In a new guiding document to be released soon by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education, “a special policy zone” will be made to encourage professors of institutions of higher education in agriculture to go out of campus and “write their thesis on the farmland”, a measure to promote the extension of agricultural technologies.

For a long time, there has been a dilemma in the extension of agricultural science and technology that “university professors are reluctant to go to the countryside and stay there” while “grass-roots agricultural technicians are not competent for the job”. The main reason for the former is that the evaluation and assessment system in university is based on the number of the published papers and SCI citation index so that it is difficult to arouse the professors’ enthusiasm to go out of campus. According to Science and Technology Daily, in the new policy, the number of papers will not be taken as the only indicator of the merit of agricultural professors and greater emphasis will be put on the effectiveness of the technical extension efforts made in a new form of organization called “new countryside development institute”, so as to bring up more “extension-type” professors.