Shih Chih-yu (
Shih even turned down an offer of permanent tenure at NTU because he felt so strongly about the subject, displaying a moral fortitude that should be common to all intellectuals.
But I would like to offer another perspective on this. First, Taiwan is not the only country to appraise its academics based on how many research publications they produce. Many universities in the US also use publication quantity as a factor for assessing the performance of social science professors.
For example, when US doctoral candidates who plan on an academic career begin their research, their professors often remind them of the importance of getting their work published. This has nothing to do with improving a candidate's grades, but is closely related to how competitive they will be in the job market.
But the biggest challenge for university teachers doesn't come until after they are made professors. If an associate professor hasn't produced enough quality work within six or seven years to receive permanent tenure, he or she could soon be unemployed.
This kind of pressure may be brutal, but it has led to the international prominence that US universities enjoy in the humanities today.
The establishment of common academic standards enhances the accumulation of knowledge. Without such standards, humanities research would be fragmented, and each researcher would blindly draw their own conclusions without input from colleagues.
This is why, beginning in the middle of the past century, the humanities began to emphasize scientific analysis. This movement became the norm in some areas of US humanities research.
Taiwanese universities' so-called social science colleges and political science departments are all products of the movement toward scientific analysis.
However, because many Taiwanese academics are limited by insufficient training in methodology or foreign language, they create research that often consists of static policy analysis or collections of facts.
Some academics say that the nation's social science researchers should not be judged by how many articles they have listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, which is a worldwide catalog of past and present social science journals. This viewpoint holds that Taiwanese topics are too localized in nature to be published in international journals.
These academics should note, however, that regional research has always been an important field within political science. There are many academic journals focused on political science research in Asia that have been incorporated into the index.
The nation's social science academics should have much to contribute to international journals: they have had first hand-experience with an economic miracle, a peaceful transition to democracy and cross-strait competition and cooperation. Therefore, the lack of global visibility for Taiwanese academics is a result of the disconnect between their research methods and those used in the mainstream international community.
I call on progressive academics not to use localization and regionalization as excuses for not publishing more in international journals.
Feng Jui-chieh is a doctoral student in political science at the University of North Texas.
Translated by Marc Langer
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