Management Innovation And Institutional Construction Of Part-time Faculty In Higher Education Institutes In China

The concept of part-time faculty comes of western countries, especially in American universities, the development of the entire higher education is accompanied with the use of part-time faculty. Because the scale and impact of early part-time faculty is still not very big, it did not arouse much concern in academic circle. Since 1970s, some academicians in Europe and America began to attach importance to research the groups of part-time Faculty, and have made some valuable research results. Therefore, during the period from the founding of nation to 1980s, highly centralized management system of higher education has formed such a situation that the overwhelming majority of faculties are full-time and life tenure, only few are part-time.Since 1990s, under the background of market, diversification, popularization, Chinese higher education has been developed rapidly, the demand for faculties increased dramatically; at the same time, since the situation of the personnel system reform and the shortage of financial status in higher education institutes, the use of part-time faculty in higher education institutes increased year after year. According to the data of statistical Yearbook of Education, as of 2004,the total number of faculties are 1.24 million, part-time faculty have 0.27 million, it has accounted 21.9% of total number and become one important power in the team of higher education institutes faculty. They have made positive contributions to the reform and development of higher education.Part-time faculty in China have the characteristics such as: higher qualifications, higher starting point and heavy work pressure and long time. With the increase of using the part-time faculty, some problems are gradually exposed, such as procedures of the appointment are unreasonable; organizational cohesion is weak; the evaluation system is unreasonable; even controllability is low, and so on. The core of these issues is about the system, if these problems would like to be solved as soon as possible, it is not acceptable to rely solely on the past management concept. We must change the concept of the management to use some innovative management measures such as legal management, institutionalized management and humane management. At the same time, some absent institutions which constraint part-time faculty should be built, such as employed systems; teaching management systems; incentive systems ; faculty development institutions; and so on, so that part-time faculty can engage academic work in the security of the law, all its powers, responsibilities and obligations can be guaranteed, in order to play their roles to ensure a high quality of their academic work and make even greater contributions to the development of Chinese higher education.