Difficulties for inter-disciplinary collaboration in Chinese universities

I would like to talk about the inter-disciplinary collaboration in Chinese universities. The status is quite complicated, so I will touch only the university I worked for.

On the national level, the Ministry of Education in China encouraged inter-disciplinary. It has created some opportunities for this kind of cooperation, such as some projects in the national 863 projects or similar programs. Even at the institutional level, administrators also encouraged it by implementing some internal policies. However, the progress is not satisfied. There are some reasons.

The priority of interdisciplinary collaboration is not very high. Even though institutional leaders are encouraging collaboration across disciplines, they still think it is a complimentary to the normal teaching and research within disciplines. Internal policies have been made to promote this kind of internal cooperation, but the implementation is not compulsory. It is up to each discipline to decide if to implement these policies or not. Meanwhile, inter-disciplinary collaboration weights very little in the institutional assessment system and this has make faculties and departments give it very low priority on their working list. Furthermore, some people think that only those faculties and departments that are not doing well at traditional teaching and research have to consider inter-disciplinary collaboration as an opportunity to improve them through innovation. It is very common to see that new faculties and departments are more eager to work together while traditional strong disciplines are not interested in cooperation at all.

The structure of current Chinese universities cannot facilitate the inter-disciplinary collaboration. China’s higher education system followed the model from former Soviet Union that a university is strictly divided by disciplines and much focused on its own matters. Although the Chinese system has gone through reform for several decades, it is still heavily influenced by the old style. Since there is no mediating mechanism across disciplines, it becomes extremely difficult to create joint projects, to solve problems caused by misunderstanding, and to coordinate activities and people from different background. This completely divided system creates many obstacles for inter-disciplinary collaboration. It has decreased the efficiency of cooperation and lowered the possibility of successful collaboration.

Financial consideration is also one of the factors that influence the successful and sustainable inter-disciplinary collaboration. Nowadays, faculties and departments have to carry the responsibility of generating revenue to release the pain of fund cut. Financial consideration has become more and more important when faculty leaders make decisions. Conflicts on how to divide the contribution to joint projects and then allocate income have increased within universities among faculties and departments that involved in joint projects. The more parties involve in the joint program, the worse they fight for financial gains. Seldom could we see successful cooperation without any financial conflicts. Gradually, people lose the temper and confidence of working together.

Heavier workload is another factor making collaboration difficult. Very often, collaboration required more people involved in joint projects, so more communication work is needed. Especially when there are disagreements among people in different units, much more time and energy has to be spent on communication. Very likely this will slow down the work progress and increase the cost. Beside normal teaching or research workload, people have to invest time and energy to do much interpersonal work in order to make the job down smoothly. Typically faculty members are not good at interpersonal skills. Therefore, both faculty and staff complained a lot about joint projects that make their heavy work become even heavier. This has greatly hurt people’s passion on inter-disciplinary collaboration.

There are also many operational difficulties on the way to successful inter-disciplinary collaboration, such as time control, process management, workload allocation, etc. All these have severely postponed the implementation of inter-disciplinary collaboration policies. If the government or institutional leaders could not solve these problems without hurting the benefits of most people, the inter-disciplinary collaboration is very much likely to stop at the moment and contribute little to the development of the country and universities.