The Legislative Yuan recently passed several bills regarding the retirement and pensions of public-sector employees. As it is inevitable that higher education will undergo many changes, university presidents and professors want the government to improve academics’ retirement benefits to attract more talent and prevent a brain drain.
According to the pension system, public-school teachers receive the same pension and retirement benefits regardless of performance. Although academics sometimes receive very good retirement benefits, like an extremely high income replacement ratio, it rarely happens.
The Ministry of Education should consider setting down different rules for higher education faculty and researchers at public institutions, instead of applying the same pension schemes and retirement benefits to all civil servants, including public-school teachers. Establishing a separate salary and pension system for academics would bring several benefits.
First, providing more flexible salaries to university faculty and researchers would make Taiwan more competitive in the global market, improve higher education and boost university rankings.
Second, offering salaries to academics based on performance in research or teaching, instead of paying everyone the same, would also be fairer.
Third, while civil servants are supposed to follow instructions and abide by rules, academics need to be innovative and imaginative.
As academic Hu Shih (胡適) said, researchers should “make bold assumptions and try to prove them carefully.”
Being an academic requires an entirely different approach from that of most government employees. Academics who think like civil servants and are resistant to innovation are unlikely to make major contributions.
Fourth, if academics were not bound by rules designed for civil servants, they would be able to enjoy more flexibility in obtaining or using research grants. This could prevent unnecessary legal issues due to flawed regulations — such as the 2013 false receipt controversy in which many academics were embroiled.
To improve Taiwan’s global academic reputation, we must encourage academics and researchers to return to Taiwan and stay here. The government should develop a new reward system to keep academics from leaving.
Kent Lin is a professor at the Institute of Religion and Humanity at Tzu Chi University.
Translated by Tu Yu-an
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
A large majority of Taiwanese favor strengthening national defense and oppose unification with China, according to the results of a survey by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC). In the poll, 81.8 percent of respondents disagreed with Beijing’s claim that “there is only one China and Taiwan is part of China,” MAC Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told a news conference on Thursday last week, adding that about 75 percent supported the creation of a “T-Dome” air defense system. President William Lai (賴清德) referred to such a system in his Double Ten National Day address, saying it would integrate air defenses into a
RSS