Citing a shortage of funds, the Ministry of Education is halving the budget for the Teaching Excellence program for this year to NT$2.5 billion (US$78 million), while retaining the full budget for a controversial NT$50 billion five-year program to create top universities. A policy that favors certain sectors over others, and rich over poor, is a slap in the face of the teachers and students at the several dozen schools that have worked hard to achieve the Teaching Excellence award.
Higher education in this country has long been a matter of stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, working against private schools while promoting public schools and constantly replicating and reinforcing class structures. Disadvantaged schools and students have no chance to improve their lot since government policies continue to favor the strong.
The ministry favors a few top schools mainly because it wants to raise Taiwan’s international competitiveness. The purpose of the NT$50 billion program is to place a few Taiwanese schools on the list of the world’s top 100 schools. In this year’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) recently released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Center for World-Class Universities, National Taiwan University (NTU) had “improved” its ranking from 150 last year to 127. This caused a lot of smug people to say that not only is NTU the best of all universities in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, it also managed, for the first time, to surpass the National University of Singapore, which ranked 145, thus making NTU the best among “Chinese” universities.
The fact is that in the ARWU ranking, universities ranked 101 to 150 are grouped and listed alphabetically, so there is no difference between 127 and 145. Not much to rejoice about, in other words.
Even if they had managed to make it to the top 100, what is the difference between 99 and 101? Who remembers any of the schools ranked below the first dozen or so on the list? How many people have heard of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, which ranks 23rd?
Furthermore, top Taiwanese universities like the National Tsing Hua University or National Chiao Tung University always rank in the 300 to 350 group, belying the idea that the NT$50 billion five-year budget is having any kind of effect.
An education policy focused on placing a university on the list of the world’s top 100 universities merely highlights the use of political rhetoric in developing countries. Even a place on the World Universities’ Ranking on the Web, which aims to promote Web publication and electronic access to scientific publications, is on the wish list of domestic universities, with schools ranking in the 500s and 600s making a big deal out of it. This obsession with ranking has reached unimaginable proportions.
National competitiveness depends on raising the skills of the whole nation, not on favoring a small elite. We cannot rely on cultivating a few top universities and ignore the rights and potential of the majority of university students, nor can we continue to create privileged and disadvantaged groups in complete disregard of social justice and fairness.
There have been reports that the ministry was considering cutting the budget for the “top university program,” but a few “powerful individuals” intervened and the budget for the Teaching Excellence program will instead be halved, creating a difficult situation for 30 to 40 universities that already receive little support each year.
The main concern for Taiwan’s higher education is how to resist the two main forces that have developed in response to educational formalism. In a pluralistic democracy, universities should have the power to strive for equality and pursue difference. Not every Taiwanese university wants to become a top university or be a factory for academic production, but they still have the right to demand, on a foundation of equality, that they be allowed to use their specialties to train the next generation.
Even more importantly, the state must not use national assets to favor a small elite, nor must it sacrifice the rights of the disadvantaged in order to secure the future of the privileged. The only right left to the disadvantaged would then be the right to take to streets.
Chiou Tian-juh is a professor at Shih Hsin University’s Department of Social Psychology.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs