‘An earthquake in Chinese academia’: Tongji abolishes tenure

The decision of Tongji University in Shanghai to abolish faculty tenure and replace permanent appointments with periodic assessments has unsettled a Chinese academic community used to jobs for life.

According to a notice issued at the end of July, pre-tenure faculty at Tongji University will be reviewed every three years, while tenured faculty at the institution must now undergo a full assessment every six years and an interim review every three years. Those who fail their assessment could face pay cuts, demotion or even dismissal.

Tongji is among the 36 Class A universities in the Chinese government's Double First Class excellence initiative, launched in 2017. There is concern that this move from one of China’s top research universities will set a precedent that other leading institutions might follow. 

Historically, Chinese institutions adopted a tenure-track system that offers academics a structured pathway to promotions while protecting job security and academic freedom. However, Tongji’s proposals also reflect a broader trend in Chinese universities towards surveillance and performance management.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the universities of Bristol and Oxford, said that the intervention marked “an important development”.

“Tongji University is a prestigious public university in China…so what Tongji does is significant as a potential example that might be imitated elsewhere,” he stated.

Marginson described the proposed change as “an earthquake in Chinese academia” but was not convinced that it would lead to improved academic performance. As well as making it “harder for universities to hold on to established high performers”, it would also put off early career researchers “as the possibility of reaching the security and respect entailed in a tenured post is a strong motivating factor for junior faculty”.

“It is hard to see how increasing the weight of management and ratcheting up the performance pressure could improve performance in what is already the world’s most competitive, pressured and managed higher education system,” he said.

That perspective was shared by Futao Huang, professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University in Japan. Although he considered the regular assessment of academics to be “not necessarily unreasonable”, Tongji’s proposal to review pre-tenure faculty every three years and tenured academics every six years “could seriously weaken the security that tenure is intended to provide”, he cautioned.

Depending on assessment criteria, Huang said: “The reforms could increase anxiety, encourage short-term publishing strategies and make academic careers even less attractive.”

Many details about Tongji’s announcement are yet to be fleshed out. For example, the university has not confirmed what the assessment criteria for academics will be, including whether it will focus on research, teaching or both.

As a result of such uncertainty, one Chinese scholar, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Times Higher Education that Tongji's policy risked introducing more “involution” into Chinese higher education, by which they meant a self-defeating cycle of hyper-competition that leads to exhaustion. This will lead to “deceased interest” from graduates in working at Tonji, for which reason the policy “may not last long”. 

Tongji president Yang Jinlong, who has led on the review of faculty appointment, took the helm in June 2025. Although the length of presidential terms is not fixed in China, they usually last between three and five years. Hence, the policy might be a case of “the president trying to make his mark before his time is up”, the source, who is not based at Tonji, suggested.

“It is very likely that the policy will be changed when the university has a new senior management team,” they added.

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com