Lately, there have been many reports about scandals in the academic world.
There was the teacher who had an affair with a student, the department head who was accused of sexually harassing students, and the reports about life-threatening curses from a certain technical university.
The courts will have to decide what actually happened, but regardless of their findings, consideration must be given to some deeper issues: Are these scandals isolated occurrences and how should they be dealt with?
The debate about the overall influence of universal access to tertiary education on society has been going on for a long time.
Those who say that the influence has been positive talk about the importance of building a highly educated workforce and say that higher education lifts national competitiveness.
Some say that the right to an education is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that offering the chance for a university education to those who otherwise could not afford such an education is an important human right.
Those who disagree with this interpretation say that the widespread establishment of new universities or elevating existing schools to university level -- leaving aside any "injustices" in the interaction between private schools, local governments and the Ministry of Education -- has only further diluted Taiwan's already scarce educational and academic resources.
In light of the fact that this has distorted both the workforce and the structure of industrial production, educational policy is simply wrongheaded and is part of a broader series of economic policy mistakes.
The quick growth of institutions of higher education in Taiwan has led to the following chain reaction.
To begin with, there is a shortage of teachers. A close look at the new schools shows that many departments or institutes have merely four or five teachers, and some of them don't even have a doctoral degree.
In addition, some teachers are simply not suitable: A teacher at an applied linguistics department in one school has a degree from the US in political science. Could it be that the school feels that having studied in the US is enough qualification to teach linguistics?
There are also too many teachers hired by multiple institutions. It is really difficult to imagine that Taiwan would have so many academics with such wide knowledge.
One teacher can hold positions in three or more academic institutions, and many institutions do not list these different positions, which makes one wonder if they are deliberately trying to cover up this fact. It is not difficult to understand why university management complains about the low quality of new staff.
The urgent need for teachers has meant that Taiwan's local educational institutions must gear up to produce local doctoral graduates.
This has meant that many master's degree holders that aren't really suitable for doctoral studies jump on the doctoral train and later enter the university world as teachers.
The negative effects of this approach are now beginning to appear. The employment market is already discriminating between doctoral degrees obtained abroad and locally in Taiwan.
The question is how Taiwan's advanced graduate teaching will be able to establish itself once this approach takes root.
Another issue is that the system for permanent tenure is improperly implemented in most universities.
As a result, once hired as an assistant professor, there is no longer any need to continue to work hard. Perhaps this idleness makes the mind wander and leads to less than professional behavior.
The universities, which in the past were ivory towers and academic temples, have now been universalized to the point where they are no more than a model of society in miniature.
Many people in academia, from students to department heads, are straying further and further from the task of cultivating a learned "elite."
Looking at it this way, there is no reason to be too surprised by sex scandals or stories about the evil of academics.
If we want to deal with declining standards at universities, we must be stricter when deciding who we hire and we should also think of ways to provide better exit strategies for academic staff.
Fong Ruey-jay is a doctoral student in political science at the University of North Texas.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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