Speech by the President of China Agricultural University at the Teachers' Meeting

-Speech at the new teacher training class on August 25th, 2065438+04.

Ke Bingsheng

First of all, welcome to China Agricultural University and congratulations! At present, the recruitment procedure of China Agricultural University should be the strictest among domestic universities, and it is to choose the best among the best. In this process, you proved your Excellence with your own strength. So, congratulations!

Looking at you, I think of myself 30 years ago. I just joined the company 30 years ago, at the then Beijing Agricultural University. When I was still in the second year of my master's degree, the department leader came to me and asked me if I would like to stay in school. At that time, I had set my sights on several units with the words "Central" and "the State Council", and I also had some good contacts. However, the conditions put forward by the department leaders are very attractive: if you stay in school, you will be sent abroad to study for a doctorate immediately. There were few opportunities to go abroad at that time. I wanted to go abroad when I graduated from college, but I applied because there was no place for my major to go abroad and the Agricultural University had a major in agricultural economics. However, due to poor performance in professional courses, going abroad was unsuccessful and was admitted as a domestic graduate student. When the opportunity to go abroad flew like a pie in the sky, I agreed to stay at school. In this way, after graduating from master's degree at the end of 1984, he became a teacher of agricultural university and then went abroad to study. After receiving my doctorate abroad, I thanked the school and kept my integrity, and returned to work at Agricultural University. I said these words to show that I came to Agricultural University to study and take up my post, which was accidental and passive. However, I have always felt that my choice is correct. I am very fortunate and have never regretted it. Now, you have come to Agricultural University, which is a positive and rational choice, and after encouraging competition, you are all happy now, and you will certainly not regret it in the future.

Great changes have taken place in agricultural university in the past 30 years, including campus environment, team strength and discipline development. But there are also many things that remain unchanged, or are inherited, carried forward and even innovated in the process of historical changes. This is the spirit and character of our agricultural university. The spirit and character of a university can be seen everywhere. It is reflected in the management system of the school and also in the style and behavior of teachers and students in the school. The spirit and character of a university play an extremely important role in the long-term healthy development of the school. The formation and development of this spirit and character need long-term cultivation and accumulation, and need to be passed down from generation to generation. The new teachers present here are the present, the future, the hope of development, and the inheritors of the spirit and character of Agricultural University. So, today I want to focus on communicating with you.

Agricultural University is a university with a strong sense of mission. The core mission of our school is to solve the problem of feeding more than one billion people. This is also the specific connotation of "how difficult it is to solve people's lives". Eating is a big problem. The more economic and social development, the higher the demand for food. At present and in the future, China's national food security is facing great challenges. Agricultural land is getting less and less, agricultural water resources are getting less and less, agricultural labor force is getting less and less, and the requirements for the quantity, quality and safety of agricultural products are getting higher and higher. In other words, we need to produce more, better and safer agricultural products with less land, less water resources and less labor. How to deal with this challenge is the common mission of teachers and students in agricultural universities in China. After reading this mission, it is clear that the service objects of agricultural colleges and universities are not just "agriculture, countryside and farmers", but all the people and the whole society. Adhering to this mission means adhering to the direction and characteristics of our school. Our school should be duty-bound to lead the national agricultural colleges and universities. The mission of the school is inseparable from personal values. I have said many times that as long as you can contribute to solving the rice bowl problem in the whole country, your own rice bowl will definitely not be a problem. I hope that after you enter the Agricultural University, you will consciously and automatically shoulder such a sense of mission. This is a noble sense of life.

