Local University Curriculum Decision-making Research

The curriculum arrangement in universities is the key to improve the quality of graduates. But with the gradual devolution of administrative power to arrange the courses to lower levels, the decision-making power of universities is faced with unprecedented challenges, besieged by influences from government, market and society.The so-called curriculum decision-making refers to a series of judgments and choices of the issues related to courses when the decision-makers suffer from the corresponding hard situation under the influence of various factors. Why should the decision be made?(Rationality) What decision should be made?(Contents) Who should make the decision?(Protagonist) How to make the decision?(Process) The answers to all the questions constitute the basic contents and research venation of curriculum decision-making.The decision is not made out of thin air but the product of interactions of some problems and environment against specific background. In the rapid and premature transition from elite education to mass education in Chinese higher education settings, local universities accumulated many problems with its rapid development. From such a variety of dimensions as time, space, system, concepts and so on, it can be observed that the scale of H University has become stabilized and has an urgent need to enhance its program quality after more than ten years of fully expanding their undergraduate education. Only by adhering to serving the social development of regional economy, local universities can survive. As a "unit" with local characteristic, it has steeped in a strong ideology of reform. The ongoing reform is the secret to win the opportunities of survival and development, and has increasingly become policy-makers’habitus in specific field.Generally speaking, nowadays the government is still dominating the curriculum arrangement in universities through such strategies as embedding political ideology, restricting undergraduates’catalogs and norms of majors, formulating public courses, conducting evaluation of teaching and guiding the construction of projects. At the same time, the local universities are trying to show their autonomy in establishing their objectives of education, arranging majors and making the decision of curriculum system. It is under the lens of power that the decision-makers can be visualized and freeze-framed. They are the "elites" who decide the texture of university courses and are the top of a core layer-participating layer-influence layer hierarchy. In the transverse direction, the decision-making power favors administrative power, lacking academic power and student power. And in the longitudinal direction, the decision-making power is concentrated to the leaders, average teachers and management staff lack power. Universities are typical organizations of stakeholders. In order to achieve the balance of power, the decision-making of university courses needs to be diversified, so that teachers and students can voice themselves.An analysis of the triggering mechanism and procedures of curriculum decision-making, together with the clarification of the mechanism of power and relationship in the decision-making process, can be helpful to demystifying the "blackbox" in the process and provide better explanation for the strategic actions taken by various actors. From the perspective of mirror-image politics, a possible explanation can be provided to the "traps" in the curriculum decision-making and can give us much valuable aspirations.During the process of China’s modernization drive a large number of "moderns" are required. Education of such "moderns" can not be separated from the modernization of university curriculum, and ultimately the modernization of curriculum decision-making. We are now on the way.