Chapter 454: Chapter 149: The Frustrated Senior Brother Chen
To be honest, Chen Zhuoyang hasn’t been doing well recently. He feels that he’s oversimplified many issues.
In a certain sense, universities are the perfect breeding ground for factions.
The relationships between teachers and students, and among peers, often naturally form alliances.
As for why alliances are needed, the answer in two words: competition!
From an outsider’s perspective, universities appear to be ivory towers, but internally, the competition is no different from society.
The competition among universities needs no further explanation.
The most noticeable difference in Huaxia’s higher education compared to other countries is the more prestigious the school, the cheaper the tuition.
The tuition for most undergraduate programs at 985 and Double First-Class universities is only five thousand yuan, even second-tier schools aren’t much more expensive.
But those third-tier universities that no one has heard of, their tuition can easily range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand yuan, with some even charging over fifty thousand yuan a year.
It is well known that first-class schools, whether in terms of faculty or hardware, are many times better than third-tier universities, which all require substantial funding to maintain, yet their tuition is several times lower...
The commonly accepted saying "you get what you pay for" is not only inapplicable to higher education resources, but the opposite is true instead.
The funding gap is naturally bridged by subsidies. After all, quality educational resources can’t appear out of thin air.
However, the annual grants for education and research are limited, if you get more, then others have to get less.
Therefore, most university presidents of prestigious institutions are academicians, and even if they’re not, checking their resumes will reveal how illustrious their backgrounds are.
In short, a president not only needs to manage effectively internally but also should have a say externally, so that during the allocation of resources, they have the courage to strive for a bit more...
Similarly, once external competition is settled, there’s also competition among different schools within a university.
If you take a closer look at the heads of dominant majors within universities, you’ll find that most of them are not the most capable individuals in the department, sometimes not even among the top few. They are usually middle-aged, in their thirties or forties.
Why?
Because such individuals are most suitable. The candidates are often chosen through extensive deliberation between the higher-ups and the interns.
It’s important to know that resources for each secondary school within the university are allocated by the university itself. A middle-aged person serving as dean on this administrative post for a few years might become a vice-president in the future.
In addition, if their own department is a dominant program in the university, nurturing a vice-president naturally inclines the resource allocation towards the department that nurtured them.
This aligns most with the maximization of factional interests. Therefore, dominant departments within universities tend to be quite cohesive internally because everyone compromises for the larger piece of the pie, maximizing benefits.
However, the logic within some less advantaged secondary schools within the university is quite different.
These programs may not have produced a single university-level cadre in the past ten years, so they naturally lack strong bargaining power when it comes to the internal allocation of resources within the university.
Moreover, the academic strength of such programs is already disadvantaged, and they’re unable to compete for resources with other A-grade programs, which leads them to focus on internal strife over limited resources.
Indeed, the competition logic within universities is not that different from international society; the worse the department, the more severe the internal strife. This is similar to how the poorer the place, the more chaotic it tends to be.
All these were experiences that Chen Zhuoyang never encountered during his time at Yanbei University.
After all, the code for Yanbei University’s School of Mathematics was 001, making it one of Yanbei University’s flagship programs, where everyone is relatively united internally.
Not to mention that out of the 42 mathematics academicians at the Huaxia Academy of Sciences, Yanbei University alone has seven.
But Jinzhou University is different. Since the School of Mathematics split from the School of Science, its development can only be described as unsatisfactory.
If you look at the internal professional ratings, many A-category disciplines are concentrated in engineering. The mathematics program only received a B rating.
Of course, B isn’t necessarily bad, ranking within the top 20%-30% nationally, but with other strong disciplines, it’s overshadowed.
Among a group of A+/A/A- ratings, a B hardly stands out. Not to mention that none of Jinzhou University’s dual first-class disciplines are related to mathematics.
So before he even started formal classes, Chen Zhuoyang already felt that something was off.
For instance, during the new faculty orientation, he could clearly sense a lukewarm attitude from a few new colleagues.
Today, at the meeting about the new semester’s teaching arrangements, he deliberately arrived early, intending to seize an opportunity to report his work to Director Xu of the Teaching and Research Department.
He learned this from Qiao Yu.
As a newcomer, with plans to focus on teaching, interacting more with the head of the teaching research department was always a good idea.
Then he once again felt that something was amiss.
Director Xu, who had previously been quite welcoming, now displayed a peculiar change in attitude. It wasn’t a direct cold shoulder, but he distinctly felt a lack of patience, with their conversations reduced to platitudes.
It’s not that Chen Zhuoyang is overly sensitive. To become a doctoral candidate in mathematics, one’s intelligence cannot be low, and intelligent people are often more sensitive to changes in others’ attitudes.
Of course, some believe that people good at mathematics aren’t so amazing, and often when dealing with them, feel their emotional intelligence seems low, like bookworms who’ve read themselves silly... This is indeed possible.