Agricultural University is a university to cultivate self-confidence. It takes a spirit of self-confidence to undertake the mission. Confidence can be interpreted from different angles. My interpretation is: I believe that what I do is valuable and promising; Believe that you can do what you are doing well and do your best. Self-confidence is actually the belief in what you do and the confidence to do well. I just talked about the mission of the school. Everything you do is to accomplish this mission, which is very valuable and promising. Your specific post is different, but whether you are directly engaged in teaching, scientific research or management service, it is important to complete the mission of a good school. So, can you do your own thing, do your best, do your best, and do your best in this field? I believe I can. My belief is well founded. The first is the development of the school itself, which has obviously accelerated in recent years. 10 years, the research funding of our school has increased from about 200 million yuan to 10 billion yuan, and the number of SCI papers has increased from more than 280 to more than 1200, especially the number of papers with impact factors greater than 5 has increased from less than 10 to nearly 100. Among agricultural colleges and universities, our school's academic indicators are obviously among the best. Among the 985 key universities in China, the number of teachers in our school ranks around 35, but the overall academic performance of our school is quite outstanding, almost all academic indicators are within the top 20, and some are before 10. For example, he has won national science and technology awards and published papers in top journals in the world, ranking sixth in our school; China University ranks fourth in major; Ranked first in the performance evaluation of universities directly under the Ministry of Education, and so on. Even the quality of college entrance examination enrollment, which is greatly influenced by various unfavorable factors, has been significantly improved. During the period of 10, the average score of freshmen in our school was 23 to 77 higher than the local key line. This is not easy, because it means that we have better overcome the traditional prejudice against agricultural colleges and universities in society and significantly improved the reputation of our school. In terms of self-confidence, we are not limited to the development of disciplines, but also in the management of schools. In recent years, some reform measures introduced by our school try to avoid the influence of impetuousness and formalism, without blind obedience and vulgarity. They did not copy the practices of foreign famous schools or domestic famous schools, but followed the laws of higher education and combined with the special national conditions of China to innovate. Some of these measures are ahead of the national universities; Some measures are unique. This includes fair and just sunshine enrollment policy, undergraduate students' free transfer to major policy, doctoral enrollment application assessment system, loose scientific research assessment policy, strict enrollment policy, principal's mailbox mechanism which embodies a high degree of campus democracy and so on. What other colleges and universities failed to do, we did, and the effect was very good. Therefore, all the teachers present here, whether engaged in teaching, scientific research or management services, have every reason to be confident. In terms of self-confidence, I have a feeling that the longer I stay at Agricultural University, the stronger my sense of self-confidence. Almost all our senior professors are highly confident. Young teachers who just entered the school may be unbalanced and may not be as determined as senior professors. As for students, especially freshmen, the situation is even more unbalanced, but by the time they graduate, most of them are confident. The more you communicate with students, the stronger this feeling will be. I think it is also an important achievement of our education to infect and edify students with the confidence of schools and teachers through four years' edification in college, and obviously shape and enhance students' self-confidence. This is also a reflection of the school's self-confidence. Students' progress in this respect may have no less impact on their lives than their study in professional courses. I hope and believe that you will have such confidence: you can do what the previous teacher can do, and you can do better! Your academic achievements will be greater and your management level will be higher!

Agricultural University is a university that practices academic freedom. Academic freedom is the life of a university. Without academic freedom, it is impossible to have good major scientific and technological innovations and cultivate innovative talents. As a general concept, academic freedom is indisputable. The question is how to implement it and how to achieve it. Our school has worked hard to practice the principle of academic freedom for many years, and strives to fully embody it in the internal management system of the school. Academic freedom in universities is manifested in two levels: students and teachers. The academic freedom of students is the freedom to learn and what to learn. The first is the freedom to study what major. If students can't choose their favorite major and are forced to study their disliked major, that is the greatest academic freedom for students. It is the greatest tyranny to deny students the freedom to choose their major. In many colleges and universities, if students find that their major choice in the college entrance examination is wrong after entering school, they can only have two choices: drop out of school and retake the exam. Some schools allow students to change majors, but they also have strict academic performance requirements. Our school is not like this. Since the spring of 20 1 1, our school has broken through all kinds of obstacles and fully implemented the policy of free transfer to major, starting once every semester. The meaning of freedom is: you can transfer to a department without restrictions, and transfer to a department within a predetermined quota, without restrictions on students' grades, whether they fail or not. In fact, the more students fail, the more they are encouraged to change their major. This is because all the students who enter our college entrance examination are smart and diligent. The reason why they failed in this course must be that they don't like their major. Therefore, they should be freed and transferred to their favorite major. Since the implementation of this policy, 300-400 students have changed their majors every year. The policy of changing majors freely is not the whole of academic freedom at the student level, but if there is no such freedom, students will have no academic freedom. On the teacher's level, we have given many aspects of academic freedom to choose from. For young teachers who have just arrived, the school provides 654.38+10,000 yuan of research start-up fees per person. The specific topic is entirely chosen by the teacher himself. The most important thing is that our school implements a relaxed scientific research assessment policy, without setting any quantitative annual targets, and without stipulating how many projects, how many scientific research funds, how many papers to publish, how many patents, etc. What teachers win every year, but only do actual debriefing in colleges or departments at the end of each year? This not only allows each teacher to choose the research direction and specific topics independently, but also gives teachers a lot of free space to decide the research progress independently according to the characteristics of majors and topics. We implement such a relaxed academic research environment based on our full trust in teachers' sense of mission and enthusiasm, our respect for the characteristics of different disciplines, and our belief that only academic freedom can produce significant results. Our school has not implemented the so-called "promotion or transfer" policy, because the current conditions are not mature because of the national conditions and school conditions, and that kind of incentive is not unique. In terms of teacher promotion, postgraduate enrollment, and academic performance evaluation. The college is completely endowed with a high degree of freedom and autonomy. This is also the concrete embodiment of the professor's scholarship. We believe that under such a system of academic freedom, you will certainly strive to spread the wings of academic exploration and fly higher and further.

