The MOE
In other posts, I have talked about the Ministry of Education (MOE). In the West, we are used to the idea that universities are largely independent. In Taiwan, the MOE has so much control that they are really an obstacle to effective education.
As I have said before, the MOE tells universities who they can hire. They also give the schools their contract. Some schools don't follow this contract, but they generally model their own contracts after the MOE. The MOE tells schools who they can promote. We have to get their OK to offer a new course. And if we don't do what they say, they threaten to pull our funding. Like many parents, students, and educators, I hate the MOE.
All of this has a serious effect on education. For example, in the West we are used to thinking of professors as a sort of super professional class. They have so much freedom that even the universities have trouble controlling them. Here, the MOE turns us pretty much into public servants. The result is that instead of being elite educators, we are just teachers at the university level.
Teachers don't have the same problems as professors. Instead of being concerned about what theory we believe or teach, we have to be concerned about more terrestrial matters, such as how to keep our job. University teachers align themselves following the same sorts of conventions that public school teachers would; seniority, who you know, and what school you graduated from.
The MOE created this system to assure that every university met a minimum standard. This was fine when corruption dominated the system and there was no international standard of professionalism or competition. Today, all this system does is create ferocious fighting over the control of resources and money by groups divided along lines I described above.
10:01:42 PM 
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