governance
role has been markedly diminished under the authoritarianism of the Nationalist
Party, Mao Zedong’s dictatorship, and authoritarianism since the Deng Xiaoping
era. Presently, authoritarianism is the order of the day in both mainland China
and Macau, severely limiting a tradition of professionalism and academic
freedom, the major guarantee of quality in higher education.
What is
professionalism anyway? In this paper I assume professionalism as a universal
value and will use the development of professionalism in the U.S. as a
comparison point. The sociology of professions has long considered the meaning
of professionalism and professionalization (Abbott 1988; Aronowitz and DiFazio
1994; Brint 1994; Clark 2008; Collins 1990; Freidson 1970, 1973; Hao 2003; Larson 1977). The professionalism
of college teaching, i.e., the creation and transmission of knowledge (see also
the discussion of Kant and Durkheim in Chapter 2), may be what Clark (2008:319)
regards as the logic or identity of the profession. It is the social function
discharged by the professional scholar, according to the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) (Gerber 2014:52), and a calling, as Clark (2008:325-26) observes, that
“transmutes narrow self-interest into other-regarding and ideal-regarding
interests: one is linked to fellow workers and to a version of a larger common
good. It has moral content, contributing to civic virtue.” Here the professor
finds “the fascinations of research and the enchantments of teaching,” or “the
demon who holds the very fibers” of his or her very life, and “the rewards of
personal fulfillment and a sense of societal service.”
To
fulfill this academic calling, i.e., the creation of scientific knowledge and
education as “the cornerstone of the structure of society,” whose progress is
“essential to civilization,” “the professorial office should be one both of
dignity and of independence” (AAUP 2001, 294; see also Weber 1973). This means
that faculty needs to have academic freedom and the means to exercise that
freedom. In 1915, when the AAUP was established, its first job was to define
academic freedom. Its 1940 statement on academic freedom is a classic: 1) the
freedom to do research and publish the results; 2) the freedom to discuss
subject matter in the classroom; and 3) the freedom to write and speak as citizens
without institutional censorship or unwanted sanction (AAUP 2001; Gerber 2014;
Ruch 2001; Teichler et al. 2013).
As is
also discussed in Chapter 2, in a 1957 statement, American Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter defined the “four essential freedoms” of a university
as: the freedom to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught, how
it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study (cited in Thelin 2004).
More importantly, these matters are reserved for the direct control of the faculty,
not for either the president or the trustees (Birnbaum and Eckel 2005).
To
guarantee academic freedom in the terms outlined above, shared governance has
developed, where faculty play an important role in core academic areas like
recruitment of new faculty, tenure and promotion, and academic programing. Faculty
should enjoy “a large degree of autonomy from lay control and normal
organizational control” (Clark 2008:123) in relation to the trustees of the
governing board and the administrators of colleges and universities (see also
Pennock et al. 2015). “The governing board and president should, on questions
of faculty status [the recruitment of new faculty, promotion, and dismissal],
as in other matters where the faculty has primary responsibility [educational
policies], concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for
compelling reasons which should be stated in detail” (AAUP 2001:221). Although
the selection of academic deans and other chief academic officers is the
responsibility of the president, it should be done “with the advice of, and in
consultation with, the appropriate faculty” (AAUP 2001:219).
The
process of achieving shared governance is the process of professionalization,
i.e., establishing mechanisms that will
foster the identity and calling of the profession and guarantee its autonomy
“in selecting the economic terms of work, the location and social organization
of work, and the technical content of the work” (Freidson 1970:44). This
negotiation of professional autonomy or academic freedom is usually done
between professional associations and other stakeholders in higher education.
AAUP, for example, “has been engaged in developing standards for sound academic
practice and in working for the acceptance of these standards by the community
of higher education” and by the society in general, including the state (AAUP
2001, ix).
Academic
professionalization is thus a process of constantly defining the boundaries of
academic freedom and defending faculty autonomy. In the U.S. for example, one
survey found that between 1970 and 2001 those who reported either faculty
determination or joint control with administrators in the recruitment of new
faculty members rose from 31 to 73 percent, and those who reported substantial
faculty control over tenure and promotion decisions rose from 36 to 71 percent (for
the statistics in this and the following paragraph, see Gerber 2014:159-160).
