BY JENNIFER RUTH

Last week, I interviewed Professor Shiu Wen-tang (許文堂), President of the Taiwan Association of University Professors. Given the attention in America paid to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit and the aftermath (namely, Chinese military aggression), it seemed an apt time to introduce readers to the faculty organization in Taiwan dedicated to Taiwan’s identity and autonomy. This week Chou Ping (周平), President of THE (Taiwan Higher Education) union, graciously agreed to sit down with me for an interview. The trade union is dedicated to protecting the rights of faculty and staff at Taiwan’s universities and colleges. It was established in 2012 to advocate for “better labor conditions, democratic governance of universities, and academic freedom and fairness in distributing the nation’s educational resources.” The union is playing an increasingly critical role in defending faculty as Taiwan’s universities and colleges find themselves financially squeezed by an unprecedented drop in student enrollment. The drop is in response to a number of factors – swift decline in enrollment of students from China for geopolitical reasons, for one, but perhaps the most important factor is the island’s changing demographics leading to many fewer college-age students in Taiwan. Universities are consolidating, downsizing, and some are closing altogether, a trend all too familiar to some of us here in the US. The union is fighting to make sure that faculty across the country do not unfairly or disproportionately bear the brunt of this precipitous decline. Indeed, on the day I interviewed President Chou (August 23), we needed to move our appointment up a few hours to accommodate a newly announced action: a protest held in front of the Ministry of Education. Faculty at Kao Yuan University in southern Taiwan had not been paid for more than three months and the campus branch of the union organized a demonstration.

In addition to being the president of the labor union, Chou Ping is an Associate Professor at Nanhua University in Applied Sociology. He received his PhD in sociology from The New School in New York in 2002.

With us for the interview was also Chen Po-chien (陳柏謙), a researcher on the union staff.

Jennifer Ruth (JR): Can you tell us about the union’s establishment in 2012?

Chou Ping (CP): Before 2012, there was no teachers’ union. We had professional associations but a union was not legally allowed. Immediately after it became legal in May 2012, we established the Taiwan higher education union. After 1987, after the lifting of martial law, we are supposed to see a new atmosphere in Taiwan – freedom of speech, freedom of press, etc. The university part of this—academic freedom—is part of this. However, new forces that are not so democratic or free have emerged and that is what we call the new managerialism by which administrators exert control over faculty. In the nineties, people promoted the idea that professors should be in charge. They tried to institutionalize a spirit of “academic autonomy” but the new managerialism has damaged this spirit as administration became more and more powerful as they chase dollars from the government. Universities rely heavily on financial support from government and the National Science Council. Even private universities depend on the government for 20% of their budget so all university administrators, public or private, have to cater to government demands and expectations. There are regular evaluations at every level (university, department, individual professor) and these evaluations create very strong pressure for university administrators to control professors in all areas of our jobs – academic research, teaching, and service. Before 2012, individual professors wrote articles and found other ways to express our discontent regarding this system of governmental and administrative control. After 2012, with the union, we can organize our efforts to reform the system.

JR: Can you say a little about your history with the union, how you got involved and became President?

CP:  After graduating from The New School, I immediately came back to Taiwan and began teaching at Nanhua University. At that time [2002], I did not even know what “SSCI” [Social Sciences Citation Index] meant but my colleagues kept reminding me that I have to publish more articles in the journals ranked in that index. I was curious about this and after a few years I realized that the citational index has become an exaggerated force in Taiwan, one that has created a false meritocracy. I found this situation to be wrong so I wrote some editorials in the press about this. These articles caught the attention of Dai Bo-feng who became the first president of the union and she invited me to join in forming the union. I was there at the beginning and one of the original twelve board members. After our last president Professor Liu Mei-chun finished two terms and stepped down, I agreed to do it because it is important work. [Note: Taiwan passed a law that stipulates that union presidents must not lead for more than two terms. See past-president Liu Mei-Chun discuss the difficult employment situation for Taiwan graduates here.]

JR: For American academics who may not be as familiar with the SSCI index or, if they are, have not considered how the index might impact research conditions in Taiwan, can you explain what it is and how it negatively influences Taiwan’s academic culture?

CP: The index is not a bad thing in itself. It is a good academic network for some purposes. However, in Taiwan, it has become the primary mechanism used to judge professors’ achievements and determine their promotions and bonuses. This reliance on the index pushes faculty away from writing books or developing projects and academic communities in Taiwan and pushes them towards always trying to place more and more articles in the predominantly English-language journals cited by the index. This situation is not only in Taiwan but also in Japan, Korea, and China. The government and the university administrators care so much about the SSCI because they use it to rank universities and to rank individual professors. The rankings determine how they distribute resources. The effect is to drive the majority of resources towards the elite institutions and towards those professors whose research agendas maximize citations in English-language international journals.

The union has an ideal of distributional justice. We see the way economic class in Taiwan has become more and more unequal in part as a result of the higher education system. We want to reform the system to minimize class polarization. Take the cycle by which the national elite schools gain a disproportionate share of resources due to the ranking system. Students from poorer backgrounds, with less competitive preparation in high school, are unable to gain admission to these public universities. So they enroll in private universities. [In Taiwan, the public schools have the most resources and prestige while private schools have significantly less.] Because the private schools have less financial support, their tuition is higher and this means that the poorer students end up taking on student loans to get their degree. This debt becomes a burden which they carry through the lives. The SSCI is one of the mechanisms creating this non-egalitarian distribution of resources.

Another problem with the SSCI is that it leads teachers to focus on research rather than teaching at the expense of the students. And even the research itself suffers. Faculty are not free to choose the best research methods or research topics for their work because they need to apply the models and pursue the topics rewarded by the SSCI journals, the vast majority of which are based in the West. The methods and topics popular in these journals are not always the best ones for the situation in Taiwan but it doesn’t matter. In this way, we do not develop our own indigenous theories or methods. This is not helpful for our domestic research or creativity. The articles themselves do not end up having a big impact. We have many articles in these journals written by faculty in Taiwan but quantity is prized not quality. [See here an article in the Taipei Times covering the union’s criticisms of the evaluation system.]

JR: What is another issue important to the union?

CP: For private universities, especially this year, there is a shortage of students. For a while now, the private universities have been trying to lay off professors, replacing them with contract or adjunct faculty. In the past, at private universities there were about 70% full-time to 30% part-time faculty. Now it is more like 50-50 or worse.  Many contract faculty are treated unfairly and they come to us for help. We help them to win in negotiations or to win legal cases. [See this for more information on the abuse of contract hires.]

Regarding private universities, because of the demographic crisis, many are facing an existential crisis. The Boards of these institutions are handling this crisis as if the universities were private companies and they are trying to empty campuses of faculty and students so that the board members can keep the assets and repurpose them as they see fit.  But we argue that private universities are not for-profit companies. They were established as non-profits and were subsidized heavily by the government as they came into being. We are against the board members who try to privatize the school’s property, thereby sacrificing professors, staff, students, and the public who have no say in what happens to the assets. We argue that if a university must close down, it should be donated it to the public.

The Ministry of Education designed a University Closure Act to regulate the process of closing the universities. It is supposed to provide guardrails for what happens to assets when a university closes but it is a very inadequate act and we have to fight with them to make it stronger.

JR: You were not consulted when they designed it?

CP: They view us as their biggest enemy. They didn’t consult us but we protested and warned that we would hold a press conference if they did not invite us to the hearing they held so they did in the end.

JR:  Please tell us about the petition and protest today for Kao Yuan faculty?

Chen Po-chien (staff):  A few months ago some faculty from Kao Yuan University came to us and asked for help. We helped them initiate a branch. Their Board is trying to shut down the university and has not paid faculty for over three months. We are helping faculty petition the Ministry of Education to disband the board.

JR: Any final point you’d like to make?

CP:  We are also working to expose the reason why the Ministry of Education often does not act in the best interests of faculty and students. There are links between the governments officials in the ministry and the boards. When officials retire from the ministry, they often take positions at universities. This revolving door creates conflicts of interests. Current officials have an expectation that they will in the future be invited to be the president or senior professor at a private university and this influences them to make decisions that favor the interests of the Boards. [See this article for more information on this subject and the union’s efforts to draw attention to it.]

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom(2022). She is currently researching academic freedom issues on a MOFA fellowship in Taiwan, where she wrote this editorial for The Taipei Times.