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Behavioral Foundations of Higher Education Reforms and Designs: What We May Learn from the NCCU Dynamics Shu-Heng Chen | Vice President, National Chengchi University June 20, 2018 | 1

Section 1 Strategies for Broader Societal Impact and ROI

Behavioral Foundations of Higher Education Reforms and Designs: What We May Learn from the NCCU Dynamics | 2

Prolog: A little bit about NCCU

• NCCU, founded in 1927, is a university which has been long reputable for cultivated young talents for various crucial social engagements. • Her alumni include outstanding entrepreneurs, CEO of listed companies, legislators, journalists, diplomats, artists, scholars, policy advisers, high- ranked civil servants and social celebrities. • However, NCCU is basically a humanities-oriented university; she does not have the medical school, engineering school, and barely has a school of science. • “The road not taken” (Robert Frost, 1916) and “the road less traveled by” “has made all the difference”: The road taken and not taken become the distinguishing feature of NCCU, but also places herself in a great adversity during the higher-education reform dynamics over the last two decades. | 3

Prolog: What is this presentation about?

• In this presentation, I will briefly review how NCCU, despite her leading position as a humanities hub in Taiwan and East Asia, reacted to this challenge and formulated her reforms, and also how well these reforms were accepted or were resisted in light of the behavioral and cultural foundations (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008; Shafir, 2013; Chetty, 2015). | 4

More about NCCU: What was She?

• So, what was or still is NCCU, a typical humanities-oriented university? • First, a stereotype of NCCU is her incessant and enthusiastic engagements in the machinery of government. • A great number of our faculty members carried out policy-oriented projects consigned by the government; many of them also accepted the appointment as a cabinet position, and, if not the cabinet members, they become the leaders of dissidents and social movement initiators. | 5

NCCU Participation in Political Service | 6

More about NCCU: What was She?

• This spirit of social engagement has been further enhanced through the most recent social medium technology, and has contributed to what is called the `participatory culture’. • Second, based on the first characteristic, it is evident that NCCU already had a history of broadening social impacts, and pragmatically considered social crowds and grassroots in the local communities as their main audience (information receivers and knowledge absorbers). • Third, due to this conventional vision and mission, preaching, indoctrinating and hence teaching or textbook writing used to have an equal or higher regard than publishing journal articles. • The history, no matter how glory it was, turns out to be a hurdle for us to move forward when the recent higher-education reform tide crossed the bridges, the levee, and finally overflowed to the campus. | 7

NCCU and Jingmei River, when it was quiet

https://www.facebook.com/nccu85.scene/photos/a.342839275762868.77109.339864816060314/710922698954522 /?type=3&theater | 8

NCCU and the Jingmei River, when it was rampant

http://shine.pixnet.net/album/photo/101819270 | 9

Some of the Recent Higher Education Reforms: Logology

• What are the recent higher education reforms? • Needless to say, they are multitude, but there are a few threads that have a far-reaching implications and most educators would not ignore. • First, it is the prevalence of the application of the logological approach to measure the academic performance, such as the use of a `scientific’ measure for evaluating faculty members’ academic performance. • One of the most popular methods is to rank academic (mainly, English) journals by their `significance’, and to develop a crediting system based on the employed ranking. • Second, it is university ranking. • Globalization aided with the information aggregation technology inevitably facilitates a desire to generate a list and to rank all universities from the prominent ones to the mediocre ones, which involves many `scientific’ measures in similar vein. | 10

Some of the Recent Higher Education Reforms: Englishization

• Third, Englishization. The above two trends necessitate the movement toward Englishization, from the campus guideposts, lecture notes, and publications. • The three together, a trinity, seems to reinforce each other and becomes a coherent cyclical dynamic system. | 11

Globalization and the Related

• This is not a place to illuminate, praise or demur globalization. • Globalization, including the related issues, such as populism, economic inequality, and justice, their types, causes, consequences, history, and the future of democracy have already been extensively discussed in many meetings and books, not to mention that this year is the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. • We don’t need to bring these heating issues here again, except just referring to the following three books which may serve as a background music as we continue the talk. They are: - Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage. - Picketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century. Harvard University Pressed. - Mishra, P. (2017). Age of anger: A history of the present. Macmillan. | 12

Globalization and Higher Education Reforms

• After all, for each infinitesimal entity in the universe, globalization may not be open for individual choices: `to be’ or `not to be’, and one, to some extent, simply has to be. • First, the above `trinity’ was endorsed, voluntarily or inadvertently, by some non-English speaking countries in formulating their higher- education governing policies, particularly, those pertaining to the resources allocations. • Second, this `new rules of game’ in turn makes each university, no matter how autonomous it was conceived, to set up a fundamental reform toward streamlining the academic disciplines in the guided directions, such as recruiting more international faculty members and students, offering more English-taught programs, being inclined to draft their documents and publications substantially in English, etc. • One step further, the recruiting, promotion, and tenure decisions are also made in a consistent manner. | 13

NCCU in Transition

• Back to NCCU, a university which has long taken broadening social impact as her mission, could she well adapt to this wave of reforms? • After the turn of the millennium the shinning past of NCCU which we had been long proud of seemed to be iffy. • In fact, what NCCU experienced thereafter provides a perfect illustration on what the term `success trap’ could mean to us. • The enduring efforts devoted to social engagements means less time and patient to grappling with the referee reports, and hence less counts in the international journals, not to mention the indexed ones. | 14

