What is university?

 Recently, I just keep thinking about a question: what is university? In 1931, the famous Tsinghua university headmaster Mei Yiqi said, “da xue zhe, fei wei you da lou zhe wei ye, you da shi zhi wei ye” which means that university is not about how many magnificent buildings a university has but how excellent teachers and professors it owns. Yeah, teachers are the core possession and value of a university; it is the teachers that determine what kind of graduate will a university create. And what Mei Yiqi said stands for two parts of a university, one is hardware facilities, the other is “soft power”.

   Hardware facilities, obviously, are the buildings and others facilities in the campus, in brief, they are just the environment. “Soft power” is about the teachers’ knowledge, their ability on teaching and research, and so on. I think what professors Mei meant is that university should focus on the soft power more than hardware facilities. However, some people just misunderstand it. In my memory, Chinese universities are always criticised that they always spend too much money on the hardware facilities to get a higher rank rather than just do what they should do, namely, educating students . The money they spent on those hardware facilities should have been spent on items that could improve their education, such as hiring more good teachers. But I think those critics overreact sometimes, they just look at some universities and make comments on all Chinese universities and they like to make comparison between Chinese universities and other world-famous universities and then criticise Chinese universities, for example, some world-famous universities like Harvard and Cambridge do not have tall buildings so that Chinese universities should not build tall buildings. It is ridiculous, universities should focus on soft power does not mean that they cannot improve hardware facilities. And today, Chinese universities still fall behind in the hardware facilities even though, as critics said, they spent a lot on it.

 And I think Chinese universities still spend the majority of their money on “soft power”, why our universities cannot be called truly good universities is because the system. More specifically, it is because teachers do not care about teaching and they just want to make more money and that is why corruptions become an open secret. It is not the hardware facilities’ fault that Chinese universities cannot be famous and get a high rank, we cannot and we do not want to study in a university with poor facility after all.

 I took utown for an example to ask the interviewers this question when I attended the interview on Wednesday. Just as Ms Kong said, maybe NUS built utown for the purpose to get a higher rank too. The interviewer also said that it is unblamable to do it, it provide a better environment after all. All in all, what Chinese universities should learn is that improving their hardware facilities and simultaneously strengthening their “soft power”.