Those who reported substantial faculty control over the curriculum and degree
requirements rose from 80 percent to 90 percent.
Faculty
determination or joint authority in the selection of department chairs rose
from 22 percent in 1970 to 54 percent in 2001. Only four percent said that
faculty had no role at all. However, the faculty influence in the selection of
deans and vice presidents and presidents was small: 32 percent in 2001,
although still an increase from 14 percent in 1970, with only five percent
saying that faculty played no role at all. Moreover, more than 90 percent of
the institutions surveyed had some kind of senate, chaired mostly by an elected
faculty member. This could mean “fully collaborative decision making” or
“simple consultation” or “information sharing” (Gerber 2014:160).
Granted
that faculty power in the U.S. has been eroded to some extent in the last
decade (see Chapter 2), university teaching in the U.S. is still a very strong
profession, and it is fair to assume that in general professors in the U.S.
enjoy more academic freedom than in most other parts of the world. Thus, to use
faculty governance as developed in the U.S. as an indicator of professional
identity development in Macau would help us see more clearly the status of the
academic profession and identity of the professor. That is what I will do
below.
A Note on Our Research Methods
The university studied,
hereafter called the University, has both undergraduate and graduate programs,
and a fairly large faculty. Most of the faculty members are recruited
internationally. A majority have a Chinese cultural background, but they tend
to be returned students from the West, who were professionalized in the West
before they came to Macau. The University can be characterized as a “striving”
institution (Gonzales et al. 2014): it places great emphasis on improving its
position in international university rankings, has made great investment in
recruiting productive researchers and has distributed a huge amount of money
for research. Research support and most faculty benefits are in general superior
to many in the U.K. or the U.S.
The
research team interviewed faculty members, administrators, and students,
altogether 44 from the University: nine assistant professors, eight associate
professors, 10 full professors, six administrators, and 11 students, both
undergraduate and graduate. Most interviews lasted from one to one and a half
hours, but several lasted for two hours, and a couple of interviews were
through emails. We also interviewed three professors from three other
institutions of higher education to give us a sense of conditions elsewhere in
the region. The interviews were done in professors’ offices or cafes between
2013 and 2014.
I have not set out to look for deviant cases
to refine or reconstruct the theory of university governance, neither in analyzing
the case University nor in reporting individual faculty members’ points of view
(see Small 2009 about such methodological issues). The ultimate purpose of the paper
is to examine the mechanisms and processes of professionalization or the lack
thereof in a striving university. This method is in line with Clyde Mitchell’s
and Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, which seeks to uncover social
mechanisms, trace processes, and to understand the larger forces shaping those
mechanisms and processes, whether in unique or in deviant cases (see Small
2009).
The
research methods used here are also in line with Robert Yin’s (1989) principle
of sequential interviewing in that each case in our study (i.e., each
interviewee) “provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the question
at hand” (Small 2009, 24-25). I have used a similar set of questions with
different stakeholders, but they have all focused on the role of faculty in
research, teaching and service, from the perspective of various professors as
well as students. Interviews were conducted more like discussions,
explorations, and explanations than questions and answers. The objective is
saturation, i.e., team members are fairly confident that the cases we have
studied have provided us with most if not all the necessary information
regarding the status of professionalism in the region.
Findings and Discussion
The Role of Faculty
in Personnel Matters
As discussed above, professionalization
in the form of shared governance means that the faculty play a crucial role in the
recruitment of new faculty members and in promotion. Normally, the dean and the
president are not involved directly in the processes and will go along with committee
decisions. For the dean or the president to disapprove of a candidate without
compelling reasons would be a serious violation of shared governance and an
encroachment on professional autonomy and academic freedom. However, in our
case University, while faculty members may be involved in the selection of job
candidates, the rectors (presidents) can, and sometimes do, reject job
candidates approved by the faculty level committees usually headed either by a
dean or a vice president. (Since all the academic deans, vice presidents and
the president were men at the time of research, I will use “he” to refer to any
one of them.) This has caused discomfort among faculty, as one professor
comments (Interview Notes, Full5):
The rector
is too micro-managing. When we hire a faculty member, even if this is only an
assistant professor, he would use his veto power. But are you qualified to make
such decisions? What are your fields of study? You cannot possibly know every
field, right?
Usually the reasons given
are either that the candidate does not come from a prestigious university or he
or she does not have enough publications. Whatever the reason, the faculty role
is diminished.
