On the issue of academic standards in China, I have to say this bluntly: plagiarism is a serious problem in China’s education, research and literary circles; not only are re-writings and straightforward lifting prevalent, such acts are not even seriously condemned (maybe condemned as a form of political correctness and used as a tool of debate, but much less in thought that results in action – or inaction, not committing plagiarism). One even gets the feeling that, more commonly, people think using copying cleverly, in order to satisfy the requirements of examiners, promotion committees and book buyers, is a form of art, to be commended for cleverness when done well. “Academic standards” is more often thought of as a western import, brought home by overseas returnees, or even a form of cultural imperialism. Even the exact concept of “plagiarism” is only vaguely understood. Bloggers would often trade charges of plagiarism “you used this material from that source” “your stuff was translation from that foreign book” without bothering to be concerned about such issues as citation, textual identity, etc.

Western academia require students working for research degrees to write theses displaying original content, in order to prove they have the capacity for independent research. Even undergrads are warned against plagiarism because universities aim to develop the ability to think individually, so that college graduates could show creativity and generate improvements in their working life. Further, the intellectual circle as a whole is expected to act as an independent critic in society, exercising the power of commentary and introspection on authority and leaders of all spheres. It is perhaps to be expected that such ideas are not applicable in all cultures, and convenient modifications might be necessary to fit into the particular social model of a particular country.

At the same time, independent thinking seems to be less valued in the west today than it used to be. If we take economics as the example, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz discussed in his new book Freefall the 2008 financial crisis, and said that Economics used to be a rigorous academic discipline, but today’s economists seem to be more like cheerleaders of the business circle than independent critics. Prominent economists like Greenspan, Summers and Bernanke worked in the US government for many years, but whether they acted as independent critics of Wall Street is very much open to question.

Why？Paul Krugman wrote in an old article

THE MERCEDES MENACE http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/mercedes.html

that, in the previous few years while he worked at Stanford he saw many expensive cars, including some in the Stanford faculty carparks; after moving to MIT, he saw much fewer of these, but the number was increasing. Obviously there are far more expensive cars in Stanford and MIT faculty carparks these days than when he wrote the article.

Professors are richer now because their role in society has changed. People expect, almost demand, that they invent electronic, IT, biotech and other products to meet the needs of consumers, or service business in other ways, in order to gain wealth and fame. Professors who do not make much money are not given extra respect for their unworldliness and scholarship, but are more likely to be suspected as being not very smart. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would probably be a computer game programmer earning millions in stock options, not a penniless author. Professors who hold endowed chairs funded by generous donors, give speeches at corporate and industry association banquets for a fee, receive consultation assignments from business and government clients, or own high tech startups with venture capitalists, might think twice before speaking their minds as independent critics.

The opening up of China occurred after such changes had already taken place in the western academia. It imported the new thoughts. Traditional western academic concepts are having difficulty taking root.

Stanford is one of the top universities in the world, and it might come as a surprise to you that I blame it for starting the trend that has all but destroyed the academic profession: Stanford demonstrated that it is possible for professors to become very rich, so afterwards, every professor everywhere  wants to be very rich.

I have several other gripes in my capacity as a former Computer Scientist: Stanford also started the trend of producing MSc and PhD graduates that go and work as programmers instead of becoming professors and researchers; it started a trend in CS research that I call the "thin slice of reality" approach, supposed to ensure scientific rigour: if you look at a situation when just a small number of variables can be changed, you can rigorously describe their relationship to each other. However, to make the study meaningful, the "thin slices" have to be put together into a whole, but that become nobody's job - not rigorous, which explains why, the last 30 years saw tremendous advances in computer technology and business, but hardly any progress in computer science itself.

Finally, Stanford's president John Hennessy was famours for his research in RISC (reduced instruction set computers - David Paterson of Berkeley was the other big RISC name), and all the major computer companies (IBM, Motorola, Apple, Sun, HP, DEC which no longer exists: having spent heavily developing the Alpha RISC processor, had to be bought out by Compaq;) developed RISC processors. Yet, the idea was basically a failure; a second major research idea in Computer Architecture, EPIC, failed too, though only one company, Intel, actually made investment in it, producing the Itanium processor that has all but been abandoned

You see I am not a Stanford admirer; However, I also happen to be Stanford's neighbour - I own a house in Palo Alto, not far from Google's Mountain View offices.

http://sinazen.com/eichler 

I am entitled to have a friendly disagreement with them. And here is another opportunity for me to do so

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/01/10/professor-comes-under-fire-for-alleged-anti-iranian-e-mail/

Jeff Ullman is the computer scientist with the highest publication citation count (that is, references by other people to his book/paper, an indication of their usefulness to other people's work) and his textbooks were widely adopted; frankly, his reply to the student was politically juvenile - once outside his domain, he is no better than anyone else, but obviously he thought his views on Israel etc are worthy of other people's notice, to the extent that he thought these represented American/Stanford 'values' that prospective stanford students must "share"; I might want students to support, say YOG or climbing Everest, before they deserve my help - NUS students have organized efforts in these ventures so they must represent "values' that prospective students need to share...