Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (25 page)

The question is made more difficult because the MOE has decreed that every master’s degree student write a thesis (unlike American universities, for example, where many MBA or education degree students finish without a major research project). The goal is to raise the research profile of Taiwan in
the
hopes of establishing a research center in an emerging global knowledge economy. Unfortunately, the test-heavy educational system does not afford training in independent inquiry—especially in fields as ideologically essential to state control and reproduction as the humanities and social sciences. Thus, not trained to conduct independent research, familiar with the State Neo-Confucian model of friendly teacher–student ties, and hoping for ease, many students choose the less demanding route.

From the standpoint of short-term gain, the problem is easily solved. Students are themselves consumers of education, which they are promised will add value to their human capital. Accordingly, students can gain leverage over the divided faculty via complaints that course content and curriculum design are insufficiently practical for future success. Success is usually undefined but understood to mean occupational pathways that lead to increasing consumer power (see Ren,
Chapter One
in this volume, for a comparable argument regarding the Chinese mainland). Because it is devoid of concrete content but overdetermined by the mandate for the state’s construction qua economic growth, raising the problem of student success during meetings has the power to frighten administrators to alter curricula. It is simply and unquestionably logical that students must succeed; and, to be successful, they must be practical; and to be practical is to possess marketable skills. Naturally, teachers must supply these skills pleasantly.

Thus, students consume education and in turn produce themselves as consumable. It is here that the promise of Enlightenment slides into a subjectivity that I term
democratic consumerist
—following a description of the general culture of contemporary Taiwan made by the former vice president and current president of the university during a meeting with teachers in 2002. Acutely aware of this feedback loop, he referred to the demands on CYUT for efficiency of operations (experienced by the administration in terms of parental and student complaints) as something that is natural in a “democratic nation” (
minzu guojia
). His resigned reference to democracy struck me as strange but very pronounced insofar as it conflates the demands of consumers with the sovereignty of the people in a social environment in which democracy has only tentatively replaced authoritarianism as the accepted form of political life during the past twenty years.

Ironically, this new subjectivity is possible only because the liberatory promise of the Enlightenment has been realized for many in Taiwan. The days when people labored for poor wages in factories or bent over in rice
fields
have been all but forgotten. Taiwan now imports manual labor to build buildings, take care of its old people, and work on computer chip assembly lines. The crisis of personal autonomy is apparently resolved for students via two messages: Study for a future of success and consume (see Hsu,
Chapter Two
in this volume)—though to study at a school like CYUT might simply mean to consume education with no sure guarantees that the skills they acquire will have a purchase on the future. What if the promised future of a new global order fails to deliver? People can defer this possibly by appeal to the cargo-cults of Pan-Chinese, Pan-Asian, or Pan-Taiwanese identity. In the public sphere, democratic choice has been reduced to a seeming life-or-death struggle over ethnic/state identity that leaves the substantial and difficult questions about Taiwan’s future largely unanswered
democratically
; rather they have
already
been answered in terms of the supposedly necessary choice of neoliberal reforms. As relatively impoverished elements of society, students practice so-called choice on the morning ride to school as they spend their petty cash to purchase the taste that they want or by making demands on the system to ensure their proper value-added transformations. The full extent of this consumer orientation is felt by the school itself, which is competing with other schools for student dollars, not unlike streetside breakfast venders.

Neoliberal Reforms and the Dominion of the Bottom Line

Although people connected to the highest reaches of the KMT government founded CYUT, the neoliberal reforms, which contributed to the downfall of the KMT state, ironically proved to be perfectly timed for the prosperity of the emergent institution. One year after CYUT started taking students, there were only seven institutes of technology and no universities of technology. In haste commensurate with the inflating aims of the state, CYUT was promoted to university status, along with four other schools in 1997. By 2003, seventeen institutions were accredited as universities of technology. The administration of CYUT took advantage of its head start and aggressively opened and expanded programs, hoping to establish a reputation and an alumni base on which to compete in the future for students from the vocational high schools of Taiwan. The extent of the competition is made even more clear by noting that there were only two dozen institutions of higher
learning
in Taiwan in 1975, whereas by 2005 there were over 150 schools, all competing for a shrinking number of students (Chang, Chen, and Huang 2005).
11

This growth in higher education occurred simultaneously with the flight of Taiwanese industry and capital to Southeast Asia and China in the search of cheaper labor, land, and other production costs. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the new emphasis on life-long learning, practicality, and student quality became guiding principles (Kao 2003; Peters 2003). Taiwan had depended on economic success for national survival since the KMT found itself stranded on an island within easy attacking range of its civil war enemy. It had prospered to become one of the top manufacturing economies in the world, and the government had invested in education to promote this success (Green et al. 1999). During the 1990s, the precariousness and pressures of Taiwan’s position were becoming increasingly evident. No longer saddled with the censures that immediately followed the Tiananmen Square massacre and prospering in part due to the transfer of Taiwanese industry and know-how, China could and does muscle Taiwan politically, militarily, and economically. Other parts of the world, including Taiwan’s great benefactor the United States, are now in direct competition with the island. And in the case of the United States, intellectual copyright and other measures designed to secure American preeminence offer little protection to innovative Taiwanese companies that see their patents, for example, violated by powerful multinational corporations that simply have the power to do so. Taiwan’s prosperity seems to most intelligent people to lack sufficient footing to insure the prosperity necessary for political survival.

Poor in easily extractable natural resources, Taiwan must now rely on a service economy that cannot generate the surplus necessary to keep intact the status quo of rising expectations and economic growth. What is more, local trades are subject to global market penetration. The former president of the university reminded the faculty in more than one schoolwide meeting that, with Taiwan’s entry into the WTO, even education would become a tradable commodity, and the local market might be opened to mainland institutions that could undoubtedly undercut prices. Teachers are accordingly put under pressure to assure student satisfaction with their courses, lest certain departments or the university eventually be forced to close. Likewise, the state is under pressure to make Taiwan an educational producer to draw foreign capital to the island in the form of tuition payments. For this reason, the government seeks to raise the profile of Taiwan’s research
institutions.
It has adopted measures of academic success from the United States, in particular faculty productivity in publications, to do so. The MOE has decided that to create in Taiwan a university ranked in the top 100 in the world and to secure the competitive quality of research necessary to establish a new culture of high-level achievement, schools are ranked by their publications in international science indexes (ISI), including the Science Index (SI), the Social Science Index (SSCI), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), and the Engineering Index (Ei) (see Cheng 2001; National Science Council Information Center 2005). The pressures on teachers are multiple. They must satisfy the consumer-like demands of students, expand their course schedules (which keeps salary costs low), and compete with scholars from the world’s top-tier research institutions.

This is easier said than done. But the demands are completely consistent with the capitalist logic, expressed obliquely in the discourse of Taiwan’s supposed miraculous achievement. Just as capitalism seems to create wealth from nothing in abstract markets, and just as modern Taiwan had once been proclaimed to have emerged miraculously from its prior status as a former colony of Japan, many now exhort the population to “create a second Taiwanese miracle” from a society not really prepared to act according to the new economy’s (perhaps impossible) dictates. In the case of universities, the bidirectional pull of assuring student satisfaction and publishing in ISI and Ei journals is new to all schools in Taiwan, including big-name national schools. The pressure to succeed at everything falls heaviest on the upstarts such as CYUT. Yet even the national schools, with their monopoly on the recruitment of the best students from college-prep high schools, now find their budgets only approximately 80 percent funded by the state. They must aggressively seek out new forms of revenue to keep their budgets balanced or, at least, modestly in the red. For this reason, attractively titled programs, such as Executive Masters of Business Administration (EMBA) and International Masters of Business Administration (IMBA), have been established at nearly all major institutions to bring in the tuition money of adult lifelong learners who hope to advance their careers, cap their positions with titles, or bide their time waiting for better jobs to open. In turn, some departments at leading schools have made it a requirement of PhD students to publish in an ISI or Ei journal to graduate (with their advisor as first or second author)—a move that departments hope will bolster the rankings of their universities without regard to the inflationary expectation that students will suddenly become experts. The state has also funded the tuition of foreign students who
enroll
in these programs to establish a basis in the global network of knowledge workers for Taiwan’s full-scale entry into the global education market as a manufacturer of value-added (if in name only—for example,
Executive
MBA) diplomas and to raise Taiwan’s precarious status via its graduates.

The push to have it all (devoted teachers, efficient administration, and top publications) seems to be paying off for CYUT on two fronts. On the first front, CYUT was recognized by the MOE as the finest school in its class in 2006. This judgment was based on the number of programs rated as top quality in teaching, research, and service. Aware of the bounty this rating brings in the forms of tuition income and MOE support and fearful of losing ground to aggressive upstarts, the university is pushing for further reforms. Departments are constantly under pressure to improve service to students, promote new teaching programs, and develop new plans to expand the university’s outreach to businesses in central Taiwan. Understaffed to maintain profitability and, hence, stretched in every direction to meet the demands, my department is not unique in facing this condition. For example, the China Medical University Hospital in Taichung has announced its intention to be a first-rate hospital for customer service and
the leader in all of Asia
in research in the area of Chinese and Western medicine. This leaves the staff exhausted; but it must seem absolutely necessary to top administrators, who are anxious about increasing international competition.

Regardless and perhaps because of these tensions, times remain good at CYUT on a second front: profitability. In 2004, its revenues from tuition reached approximately US$36,000,000. After all expenses, it recorded a profit of approximately US$10,000,000 (Chaoyang University of Technology Accounting Department, n.d.). That these figures are available shows the extent of MOE regulation of nonprofit universities (Laws and Regulation Database of the Republic of China, 2002). According to these rules, most of these profits are turned over to the university’s foundation, which is itself regulated on how it uses this money. Half of the profits must be returned to the university for reinvestment in the school; the other half may go to outside investments, which are further regulated to prevent, for example, university profits being used to prop up the stock prices for the founder’s conglomerate. Despite all the safeguards, it is well known in Taiwan that universities and other schools can generate substantial income for investors. One well-known form of graft involves the relation of construction companies to the institutions. Schools take enormous loans for construction and
funnel
them to chosen companies with close links to the school. Tax deductions are taken, corners are cut, and insiders line their pockets, while schools pay back loans with tuition and other income in the years to come.

The founding conglomerate of CYUT saw its fortunes decline dramatically after the assumption of power by the DPP. In my discussions with rank-and-file employees, the university is often called a
dian
(company)—implying it is, from the unofficial standpoint of the conglomerate, an income-producing unit. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that CYUT has avoided the worst kind of corruption. For, although the founding conglomerate includes a construction company that gets awarded university contracts for construction, the university has been superbly built. The crucial test in this regard was the September 21, 1999 earthquake, which destroyed numerous public schools built in the vicinity, exposing the corruption that continues to plague public building projects. Although it was built adjacent to the fault line, CYUT suffered only relatively minimal damages, which were quickly repaired. Nonetheless, although CYUT has a reputation for competent administration, there is an underlying assumption among faculty that graft, if not certain, is surely possible. In fact, the underlying message in conversation is that it would be naïve to assume otherwise.