Deans also have much more power than in the U.S.
and Europe in general. They decide the composition of the recruitment and
promotion committees; the identities of the members and how they are selected are
not public. At the meetings, the administrator directs where the discussion
goes (Interview Notes, Full10). Faculty’s, especially junior faculty’s, voices
are seldom heard, if ever (Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc1). The dean, in
consultation with the rector, decides which department can have new hires and
what kind. Sometimes the rector or vice rector makes that decision directly
with the department chair with little consultation with the dean. The dean
decides whether one’s promotion application can even be processed, his power
expanding especially when the criteria are not clear (Interview Notes, Assoc2).
Professors thus do not have real autonomy in choosing their own colleagues as
academic professionalization and freedom would require. Rather the dean is
often the person who decides the composition of the department, and sometimes
it is the rector who makes that decision.
Rather
than faculty determination or joint authority in the selection of department
chairs (see also Interview Notes, Admin2, Assoc5), in our case University these
are appointed by the dean and the rector with no consultation with the faculty.
Because of the lack of faculty participation in selecting department chairs,
people feel less of an attachment to the department, and the department chairs
feel they have more responsibility to the management than to the faculty and
students. The same problem applies to the higher management positions. The
appointment of deans, vice rectors and the rector may go through an open
international search. Faculty members may be invited to presentations and give
their opinions, but it is not clear how much their comments count (Interview
Notes, Assoc4, Assoc5, Full2). Many believe that participation is only a formality
(Interview Notes, Assoc2, Full5).
With
the mainlandization of Macau, it is not even clear whether the selections of
higher-level managers will go through an international search and involve
faculty participation, let alone lower level managers. In its most recent
selection of the rector position, for example, no faculty member was invited to
be part of the selection committee. It was not clear if even more than one
candidate was invited to a campus interview. Even though the committee held
meetings to ask for faculty opinion, it was not at all clear whether any
faculty opinions mattered. As a result of such selection methods, the managers
are obligated to serve the will of the higher authorities rather than the need
of faculty and students. We will discuss further the problem of mainlandization
later in the chapter.
The Role of Faculty
in Research and Teaching Policies
Professors at the
University are required to publish in SCI, SSCI, and A&HCI journals so that
they can increase the University’s citation indexes in its pursuit of world
rankings. These requirements are not usually negotiated with the faculty and
furthermore are driven very much by a science-based model (Interview Notes,
Full1) not fully applicable to humanities and social sciences. As one professor
says (Interview Notes, Full1),
I don’t write many journal
articles. I write books, I write chapters of books, occasionally, unlike
journal articles. And for me it’s not very interesting to write journal
articles. It has limited impact. But if a book is well received, it can have
considerable impact. But in the science field books are of second grade.
He
complains that his books and book chapters are not worth as much as a journal
article. Others point out that although books are representations of one’s
system of knowledge (Interview Notes, Assoc2, Assis2, Assoc2), they are not
valued, since they do not count in international rankings.
The University not only emphasizes
journal articles but requires that they be in English and published by
international publishers, especially for junior and middle-level faculty
members. Most international journals are not very interested in publishing
research on Macau. But that’s not the university’s concern. The editor of one
of the top journals in China studies once told me that he is not interested in
publishing Macau studies since it will not help his citation indexes. One
professor tells us that even scholarly research on Chinese literature must be
written in English in order to be recognized as important. This is like
requiring an American university paper on Shakespeare to be written in Chinese
to be considered valuable research. Local studies must be published
internationally, too, or they are not given much credit (Interview Notes,
Assoc6). Works published locally in Chinese are not counted by international
rating regimes and are therefore rarely valued by the administrators (see also
Interview Notes, Full2) who make their decisions top-down. Faculty protests are usually futile. In a
word, faculty may be free to do whatever research they want to do, but they
feel less free to publish their findings in whatever venues they choose.
The
pursuit of rankings has not only forced the faculty to change the way they do
their work but has also resulted in a change of values and professional
identity. In order to increase the production of indexed journal articles,
faculty members are assigned to research, balanced, or teaching tracks. Each
track carries an indexed journal paper production quota. Faculty unable to fulfill the quota are bumped
down to a lower track to teach more courses, which is often viewed as a
punishment, thus eroding the core values of education, rendering teaching more
or less meaningless and depriving teachers of their sense of calling and
professional identity. As a result, traditional teachers “feel very very
depressed, demoralized.” “The university ranking might have risen, but the idea
of the university is lost. Humanism is lost. People’s respect for you is lost”
(Interview Notes, Full3). Furthermore, dividing professors against their own desires
into three classes—researchers, researchers/teachers, and teachers—makes it
harder to build an academic community. It goes against “von Humboldt’s concept of the university, where teaching and
research are integrally linked—the Humboldtian model has been the guiding
principle of the American research university since the beginning” (Altbach and
Finkelstein 2014).
Finally, program changes and creations are basically
decided by administrators, rather than being bottom-up proposals based on what
faculty believe to be educational needs (Interview Notes, Full10). An academic
program is initiated or approved because the managers believe it is useful to
their own purposes, such as university rankings or government needs, rather
than what faculty believe to be educational or social needs.
As Chapters 2, 4 and 5 point out,
ideological control in China is thereby very much strengthened. That has a
ripple effect in Macau. For example, the faculty have to get approval from the
management when they invite guest speakers from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Professors who lean towards Taiwan independence or Hong Kong autonomy are often
denied entry into Macau at the customs. Faculty members on research trips to
Taiwan are required to report to the university authorities whom they have met
and what they have done. In both research and teaching policies, the faculty
are deprived of participation in much of the decision-making processes, and
their professional status and academic freedom are very much strained.
Faculty Involvement in
University Governance Organizations
The senate (at the
university level) and the academic council (AC, at the faculty/college level)
at our case University are only advisory bodies, according to the University’s
organizational charter published in 2013. The issues involving ACs are strictly
about curricular changes (abolition and creation of programs, program revision)
and student education (qualifications of graduate and postgraduate students). Again
decisions are made top-down, and only rubber-stamp approvals are sought at the
AC meeting. Even if an initiative is raised bottom-up, the dean can refuse to
take it to the AC meeting, since he is the chair of the AC and decides what
will be on the agenda. “Resolutions” passed at the AC may go nowhere unless
they involve minor decisions about things like course descriptions. As one
administrator comments (Interview Notes, Admin5 ),
Things
started at the top and often it is just a gesture of giving the endorsement by
the people, by the staff below without them having any real input in the
decision. By the time to discuss them, it is already decided, you know, so the
input of the staff doesn’t mean a lot… This generates a lot of bad morale from
people, because they feel like nobody really listens to them.
As a result, except in
rare cases when the dean is more democratic, people seldom speak out at their
AC meetings because they think that whatever they say is not going to be heeded
anyway. One professor calls it “learned helplessness.” The AC, faculty members
say, is just like the National People’s
Congress on the mainland at which people’s job is to raise their hands to
endorse the Party decisions (Interview Notes, Full5; Interview Notes full6 for
the same point).
There
is a faculty association, but its role is limited to organizing year-end
parties. It has made proposals to the University management regarding faculty
welfare, but they have gone nowhere. It has not been able to influence
personnel and educational policies at the University. The weakness of the
faculty association mirrors the weakness of the student associations (Interview
Notes, PhD1, UG3, UG4). There are faculty and university level student
associations. But even if they may participate in senate and AC meetings, they
seldom speak. This inactivity on the part of both faculty and student
organizations affects not only the professional identity of the professors but
the identity of the university as well.
The Creation of a
Docile Faculty and Study Body: The Opposite of a Professional Identity
The lack of shared
governance described above has resulted in the creation of a docile and
alienated faculty whose interests are constantly threatened as a result of their
loss of autonomy and academic freedom. As one professor points out (Interview
Notes, Full8),
Because there is no tenure
system, if you speak out, you may have your job in jeopardy, or various
interests affected, just like in China. Who dares to speak? Younger faculty
feel that they are too junior to speak out. Senior faculty want to protect the
benefits they have already obtained. But of course, not speaking out is against
everyone’s interest.
Several other faculty members also say that the lack of
tenure plays a key role in such docility (Interview Notes, Assoc3, Full6,
Full8). This lack of professional protection leads to much discontent,
mistreatment of faculty, low faculty morale, and alienation on the part of the
faculty. And there is almost no recourse. A professor comments
(Interview Notes, Full9):
It’s almost like they’re being hit by a big
truck or smashed on the ground because a dean or a department head does not
like that individual and then that individual is crushed and the individual
either seems to not know his rights or cannot find out what his rights are…
There is no staff faculty association worth its mettle that could at least
intervene on behalf of faculty and could say that we must have an appeals
process, that we must have it clearly written what the rights and what the
duties and what the obligations are of people, of faculty member, of staff, and
of deans and department heads and all that…
Those
who choose to speak out will do so at selected moments (Interview Notes,
Assoc2). But in general, the faculty are
docile, withdrawn, alienated, and demoralized despite being well-paid, with
good benefits and conference and research grants (Interview Notes, Full9,
Assoc2, Assoc3).
A
docile and obedient faculty leads to a docile student body, as we have also
mentioned above, and together they create a passive learning environment. There
are no faculty or student forums on politically controversial issues. In 2008,
the Macau government was going to legislate Article 23 of the Basic Law, a bill
on state subversion. This was controversial because people were concerned about
freedom of speech. Once the law was passed, what was allowed before might be
considered as illegal. So some faculty members decided to organize a forum to
discuss this matter, and they invited scholars from Hong Kong. Then just before
the forum, they cancelled the event because the University said that the space
that had been assigned to the forum was now unavailable. There has never been a
forum on the true nature of the “One country, Two systems” formula, or the Hong
Kong democracy movement. In the 2014 Hong Kong movement on universal suffrage,
there was almost no voice coming from Macau colleges and universities. Students
of communications at our case University did design a very professional flier
and it was posted in several places on campus, voicing their support of the
movement in Hong Kong. Some yellow ribbons were tied on the handrails of a bridge
on campus. But such activities never became a movement—people did not even know
who the leaders of these activities were. So their effect was very limited.
Two
professors comment that students at the University do not have the ability to
talk about politics (Interview Notes, Assis3). If protests are part of college
life and education in the US (Rivard 2014), that is not happening at our case University.
One student’s comment is apt here: the ethos of the university is harmony, not
vitality (Interview Notes, MA1). The
mission of the university is to train obedient workers rather than thinkers
(see Interview Notes, Assis1, Assoc2, MA1, UG1). Increasingly the university generally
approves only professors who follow the Party line or who present on
non-political topics to come to speak on campus. The lower level managers
quickly follow the cue. In 2017 a professor was inviting a controversial
mainland scholar to speak on their academic forum. He asked the department
chair to write an invitation letter, but the latter refused. Even if a meeting
on a controversial topic such as the Cultural Revolution or national minority
issues was held, the organizers would make sure that it was as low-key as
possible. Academic freedom is eroded, the faculty is losing its identity and
calling, and students are losing opportunities to learn to be critical
thinkers.
Factors Affecting an Academic Professional Identity Formation
Given the issues of
vocationalization, part-time employment and corporatized governance discussed
above, what might be some of the political/structural, cultural, and individual
factors that make it difficult for the faculty to form a professional identity
and exercise academic freedom?
Chief among the political and structural factors is the
influence of mainland China. Under the “One country, Two systems” principle, Macau
is supposed to be a largely free society. Politically, however, it resembles China in
its authoritarianism, although there are some limited democratic practices in
the election of legislators and the Chief Executive (CE). In the so-called
“executive-led” system, the CE has the power to make all the important
decisions of the land. The legislature does not have the power to make laws but
can only improve and approve bills submitted by the government. The CE is
responsible to those who elect him, i.e., a 400 member committee, most of whom
are pro-government representatives of social organizations, and to the Central
government that appoints him. Increasingly the CE is required to answer to the
Central government rather than to the people of Macau. This corresponds to the
university system where the rectors are the decision makers and faculty have little
or no role to play regarding university policies. The rectors answer to the
Chief Executive, even to the Central government, and need not consult the
faculty to make decisions.
If the mainland Chinese system does not allow for much
academic freedom (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5), professors in Macau feel the
effect. For example, the Central government has an office in Macau, called the
Central Liaison Office (CLO), which coordinates the relationship between Macau
and the Central government. One interviewee
reports that when they invited the Consul of the American Consulate General in
Hong Kong and Macau to give a talk at the University, both the CLO and the
Macau government were upset and told them next time to report such invitations
beforehand (Interview Notes, Admin1). One faculty member reports that he heard that
a student was paid by the CLO to record his class. Another faculty member
reports that his relationship with Hong Kong and Macau democracy activists was
being investigated. A third faculty member reports that she and others were
told by the government to stay quiet on controversial issues in Macau.
A student organization used
to hold exhibitions in June of each year to commemorate the 1989 student
democracy movement in China, but they stopped the practice several years ago
when student organizers were called to meet officials from the CLO to talk
about it (Interview Notes, Full10). They were also asked about what professors
discussed in class. Some student organizers were from mainland China and had
family members who were civil servants there. They were afraid that their
activities in Macau would harm the opportunities of their family members back
home.
Apparently there is a
concerted effort in controlling what happens on campus. The mainland government
is increasingly concerned about the political inclinations and activities of
faculty and students in Macau for fear that Macau would become Hong Kong. As a
result self-censorship is now on the rise, and faculty and students are
becoming more docile.
Increasing political
control in Macau culminated in the dismissal of two professors from two
different universities in 2014, apparently for political reasons (Hao 2014). The
reason for no contract renewal regarding one of them was ostensibly violating
professional ethics to ask students to attend his political activities for
extra credit. But the actual reasons were his political activities: the
evidence the university presented included a letter of complaint about him
passing out election fliers outside a high school and a newspaper article
complaining that he should not comment on how the legislators should be
elected. There were also reports on their investigation of his class
assignments. It turned out that what he required was for students to attend two
or three out of 12 political gatherings in Macau and to write a report for
extra credit. And this was a political science class.
Another professor was fired
because he commented that the CE did not have charisma. The rector said openly
that the professor could not criticize the CE and comment on politics in Macau.
That he was invited to go to a meeting in Portugal about Macau politics was
also a reason for firing him. The lack of a tenure system only better serves
that control. If the University is treated as a government department
(Interview Notes, Admin1) as on the mainland, professional autonomy, identity and
academic freedom are likely to suffer. Professors are supposed to be free to
teach the way they think appropriate and to participate in political activities
off campus as long as such activities follow professional ethics.
Culturally, Macau is basically Chinese. If American culture
supports faculty governance, the Chinese hierarchical culture does not. To conform
to Confucianism, faculty obey the deans, deans obey the rector, the rector obeys
the University Council (UC, or the board of trustees) chair, the UC chair obeys
the CE of Macau, and the CE obeys the chief of China. They all have to say yes
to their superiors (Interview Notes, Admin2).
One
professor interviewed believes that this is in fact a mixture of Western
management style and Eastern culture (Interview Notes, Assis6; see also Full6,
Admin5). Indeed corporatization, part of academic capitalism (Gonzales et al. 2014;
Hao 2015; see also Chapter 2 and other chapters in the book), is on the rise in
American higher education and perhaps Macau university leaders have learned the
Western corporate management style. In one professor’s words, the management
and faculty have combined the problematic elements of two cultures when they
should be combining the best elements of both (Interview Notes, Full8).
That is
a very interesting observation. So why have both administrators and faculty
members chosen a system that largely goes against traditions of academic
freedom and professionalism? That brings us to the last issue of analysis:
individual factors.
One
interviewee observes that those Chinese who have been bathed in American
culture cannot wash their Chinese cultural traces away. Once they are back in China,
their Chinese culture comes alive again, and the American culture fades
(Interview Notes, Assoc6). Another interviewee comments that anyone [foreign
teachers] who jumps into Chinese culture will be tainted (Interview Notes,
Assis1).
Nevertheless,
despite structural and cultural influences it is individual managers who choose
top-down management style, and individual faculty members who choose whether
and how to speak out. As one interviewee further explains (Interview Notes,
Admin5):
I am an American, I am an
outsider, and I came here recognizing this is not America… That there are
certain ways people censure themselves, given the realities the central
government probably discourages parades or whatever, it is never… no one ever
told me I don’t do something, or I did something wrong, but on the other hand,
I am not saying anything controversial. I just, maybe it is just stereotype or
generalization that I just presumed it wasn’t going to be the way when I was
coming in… So different cultural
tradition and different kind of political system, there is a different rule
whether it is official or not official. And I am not saying that is good
or I think it should be like that, there ought to be freedom of speech or of
doing things, but I know that, you know, it is not… I am a visitor, it is not my country…I figure there are some
tradeoffs, benefits and costs.
Indeed, if one is an
American or Australian or Brit one learns to adapt to an authoritarian culture.
This adaptation is easier for the faculty members who are trained abroad but have
a Chinese background. Very few can escape from the political and cultural
constraints.
When
asked whether the faculty association should be more active in protecting
faculty interests like class scheduling or track assignments, some association
leaders’ response is that after seeing what happened in the Cultural
Revolution, etc., they hate politics and do not want to be troublemakers.
Others, however, want to be more involved and more active (Interview Notes,
Assis9). These are apparently individual choices. Most faculty members choose
not to speak out at AC meetings, as we discussed above. But there are some
people who do speak out, even though selectively. Some are afraid of joining
the faculty association for fear of being viewed as troublemakers, potential
enemies, the opposition (Interview Notes, Full9). But others do join. One dean
or president is more democratic than another. These are individual choices.
It is
true that structural/political and cultural factors greatly influence
individual behavior, but ultimately it is individuals who make the choice to
practice and obey top-down management style or to resist. And resistance need not be confrontational. But
given the general political atmosphere in China and Macau, academic freedom and
professionalism on the part of faculty are going to be an uphill battle if some
want to fight it.
Conclusions
To sum up, higher education in
Macau has a relatively short history and is very much characterized by academic
capitalism such as vocationalization, casualization of faculty, and political
and commercial corporatization that reflect the nature of the government system
in Macau and China. These are not conducive to the development of an academic
professional identity. Our case study of one university illustrates how weak or
no faculty shared governance erodes academic freedom and professional identity
formation in terms of who to teach, what to teach, and how to teach. Such weakness can be the result of structural
factors related to the hegemony of mainland China and to the executive-led
political system of Macau, as well as to cultural factors related to a
Confucian ethos. But both the political system and cultural constraints are
made by individuals. So they can also be results of individual choices. The
formation of a professional identity, or professionalization, and the extent to
which academic freedom can be exercised, are the aggregate outcome of
individual decisions made by both the management and faculty.
What is
the implication of this study, then? While it is difficult to change the
structural factors, faculty themselves may have some room to maneuver in their
own reactions and responses. Following Clark’s (2008, 131) remark:
When
the faculty member feels that this sensitive right [pursuit of one’s scholarly
interests] is infringed, he will run up the banners of academic freedom and
inquiry, or he will fret and become a festering sore in the body politic of the
campus, or he will retreat to apathy and his country house, or he will make it
known in other and greener pastures that he will listen to the siren call of a
good offer.
That is a range of
responses. In the face of political and cultural obstacles that hinder the
formation of a professional identity and practice of academic freedom, some
faculty members indeed choose to rediscover their purpose and assert themselves
(see also Irvine 2012, 391) under the banner of professionalism, a professional
identity, an academic calling, academic freedom, autonomy, and scientific
pursuits. They organize and strive to build an academic community and shared
governance. In Macau, though, such individuals are few and far between. Others
choose passive resistance, symbolic compliance, professional pragmatism,
various cunning maneuvers, and games-playing (Mok and Cheung 2011; Teelken
2012). Still others retreat to “learned helplessness,” “just collect your pay
and say nothing” (Interview Notes, Full6). A majority of the faculty members in
Macau adopt these last two attitudes and behavior. An increasing number of professors
at our case University have left the university or are actively looking for
another job.
Whatever
faculty members choose to do, it is a choice. It is true that faculty members
can easily succumb to powerful structural and cultural forces, but as Gerber
(2014, 168) points out, “faculty members themselves must bear some of the
responsibility for the retreat from higher education’s democratic purposes that
has already occurred in American colleges and universities.” The same is true of
the faculty in Macau who are involved in building a “contemporary” university.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The
system of professions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Altbach,
P. G. & Finkelstein, M. J. (2014). Essay on the way many reformers of
higher education are ignoring the faculty role. Inside
Higher Ed. October 7.
Aronowitz, S. & DiFazio, W. (1994). The jobless
future: Sci-Tech and the dogma of work. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bray M. with R. Butler, P. Hui, O. Kwo & E. Mang (2002), Higher Education in Macau: Growth and Strategic
Development. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre.
Birnbaum, R. & Eckel, P. D. (2005).
The dilemma of presidential leadership. In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdahl, & P.
