Abstract: Since 2014, the comprehensive education reform plan of Chinese universities takes the reform of teachers’ personnel system as its breakthrough, hoping to achieve the goal of building a world-class university. The logic of the reform is to start with the hypothesis of economic man, attract talents with high salary and stimulate output, and conduct market competition through performance appraisal and elimination system, so as to stimulate the academic vitality and output efficiency of teachers. This is the ideal picture of academic production projected by the reform of personnel system, and also the typical performance of audit culture entering into higher education. However, through the analysis of teachers’ behavior strategies in the promotion of professional titles, it is found that the incentive of taking benefits as exchange conditions and rewards and punishments as incentives will not only erode teachers’ pure love for learning, but also damage the good academic environment and academic culture, resulting in incalculable and permanent internal injuries. The dislocation between the macro logic of the school and the micro action of the teachers is the collision and competition between the audit culture from the management perspective and the academic culture from the individual perspective. The macro logic of personnel reform policy requires a lot of transparent information, but it destroys the most valuable trust in academic culture. Facing the compulsory accountability of audit culture in higher education, we need to redefine the key concepts of “university quality” and “academic competitiveness” from the perspective of academic culture, so that they can reflect the significance of academic community.

Key words: personnel system reform, university teacher, academic work, audit culture, academic culture