Agricultural University is a low-key and pragmatic university. Low-key and pragmatic is the historical tradition of our school. Low-key and pragmatic are two sides of the same coin. Low-key, that is, no fanfare, no pursuit of excitement, no attention to reputation; Just do it, don't talk, do more and talk less, and say it when it's done. Being pragmatic means paying attention to actual effect, input-output efficiency and long-term effect. In the period of rapid development of higher education and popularization of higher education reform, it is more difficult and important to adhere to a rational attitude and a low-key and pragmatic attitude. Because in this context, impetuous phenomena and formalism are more likely to appear, and it is easier to cater to the media and the public with various seemingly novel titles in the name of reform, make all kinds of ineffective or unfair articles, and take the old road that has been proved impossible by domestic and foreign history. The purpose of saying these things is not to satirize other people's affairs, but to tell myself to keep a clear head, not to be influenced by the trend, and to do my own thing well. We adhere to this principle in order to avoid chaos: unchanging and unreasonable; Moreover, the reform must have a reason, and it is a sufficient reason, and it must be fully, comprehensively and deeply demonstrated. We don't want reform, what we want is pragmatic reform; We don't want to innovate, we want to innovate effectively. In terms of reform, some aspects of our school seem to be "conservative" and some aspects seem to be "radical", both of which make our school seem to be somewhat "maverick". Conservative aspects are self-enrollment, internationalization, de-administration and integration. Our school didn't follow the crowd, let alone steal the limelight in these aspects. In the radical aspect, our school has taken some measures to promote the reform of undergraduate education and teaching, postgraduate education, personnel system, internal management system and campus democracy construction. For example, the policy of undergraduate students changing their majors freely, the application direction and two-year academic system of master's training, the application assessment system for doctoral enrollment, the two-level interview system for recruitment, the relaxed assessment system, the open principal's mailbox system and so on. Whether it is "conservative" or "radical", it is based on the laws of education and the national conditions of the school in order to achieve the best school-running effect. Of course, keeping a low profile does not mean not doing any publicity work. If we are not an agricultural university, but XX University, it will be fine. However, in order to reduce the influence of social prejudice and misunderstanding on agricultural colleges and universities, and to better let candidates know our school correctly, we still need to do some publicity. However, these propaganda were not said before, nor were they said while doing it, but they were done and achieved good results before they were said. Our teachers should have the same attitude in academic research. Especially when publicizing achievements, don't embellish and exaggerate.

