Chinanews, Guangzhou, Feb.6 – On January 20, a professor from the School of Management at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou killed herself by jumping from a balcony on the fifth floor of a college faculty's apartment building at four o'clock in the morning. She was just 45. Another college teacher also jumped from the same building six months earlier to commit suicide. Their deaths were attributable to the heavy workload placed on college teachers, according to Liu Jixian, a member of the Provincial Committee of the CPPCC from the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomingtang.
The high work quotas set on college teachers directly caused their deaths, the Nanfang Daily quoted Liu as saying.
Liu said that the dead professor, Ouyang Jie, was a tutor for postgraduate students, while she was also studying for her Ph.D. degree. As a teacher, she had to give lessons to undergraduates, postgraduates and students studying for MBA courses. In addition to this, she also had to finish her doctoral thesis so that she could be a doctor tutor.
As a doctor tutor himself, Liu severely criticised the current work quota system.
“At present, all college teachers have to finish their workload that is simply assessed by some quantity criteria written on papers. These papers state that teachers with certain academic titles should accomplish such and such work in a semester, write how many essays and get those essays published, and accomplish how many research projects, regardless of teachers’ different capabilities in certain fields. In fact, some teachers might excel at writing essays, while others might be good at teaching. However, teachers’ different capabilities are all obscured by several sheets of paper,” Liu said.
He said that some media originally attributed the young professor’s death to her divorce.
“That might be one of the reasons for her death. In fact, she got divorced a decade ago, not recently.”
To Liu, it was the heavy workload that made her crack up in the end.
