As a person who worked for more than twenty years at Beida, I must say I entertain quite complicated feelings about Beida?s current reform. First of all, I am still somewhat in the fold, and it is inevitable that an emotional patina would be involved. More important, the university's reform itself is too complicated, or I should say that the issues involved in the debates surrounding this reform are too complicated. The problem is: what are the serious chronic maladies of China's universities? How should one assess China's present universities and academics? What is the most effective way to improve the standards of China's academics? Quite obviously, people are attempting to bring some clarification to these questions, and even to reach a certain common understanding on them. The competitive mechanisms on which the efforts of the reform are directed represent the path we will have to take in the future in any event; the reform plan's design contains obvious shortcomings and will hardly attain the results forecast by its architects, especially in the process of carrying it out; and, as far as resolving the chronic maladies of Chinese universities is concerned, the present reform is touching on sensitive but far from vital issues.