Funds for the Ministry of Education’s “Yushan Project” academic incentive plan should be used to improve student-lecturer ratios, education union members said yesterday.
“The problem with the ministry’s plans is that they focus only on making stricter rules, but do not provide additional funding, which leads to institutes searching for loopholes, such as hiring low-cost, part-time faculty,” Taiwan Higher Education Union organization department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) said, adding that declining student numbers are heaping pressure on institutes, with many expected to close.
With student numbers expected to fall from 1,200,000 to about 900,000, maintaining the number of professors while using ministry funds to compensate for lost tuition revenue would help boost the student-lecturer ratio from 26-1 to 18-1, which was about the level prior to a massive expansion in university enrollment two decades ago, Lin said.
Stabilizing the academic job market is imperative to retaining high-quality faculty, he added.
“Rather than giving one academic NT$500,000 [US$16,484] per month, it would make more sense to use those funds to hire five,” he said. “There are already programs in place — and the number is increasing — to provide special compensation for stellar performance.”
The “Yushan Project” has three components: The selection of 1,000 “Yushan academics,” who are to receive up to NT$15 million over three years (or NT$416.667 per month); a special NT$2 billion annual fund for institutes and research facilities to pay young professors and researchers; and a 10 percent increase in research allowances for full-time professors.
According to the ministry’s estimate, the project would benefit 19,000 academics and cost at most NT$5.6 billion per year.
“The problem is that the selection process is highly unlikely to pick an academic who does not already have a long track record of research results — and if they do pick young people who they think have potential, that would create a huge amount of controversy,” said union member Chou Ping (周平), an associate professor in Nanhua University’s Department of Applied Sociology.
Without careful design, the project would amount to “embroidering lace,” because top academics often earn substantial side incomes from private-sector partnerships, Chou said.
Yushan (玉山), or Jade Mountain, is the nation’s highest peak.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS