Twelve years ago at this time, I was admitted to Zhejiang University as a master’s student. At that moment, I was full of ambition and admiration for the century-old university I was going to study. I thought that all the people who could enter Zhejiang University for graduate studies with me should be better. At the end of the examination, the eight students who were confirmed to be admitted went out to eat together.
From the chat, I was disappointed to find that most of the people who got in were people who only knew how to memorize books. They had no interest in real reading, and the books they had read were almost all limited to textbooks. That day, at the dinner table, I began to doubt whether all graduate students were genuine, and I became disillusioned in less than six months after enrolling in September 2008, and in 2011, soon after I started my PhD, I became completely disillusioned.
The initial disillusionment came from the upbringing of the “elite”.
Within three days of enrolling in my master’s program, I was confused. A roommate in the same dormitory, the first thing he did every day when he woke up was to go into the dormitory bathroom to take a dump. The odd thing is that the door is never closed and the exhaust fan is not turned on. Two actions are just a handful, with normal thinking is really incomprehensible. Since there is no window in the bathroom, the stench mostly wafts into the dormitory. Several roommates reminded him several times, but he did not take it seriously. From that time on, I had doubts about whether the upbringing of academic reserves at prestigious universities was worthy of a degree. A few years later, I ran into another one who didn’t turn on the exhaust fan for his bowels. Am I too unlucky, or are there not a few people like that?
Every day at 12:30 p.m., at the parking spot on the Yuquan campus, when the graduate school bus arrives, all the people use their best efforts to squeeze up, and it is simply a stain on the ground. If you take a picture and don’t tell you it’s a graduate student of Zhejiang University, you can hardly think that all these people are “elites” of 985 universities. Some people return to the dormitory in the middle of the night, completely ignoring other roommates have turned off the lights to sleep. The light was switched on to light up the room and wake people up. This is not enough, after washing up, lying on the bed leisurely reading newspapers and magazines, until they drifted off to sleep, sleepless roommates up to turn off the lights.
Can we expect these “elites”, who are so poorly educated personally, to have a minimum of cultural and social concern? Where will academic research without humanistic feelings lead society? Is the current academic ecology already indicative of the problem?
The second issue that disillusioned me was the academic interests of the “elites.
I was surprised to find, as my interactions expanded, that most liberal arts PhD students generally lacked a minimum of concern for the ultimate mission of their discipline. While most Westerners do their doctoral studies and research out of sincere interest, a strange phenomenon prevails in our universities: Ph.D.s in political science are not interested in politics; Ph.D.s in education generally lack concern for the real problems of Chinese education. Those who offer critiques and diagnoses of the education system are almost always non-education professionals. I wonder if you have noticed? PhDs in law generally lack pain about the problems of rule of law in China; PhDs in sociology simply don’t care about people’s hardships …… Where do they get the motivation to do PhD and research?
What surprises and confuses me most is that most of them are able to make their “research” flourish, participating in one topic after another, publishing one paper after another, and even winning awards.
The deeper motivation for Western scholars to engage in sustained academic inquiry comes from a concern for the ultimate mission of the discipline to which they belong. Without this ontological concern, where do these Chinese academics get their motivation for research? The only explanation is that it comes from juggling degrees, finding jobs, and juggling the number of papers and titles. Without an ontological concern, how do these Chinese academics develop a sense of problem? Are they studying real problems or pseudo-problems? Or do they have no problem awareness at all, but are just rubbing it in? Without ontological concern, how can the quality of the research of these Chinese academics be guaranteed? China has the highest number of papers in the world, but what is the quality?
The situation seems to be getting less and less optimistic. In the early years, Chinese universities trained undergraduates who were assigned or could find jobs well, so those who went to graduate school were those who had a sincere interest in their subjects. When they became university teachers, their academic level was not important, but at least they had a minimum care for the mission of their own discipline.
Nowadays, it is too difficult for undergraduates to find jobs. The vast majority of people who study for PhD are there to work. Most of them will later join colleges and universities as teachers. What is confusing and worrisome is that they lack intrinsic interest in their disciplines, so how will they keep their students interested when they become university teachers? The more I asked, the more disillusioned I became.
The most distressing thing for me is the aesthetic problem of the elite.
The quality of one’s reading creates one’s spiritual interest. Any quality reading will be precipitated and internalized into an aesthetic. What really defines a person’s inner culture is not what he does within eight hours, but how he spends his spare time outside of eight hours. In those years, “Happy Camp”, “Do Not Disturb” and “Kangxi Lai Lai” were popular in the north and south. Most (liberal arts) PhD students spent their leisure time watching these entertainment programs or urban romantic dramas without any essence of nutrition or playing games on the computer.
Most of them are not interested in serious literature and movies that provoke deep thoughts, and they have little aesthetic needs beyond the utilitarian level, but are more concerned with concrete and visible interests. Literature is the foundation of all liberal arts, both because a good liberal arts dissertation cannot be written and narrated without a good narrative, and because the “problem consciousness” required for a superb liberal arts study cannot be achieved without the sensitivity and delicacy given by long-term literary reading. It is difficult for a person who is rough inside to carry out excellent academic research in liberal arts.
When I talked with several liberal arts PhDs who were awarded national scholarships for publishing many core papers, I found that their knowledge was generally very narrow, their spiritual world very barren, and their speech very boring. Even a few Zhejiang University professors sitting together to chat, often chatting about the topic is only “last night’s “non-perturbation” who who who was the most extinguished lights”. It is nothing wrong to look at entertainment programs once in a while, but what is terrible is to be completely occupied by entertainment programs in your spare time.
In sociological theory, the class division in the field of culture is the most obvious, and there is a strict line between elite culture and popular culture. However, in China today, the spare time of everyone, from the hutongs of the city to the colleges and universities, is locked in a few limited entertainment programs, and the cultural boundary between the elite and the masses has almost completely disappeared in China. On the level of cultural consumption, our “elites” are going to the “lower class”.
Their heads are merely containers of knowledge, not machines for generating ideas, and sentiment is very far from them. However, because of the aura of “specializing in ……”, they cannot be compared with each other horizontally, they generally do not see their own inner spiritual poverty, and they feel very good about themselves.
Finally, I would like to talk about the green peppers. If the state of PhD students only makes me feel disappointed with the current academic ecology, the state of the green peppers makes me feel almost desperate for the future of Chinese academics. I can hardly see any humanistic spirit in many of the young peasants studying humanities in 985 universities.” Academics” is just a rice bowl. Humanities research without humanistic care, what valuable things can be researched? This does not affect their papers published one by one. In the superficially prosperous world of academia, there is little of real value and almost all of it is watered down.
When studying for a PhD is no longer out of spiritual interest, when “academic” is no longer an ambition, but has long been transformed into a rice bowl to earn a living, you are not disillusioned and still retain your passion and ideal, then you are a joke in the eyes of others, because the rules are set by those who laugh at you.
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