A Critical Attitude Towards Academic Authority
Authority contains two meanings: the first one is having the legal right to order others and the au-thority is relevant to rank, power, office, position, etc. ； and the second one refers to truth which is the ultimate authority in human existence. Respecting academic authority is a fine tradition in our country. However, people do hold different attitudes towards academic authority. Some regard aca-demic authority as the only source of knowledge. They bury themselves in it to look for answers. On he contrary, others, including me, have a suspicion that authority is unquestioned.
To me, questioning academic authority does not mean overthrowing all authority in academic ields but holding human leaders accountable to truth. An old Chinese proverb says, " Believing eve-rything in books is worse than having no books at all" . It tells us to have a critical attitude towards cademic authority that we have learned. In China, many teachers and students are blind worshippers f the academic authority, and are enchanted by their books and speeches. However, authorities are ot always correct. We’ve all heard the story of “the emperor’s new clothes. ” A child dared to speak ruth to power. Unfortunately, I believe, in the real world, the child would have been hushed and ustled away from the parade, perhaps even punished. My point here is that truth should trump power egardless of its source. Sometimes academic leaders assume headship and deplete energy and aca-demic authority makes young researchers stuffy. It causes researchers fault. With the trend of Times, outmoded notions would be eliminated. This requires that we must have a critical spirit, to promote he development of science and society.
All in all, the truth is the ultimate authority in academic domain. Staying a critical attitude to-wards academic authority reaps no little benefit for all the students, teachers, and scholars.
