If private universities and science and technology institutions conduct mass layoffs of part-time teaching staff to save on personnel costs, encroaching on students’ right to learn, the Ministry of Education would follow the Private School Act (私立學校法) by cutting their subsidies and lowering their recruitment quotas, Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said yesterday.
Pan made the remarks amid allegations that Asia University and Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology plan to lay off part-time lecturers by cutting the number of courses.
Pan said that as schools begin to discuss contracts for the September semester with their teaching staff next month, he would like to remind all private institutions that the ministry forbids them from cutting personnel costs by firing lecturers, as it runs counter to their mission to educate.
The ministry is working to amend regulations governing the employment of part-time lecturers, which will mandate schools pay their part-time teaching staff pensions, Pan said.
The ministry has budgeted NT$60 million (US$1.97 million) to cover pension payments to part-time lecturers planning to retire this year, he said.
“If schools neglect educational needs by limiting their options to sign up for classes or by laying off lecturers, the ministry will slash subsidies to the schools and cut their recruitment as per Article 55 of the Private School Act,” he said.
“If a school decides that they do not need so many lecturers, it means that it does not plan to recruit so many students either,” Pan said, adding that the ministry would fulfill its responsibility to monitor private institutions’ faculties.
In response to reporters queries about proposed pension cuts at public schools negatively affecting people’s willingness to apply for teaching jobs, posing a risk to the higher education system, Pan said that the Executive Yuan’s pension reform proposals includes a provision that allows people to “transfer” their seniority in the private sector to the public sector.
The new rule would benefit people who make the transition from the private to the public sector when their pensions are calculated, Pan said, adding that the new rule would likely motivate people to teach at public universities.
The ministry is also working to reform regulations governing the promotion of university faculty members, he said.
Faculty members’ teaching performance is to be assigned more weighting when schools decide whether they should be promoted, while academic performance would no longer be the dominating criteria, Pan said.
The rule change would also likely help increase people’s willingness to work at public institutions, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching