This is a case study of the administration and organization of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), a prominent Chinese university operating under the State Education Commission of China. The prime objective of the research was to understand how a modern Chinese university is governed at the cultural level---what are the implicit governing assumptions of the upper level administrators? An objective of the completed study is to promote international understanding of Chinese higher education in light of China's 1985 education reform. / Data was gathered during eight months of fieldwork conducted in the 1995 academic year. More than one hundred interviews were conducted. Documents in the University Archives were searched. My prior experience was drawn upon, as I had studied and worked at HUST for eleven years. / After a brief description of the history and the campus of the university, the study includes selected major aspects of the administration of HUST including: student affairs, quality control in teaching, the academic echelon (a form of research team), academic personnel, social services, finance, and the Chinese Communist Party role in management. / The concluding chapter presents an ideal-type framework to describe HUST's administration. It has three concepts: institutionalized elitism, the danwei system, and a collectivism vision of management. The institutionalized elitism refers to the institutions for selection, training, utilizing, and honoring the best. The danwei system is defined as a working/living community under a single authority. Organizationally, it supports the institutions of elitism. Both concepts are based upon a collectivism vision, that is, a collective should take care of the interests of both the collective and its members, and the collective interests are supreme over individual interests. These ideas strongly conform to the Grand Union (datong), a utopian ideal of Confucianism. Although many changes have occurred in HUST since 1985, the features mentioned are unlikely to disappear in the near future. Knowing these features should help people in working with people in China, and monitoring the changes should be a help in predicting the progress of China.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35660 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Zhao, Juming. |
| Contributors | Isherwood, Geoffery B. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001641518, proquestno: NQ44646, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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