J. Gumport (Eds.) American higher
education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges (pp. 340-365). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brint, S. (1994). In an age of experts: The changing role of
professionals in politics and public life. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Clark, B. R. (2008). On
higher education: Selected writings, 1956-2006. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Collins, R. (1990). Market closure and the
conflict theory of the professions. In M. Burrage and R. Torstendhl (Eds.) Professions in theory and history (pp. 25-43). Newbury
Park: Sage Publications.
Du, Shengyan. (2017), “Zhongguo gaodeng jiaoyu zhidu de
lishi, xianzhuang jiqi gaige luxian tu” (The history, status quo, and reform
challenges in China’s higher education). Pp. 515-51 in Zhidong Hao (ed.) Yaowang xingkong: Zhongguo zhengzhi tizhi
gaige de kunjing yu chulu (Stargazing: The dilemma of and prospects for
China’s political reform). New Taipei: Zhizhi xueshu chubanshe.
Freidson, E.
(1970). Profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Gerber, L. G. (2014). The
rise & decline of faculty governance: professionalization and the modern
American university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gonzales, L. D., Martinez, E. & Ordu, C. (2014). Exploring
faculty experiences in a striving university through the lens of academic
capitalism. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7)
1097-1115.
Hao, Z. (2003). Intellectuals
at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers.
Albany: SUNY Press.
----------. (2014). “Jiaoshou jiepin yu xueshu ziyou: Cong Aomen
liangwei jiaoshou bei jiepin
tanqi” (Professors’
dismissal and academic freedom: on the sacking of two professors in
Macau, Financial Times, Chinese website version,Nov. 25.
---------. (2017).
“What It Is Like and What Needs to Be Done: A Status Report on Higher
Education in Macau and Its Research.” Pp. 181-94 in Jisun Jung, Hugo Horta, and
Akiyoshi Yonezawa (eds.) Higher Education
Research as a Field of Study in Asia: History, Development and Future. New
York: Springer.
Irvine, C. (2012). Taking on “Best Practices”: A novel
response to managerialism in higher education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and
Culture, 12(3)389-404.
Larson, M. S. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A
sociological analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lau, S. P.
(2002). Aomen Jiaoyu Shi (A history
of education in Macau). Beijing: Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe (People’s education
press).
Li, X. (2001). 2001. Aomen Sheng
Baolu Xueyuan Yanjiu (A study on the College of St. Paul in Macau). Macau:
Aomen Ribao Chubanshe (Macao Daily press).
Ma, Z. (2010). “Wenhua Shiye xia de Aomen Gaodeng Jiaoyu”
(The transformation of Macau’s higher education in a cultural perspective). Gaojiao Tansuo (Higher Education Exploration), No. 2, 2010.
Mok, K. H. and Cheung, A. B. L.
(2011). Global aspirations and strategizing for world-class status: New form of
politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 33(3) 231-251.
Pennock, L. Jones, G. A., Leclerc J. M. Li, S.
X. (2015). Assessing the role and structure of academic senates in Canadian
universities, 2000–2012. Higher
Education, DOI 10.1007/s10734-014-9852-8.
Rivard, R. 2014. At William Peace, departing president is
criticized by many but loved by the board. Inside
Higher Ed, October 15.
Ruch, R. S. (2001). Higher ed., Inc.: The rise of the for-profit
university. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Small, M. L. (2009). “How many
cases do I need?” On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1)5-38.
Teelken, C. (2012). Compliance
or pragmatism: How do academics deal with managerialism in higher education? A
comparative study in three countries. Studies
in Higher Education, 37(3)271-290.
Tertiary Education Services Office of Macau government
(2013), Tertiary Education Services
Office Annual Book 2012. Macau: Tertiary Education Services Office.
Teichler, U., Arimoto, A. &
Cummings, W. K. (2013). The changing
academic profession: Major findings of a comparative survey. Dordrecht
Heidelberg: Springer.
Thelin, J. R. (2004). A history of American higher education. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Weber, M. (1973). On universities: The power of the state and
the dignity of the academic calling in imperial Germany, translated, edited
and with an Introductory Note by Edward Shils. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Yin, R. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods. London: Sage Publications.
[1] For an introduction to Macau and its brief history of higher education in the
following pages, see also Zhidong Hao (2017).