He has a hearing problem, and his right hand shakes. Yet, Liu Daoyu, in his seventies, still works four hours a day, offering his thoughts on China's higher education. His latest bombshell is a 7,000-word article in China's most revered newspaper Southern Weekend in late February, calling for an overhaul of the country's swelling universities.

The former president of Wuhan University, or Wuda, is convinced that education should be based on the ultimate value of Man and stripped of the shadow of bureaucratic system. "China's education still awaits a movement of enlightenment," he says, sitting in his humble flat amid the blooming cherry on campus.

Intention to save 'an old cart'

Born in a village of northern Hubei Province, Liu studied chemistry in Wuda in 1953, with an ambition to become China's Alfred Nobel. "Nobel's story implanted a seed of innovation in me when I was just 14," he recalls.

Before 1949, Wuda was ranked as one of the top five universities in China, on a par with the universities of Peking, Tsinghua, National Central (Nanjing) and Zhejiang. But Wuda's reputation quickly decline after 1953 as the leftism set in. "Professors were caught with a sense of terror. Some were sent to the gymnasium to receive physical punishment, and nobody was in the mood to pursue research," Liu recalls.

In the following couple of years, Wuda was enveloped by party fractions, and ended up with "a cart pulled by an old ox", as Liu put it. It slid to 22 nd of the 23 universities under the supervision of Ministry of Education (MoE).

Liu became a chemistry lecturer when he graduated in 1957. The university sent him to the Soviet Union for organic fluorine studies, a basic science for atomic industry, at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1962.

"Unlike what I had expected, the postgraduate studies in the former Soviet Union were markedly independent and democratic. I was neither required to register for any compulsory course nor sit written examinations. All I had to was to write an original thesis, and pass an oral examination."

Liu attributed the Big Brother's academic freedom to its western cultural background, which "tallied with my personality as well."

In 1973, ten years of his teaching in China, Liu was grasped by a streak of "political good fortune". He was singled out as deputy Party chief of Wuda. Four years later, he was transferred to Beijing as chief of the MoE's higher education department.

Although blessed with an officialdom career ahead, Liu resigned in 1979 because he just wanted to go back to alma mater Wuda, and "end the shameful record and restore its past glory," he says, disdaining power and fame.

In the next three years, he refused the offers to hold the posts of the secretary general of Chinese Communist Youth League, education minister and the mayor of Wuhan.