Agricultural University is a university dedicated to running schools according to law. Running a school according to law is extremely important. Over the years, we have repeatedly emphasized and tried to practice the principle of running schools according to law and achieved good results. Running a school according to law is the need of the orderly and efficient operation of the school, the need of ensuring fairness and justice, and the need of educating people. Running a school according to law means doing things according to the law. The "law" mentioned here includes not only the laws and regulations of the relevant state departments, but also various rules and regulations of the school. Running a school according to law inevitably requires all departments to carry out their duties, do things according to the rules, dare to be responsible, and don't have to ask for instructions from the leaders. This will be more efficient. To do this, everyone needs to have a sense of the rule of law and the habit of doing things according to the rules. Of course, school leaders should first take the lead and implement the concept of running schools according to law with practical actions. Teachers and students in universities have a habit. As soon as they encounter something, especially something inconsistent with the system, they want to bypass the functional departments and make an exception directly to the secretary and principal. Or for personal or academic reasons, put forward special requirements that do not meet the requirements to the school. In some universities, the president or the principal in charge has more power and can directly intervene in many things. Including recruitment, professional title evaluation, 985 project funding allocation and so on. None of these situations exist in our school now. In terms of recruitment, the two-level interview system is strictly implemented, and judges vote on the spot. Neither the secretary nor the principal has exceeded the power of the jury nor bypassed the power of the school jury, including academic and non-academic personnel. This is especially true in the evaluation of professional titles, and the academic Committee of the college is an authoritative organization. As for the allocation of funds for the 985 project, it is a complicated collective decision-making process involving many parties. Doing one's job well is not only a requirement for managers, but also an academic requirement. The general discussion on "professors running schools" and "principals running schools" is not clear and has no substantive significance. What is correct and feasible is to run schools according to law and perform their duties. Through rules and regulations, it is clear which academic matters are decided by professors and professor representatives; Others, the school management makes collective decisions on the basis of widely listening to the opinions of teachers and students. Running a school according to law and making everyone equal before the system can achieve fairness and justice and avoid individual arbitrariness or human factors. The fairness, justice, openness and transparency of the procedure are the basis of fairness and justice. This is fully reflected in the enrollment, recruitment and professional title evaluation of our school. Running a school according to law is also the need of educating people. In a campus with a strong concept of the rule of law, students will be infected, edified and educated by a strong concept of the rule of law. In this way, when they leave school, they will become citizens with a strong concept of the rule of law, so as to better integrate into the process of governing the country according to law.

Agricultural University is a university that pursues democracy, harmony and friendship. In universities, freedom is mainly academic and democracy is mainly management. Democracy means that everyone has the right and opportunity to express himself, and truly know everything, say everything, the speaker is innocent, and the speaker has a warning. School management should have an inclusive mind, allowing and encouraging the existence of various voices, especially objections. Democracy is a good thing. Through democratic procedures, we can concentrate our wisdom, open up new ideas and condense our knowledge. There are many ways to realize campus democracy in our school, and there are two most prominent ones: First, all major reform measures and other major decisions made by the school have gone through several democratic procedures and widely listened to the opinions of teachers and students. There are also many proposals at the annual teachers' congress and student congress. The second is the principal's mailbox system. Calling the headmaster's mailbox is just a habit, and it is essentially an open democratic management network platform. Through this email, we have the courage to accept the supervision of teachers and students of the whole school, accept criticism, listen to opinions, dispel doubts and doubts, communicate in time, and promote the improvement and perfection of management services. Last year, the headmaster's email system of our school caused a heated discussion on the Internet and got a high evaluation. I hope you can see more and make good use of this platform. Harmony and friendship is an important part of socialist core values and an important criterion of interpersonal relationship on campus. Our school advocates positive, harmonious but different, understanding and tolerance, promoting righteousness and resisting hostility. We strive to create a campus atmosphere full of "quietness, harmony and love", so that every teacher and classmate can feel warm, cordial and happy and pursue their studies in a harmonious and friendly environment. Each of our teachers, like their own children, is full of great love for students. This kind of great love is not unprincipled love, but caring rather than doting, tolerating rather than conniving, guiding rather than misleading.

The spirit and character of Agricultural University are far more than that. Let me focus on these first. These are all mental problems. Besides these, you must have some material concerns and some practical problems to solve. Including housing problems, children attending primary and secondary schools nearby, wages, research start-up fees, training opportunities abroad and so on. These problems have been considered by the school. Yes, concrete measures have been taken, which have been implemented for many years and solved well; Some, limited by national policies and various conditions, can not be completely solved for a while, but can only be solved step by step. Specifically, the responsible comrades of the relevant administrative departments will introduce it in detail, so I won't say it here.

Comrades, I take this opportunity to exchange some experiences and conclusions about the spirit and character of Agricultural University. I hope and believe that your's participation will further promote the spirit and character of these agricultural universities. I also hope and believe that by adhering to and strengthening the spirit and character of agricultural university, we will continue to promote the construction of a world-class university in our school. In the future, when people see the words "China Agricultural University", they will immediately think that it is a world-class university, in which "agriculture" is just a representative of a number of advantageous disciplines.