The Ministry of Education has announced its “Yushan Project” proposals aimed at “recruiting globally and retaining locally” gifted academics and addressing the problem of uncompetitive salaries for university teaching staff.
The plan would increase professors’ salaries as of next year and see a number of “Yushan scholars” selected, who will have their salaries augmented to the tune of NT$5 million (US$165,909) for three years, raising the typical annual salary for these few to NT$6.5 million.
The Ministry of Science and Technology also plans to increase the stipends paid to its researchers.
Six academic groups, including the Association for Taiwan Social Studies, have voiced doubts about the plan and more than 500 university instructors have signed a petition against it, but the Executive Yuan still rushed the proposal through on Aug. 10.
When Premier William Lai (賴清德) took office, the budget for the plan was returned for some adjustments before being sent to the Legislative Yuan. In the interests of responsible governance, Lai should clarify the following points:
Over the past few years, the average number of university teaching staff — lecturers and professors — leaving their positions for reasons other than retirement every year was 148, only 0.3 percent of the total number of teachers. Also, the majority of these were actually transferring from private universities to state schools, including those forced to leave their positions as they had no chance of promotion, which is why statistically most were assistant professors.
Monthly salaries of assistant professors fall somewhere in the middle of the international rankings, and professors’ income is about 2.3 times the average national income, which is no worse than in the UK, the US and Germany.
Evidently, the so-called brain drain, even if it is borne out in a few individual cases, is not a real phenomenon. Is this really something we should be throwing money at?
In the past, the two ministries have allocated NT$1.8 billion a year for flexible salaries, or selective salary increases. The Control Yuan has investigated this and in September last year it announced that “more than 90 percent of the fund allocation of the flexible salaries plan is used to subsidize salaries of current personnel and it is of extremely limited use for recruiting new talent. The majority of the individuals benefiting from it are professors already in a position and those concurrently performing a supervisory role.”
The National Audit Office also criticized the allocation.
The higher education plan to be implemented next year allocates NT$2 billion for flexible salary structures, more than before. Is there really a need to add another NT$3 billion to this for the selected Yushan scholars?
Would the objections by the Control Yuan and National Audit Office not apply just as much to this plan?
The third question concerns the problem of how Yushan scholars could be selected with any degree of objectivity.
Responding to recent academic fraud, the education ministry said that “the Yushan scholars program is aimed at future potential” and is open to “young and non-staff members” with equal emphasis on teaching, research and services, all of which is a little abstruse.
Putting aside for a moment how one is expected to select an outstanding academic whose salary is to be equal to that of six more pedestrian ones, given that the intention is to retain talent, would it not be necessary to first require some sort of evidence to show that efforts had been made to recruit them elsewhere?
Before considerable sums of money are paid to recruit talent from elsewhere, should not universities first be ensuring that there are not any eager young academics coming through who might equally fit the bill?
Then there is the problem of how we are to subsequently evaluate the performance of the Yushan scholars during the period of their augmented salary.
If they are considered to have underperformed in some way, should the education ministry try to claw back some of the costly subsidy they have been given?
So where might investment in the higher education environment be better directed?
First, each semester lasts 18 weeks, and teaching staff are expected to teach approximately four times as many class hours in a year than their counterparts at the University of London, for example, and with a higher student-to-lecturer ratio.
Each university should be required to bring in new teaching staff to reduce the burden on their current instructors and to bring down the student-to-teacher ratio.
In view of the differences in living expenses and conditions in different parts of the nation, the government should subsidize universities so that they could offer appropriate housing for teaching staff, depending on their own individual needs. It should also invest in the future by reducing tuition fees.
Rather than increasing stipends, it would be better for the science ministry to increase the number of young academics’ research proposals it approves.
So does the Yushan Project actually comply with President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) expectations?
When Lai became premier, Tsai said that she wanted him to develop, among other things, a comprehensive plan to strengthen national development, to keep government spending under control and to reduce unnecessary waste of resources.
For years now, higher education policy has consistently disregarded the basic infrastructure of the education sector, encouraging people to vie over funding, to the detriment of the cultivation of outstanding universities
Lai should bring this fraught tussle over resources to an end.
Frank Wang is director of the Association for Taiwan Social Studies. Chen Jwu-shang is associate professor at the General Education Center at National Kaohsiung Normal University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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