I went back to my university for Teachers’ Day. The professors were worried about losing their jobs.Dear friends, On Teachers’ Day, I went back to my old university. The campus felt quiet once you stepped in from the bustling city outside, as if time had been preserved and everything looked as I remembered it.
A row of ginkgo trees along the roadside had just begun to turn pale yellow in the early autumn, students hurried between classes and bicycles were parked everywhere. I had mainly gone back to see my former teachers and bring them a bouquet of flowers. After chatting in the office for a while, one of my professors took me to the canteen for lunch and paid with his staff card. I joked that this was one of the perks of being a professor and that was when our conversation took an unexpected turn. The professor told me that the job was not nearly as secure as I had imagined when I was a student. For years, I had thought of university professors as having one of the best jobs in China: decent pay, high social status, intellectual freedom and, most importantly, stability. Once you became a professor, you could more or less settle down and keep doing research until retirement. But sitting across from my former teacher in a university canteen, I realised that this image was becoming increasingly outdated. He was already on a long-term appointment, but that did not mean he was free from performance reviews. In fact, he told me that many leading Chinese universities were moving toward systems where even senior academics face assessments. Some universities review teachers every few years, looking at their publications, research grants and other achievements. Failing such an assessment can mean being moved to a lower-ranked position, such as associate professor or lecturer, which results in changes to salary and benefits. The position may still exist, but the sense of permanence is disappearing. One teacher explained the anxiety to me in a way that was almost comical. Imagine introducing yourself at an academic conference. Two years ago, you might have said, “I’m a professor. I study this and that.” Then, after failing to meet a target, you might have to say: “I’m an associate professor.” It may sound trivial, but academic titles matter. They signal your career stage and standing among colleagues, and sometimes shape how students see you. A former student once put it even more bluntly: “When choosing a supervisor, you have to be careful. You may not even graduate before your supervisor leaves.” It was a joke, but it captured something larger. Another professor I met that afternoon was a senior university administrator. He had returned to China through a high-level talent programme and, because of his particular appointment, was not currently facing the same assessment requirements. But he was not particularly relaxed about the future either. He told me that universities used to operate under something like an “old people, old rules; new people, new rules” arrangement. Teachers hired under newer systems faced tougher assessments, while those who had already secured long-term positions were largely protected. That distinction was becoming harder to maintain. Even if long-term professors were now being assessed, he said, it would not be surprising if people recruited under special talent programmes eventually faced similar rules. Our conversation also clarified why universities were moving in this direction. The first word that kept coming up was “money”. Research is expensive and universities increasingly have to compete for funding. For an academic, winning a prestigious national research grant is enormously important, but those grants are highly competitive. In 2025, the success rate for one category of young scientists applying for funding from China’s National Natural Science Foundation was just 14.4 per cent. That means thousands of researchers can spend months preparing applications without receiving funding. Some universities have therefore placed greater emphasis on another kind of money: research income brought in from companies and other external partners. This can create a strange incentive. A professor may have spent years training in a specialised scientific field, only to find that part of his career now depends on how much money he can bring back to his university. I heard stories from academics about colleagues borrowing money or turning to intermediaries simply to meet research-funding targets. The details vary from university to university, but the underlying pressure is familiar. Research is no longer judged only by what you discover. It is increasingly also measured by what can be counted. Papers. Grants. Patents. Projects. Money. And that changes what universities reward. It also changes the relationship between scientists and administrators. Universities are enormous organisations and somebody has to manage budgets, rankings, staffing and performance. When those administrative targets start shaping academic careers, researchers feel that they are working as managers’ performance indicators. In the old system, who you were mattered enormously: your position, your title, your seniority and whether you had a permanent post. In the newer system, what you have done matters more. That may sound reasonable. But research is not always a job where the next result can be scheduled in advance. A good scientific idea can take years to develop. A risky experiment can fail. An important paper may never become a famous paper. And some of the most interesting research is precisely the research whose outcome nobody can guarantee. That creates a strange contradiction. Universities want scientists to produce important discoveries, but scientists also need enough security to take risks. Back on campus, however, nobody was talking in such grand terms. We were simply walking beneath the ginkgo trees. My professor had helped me through some of the most important years of my life, and seeing him worry about his own position was strange. When I was a student, becoming a professor seemed like reaching the end of a long climb. Sometimes I even regret not taking the academic path myself. Now, however, it looks more like stepping onto another treadmill. Perhaps that is the biggest change I noticed when I returned to my old university. The professor’s office still looks the same, the professor title still sounds impressive and the campus still treated teachers with respect on Teachers’ Day. But behind that familiar image, the job itself is changing. For generations, the university professor was imagined as someone who had earned the right to stop worrying about career security. Now, my professors were telling me that this right may no longer come automatically. And perhaps that is why, when I left campus that afternoon, the thing I remembered most was not the old buildings or even the lunch. It was my professor swiping his card for me at the canteen, then talking about how hard it had become to keep that card. Best, Chao | 
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