On July 20th, 2017, the Ministry of
Education (MOE) held the Conference for the Pilot Work of Comprehensive Reform
on National Doctoral Education in the conference room on the 9th floor of North Building. Du Zhanyuan, Vice Minister and member of leading Party
Group of MOE, attended the conference and offered speeches. Other attendants
included staff from the 14 universities chosen to take part in the pilot work,
and other officials from the Ministry of Education. The Conference was chaired
by Li Jun, director of Department of Postgraduate Education, MOE.
In recent years, XMU
has achieved great success in the graduate education, especially the doctoral
education. Therefore, it was selected as one of the pilot universities and invited
to share experience of advancing comprehensive reform on doctoral education,
together with Tsinghua University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Tianjin
University, on the conference. The speech “Deepening reform on Graduate
Education; Achieving overall progress on doctoral education” summarized the
comprehensive reform measures taken to improve graduate education since 2013
and introduced the blueprint for deepening reform at the next stage. The
specific measures, ideas and suggestions of the graduate education reform of
our university have been highly appraised by Du Zhanyuan, Vice Minister of MOE,
and other attendants.
Du pointed out that the
general trend and focus of graduate education is to deepen the comprehensive
reform on doctoral education and thus improve its quality. All pilot
universities should strictly uphold the principle “Meet needs and Improve
Quality”, always be committed to the general requirements “Cultivating talents
with great moral values to meet needs
and improving the quality of education insightfully”, and search for new
ideas and approaches to develop doctoral education in the new era. Besides,
according to their own features and conditions, universities should also make
targeted research for doctoral students on ideological and political education,
recruitment, subsidies, combination of science and education, teaching,
selection of students, supervisor groups, evaluating system, international
cooperation, management and quality guarantee. With all these efforts, together
with innovative pertinent reform measures, success achieved by these
universities can be duplicated and publicized, and thus form a policy mechanism
of doctoral education.
The pilot work of
national comprehensive reform on doctoral education is an important measure for
the implementation of “Opinions on Deepening Reform of Graduate Education Issued
by the Ministry of Education, National Development and Reform Commission and
Ministry of Finance”, for the realization of national innovation-driven
strategy and deepening comprehensive reform on doctoral education. About 10
universities with doctoral students in large quantity and good quality were
chosen to take part in the pilot work. With supports from the government, these
schools should make courageous exploration to establish platform for innovative
talents, remove obstacles caused by certain mechanism and regulation and
provide successful samples of the comprehensive reform on doctoral education, constantly
improve the quality of doctoral education.
All 14 universities
selected to participate in the pilot work include Peking University, Tsinghua
University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Nanjing University,
University of Science and Technology of China, Harbin Institute of Technology,
Xi'an Jiaotong University, Tianjin University, Renmin University of China,
Xiamen University, Beihang University, Tianjin University and Soochow
University.