NCCU in Transition

• In 2003 October, a document exactly based on the indexed publication counts and prepared by the ministry of education showed that NCCU was ranked 48, which was considered as a `massacre’ to the reputation of NCCU. • Considering it a state of emergence, NCCU even organized a press conference to defend our reputation. See https://news.tvbs.com.tw/other/397272 • Second, the great exposure and connection to local audience and grassroots also implies that the preparation for Englishization was insufficiency and, even worse, the motivation was low. | 15

NCCU in Transition

• After the 2003 `massacre’ event, NCCU, under the leadership of her three consecutive presidents, the regimes 2003-2006, 2006-2014, 2014- 2018, made strong commitment and spent tremendous efforts in promoting a series of academic culture reforms. • These reforms covering all what we have mentioned above, ranging from the design of international degree programs to the use of scientometrics in the recruiting, promotion, and tenure decisions. • These reforms have helped NCCU to successfully stand in position of the earlier Top Universities Project (2006-2017) as well as the recent Sprout Project (2018-2023). | 16

NCCU in Transition: A Clash of Two Cultures

• However, this road of reforming is not a smooth gateway, but a strenuous dirt road; it received constantly resistance, voiced from the conventional academic culture, which, with a slight risk of abusing the term, may labelled as “mediocreism”, if we accept major scientometrics- based definitions of academic excellence. • Despite the entrenched harmony that NCCU long enjoyed, the subsequent reforms did, to some degree, introduce the confrontations of the two cultures, namely, “exceptionalism” vs. “mediocreism”. | 17

Confrontation of the Two Cultures: Englishization of Research

• One of the major confrontations is on the reforms related to Englishization of research. • A concrete rebutting point is something like: should we approve the promotion for a faculty member whose major studies are on David Hume and Jeremy Bentham but had all his/her papers published in Chinese? • Likewise, should we recruit a job candidate whose research is on hermeneutics and Hans-Georg Gadamer but publishes no paper in English, neither in German? • Very unlikely, these indicated faculty members will be internationally acknowledged, but the NCCU answer, which was collectively determined by the Recruiting and Promotion Committee, was YES. • Partially, this is due to the entrenched harmony which we mentioned above, but more is due to the constituents of the committee. | 18

A Quotation from Herbert Simon (1916-2001)

• 1978 Noble Laureate in Economics, Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in his quasi-biography, Models of My life, advised us on what to do on this kind of decisions.

• “Campus politics and administration need to be guided by two goals: excellence and innovation. Money does not guarantee excellence. Although university salaries and faculty quality are correlated, the correlation is far from perfect. Insisting on excellence on the university's getting what it pays for, and more if possible at the time of critical personnel decisions (hiring, reappointment, promotion, tenure) can turn a mediocre faculty into a first-rate one.” (Simon, p. 251)

• At this point, there is no clear evidence to show that the `rank and file’ of NCCU are Simonian. | 19

University Politics

• A simple statistics of the h-index may give us an idea on why we do not have general support for the reforms. • By the SciVal database, the faculty members of NCCU who have a h- index of 10 or higher accounts for only 10% of the whole population. • While this group of people is more sympathizing with the core value of the new reforms, they are not sizeable enough to play a determining role in major committees. • When coming to vote, they are simply not representative enough. | 20

Confrontation of the Two Cultures: Recruiting Reform

• Another heating debating issue is on the recruiting reform. • At NCCU, recruiting is mainly done through a bottom-up mechanism, i.e., from the department to the college, from the college to the university. • A decision once made by the department will rarely be altered by its dean and anyone above. • If the faculty members of a department have a strong ambition to recruit the distinguished talent, then this design gives the department maximum degree of flexibility. | 21

Confrontation of the Two Cultures: Recruiting Reform

• Nonetheless, when `mediocreism’ is the rule, the decisions get crippled and sometimes we are ready to experience the notoriously known academic inbreeding. • One of the most serious reforms which NCCU tries to make is to have a more disciplinary control over the recruiting decision. • A kind of `liberal paternalism’ as suggested by behavioral economists (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) was attempted. • We successfully clothed each recruiting unit with a degree of academic prudence, even though we might do more had the `mediocreism’ not fought back and rewired the decision route. | 22

Concluding Remarks

• The recent higher-education reforms have impacted the humanities- oriented university like NCCU quite dramatically. • While the university administrators adapted to the change with many successes, their actions also contributed to the `segregation’ of the university. • Faculty members now often stand in two diametrically opposed positions regarding globalization and its derivatives, such as world university ranking. • In my viewpoint, the real challenge for NCCU is how she can regain her leadership in humanities by using her wisdom to find out a number between 0 and 1 or by discovering a higher dimensional space in which that the current divide can be resolved or sublimated. | 23

Concluding Remarks

• This challenge has pushed us to think more deeply of the design of reforms. • The aforementioned divide naturally gives rise to some degrees of trust- lacking between the administers and their faculty members; hence, the first important thing is trust engineering. • Trust is built upon good dialogues. • Dialogues are rarely enough, due to the complexity of reforms. • Complexity is generally not amenable for precise “scientific” calculations, neither the use of the one-size-fits-all principle. | 24

Concluding Remarks

• During the dialogue, I often have to stand in the other side thinking: what foxes may lose when they “pretend” to be more and more hedgehogy (dehumanities) ? - The hedgehog-fox parable was originally invented by Archilochus, the ancient Greek poet, and then further expanded by Isaiah Berlin on his famous book, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. - Morson and Schapiro (2017) described in their book, Cents and Sensibility, “what the humanities are about, and what the great writers offer, is wisdom, and wisdom by definition cannot be formalized into anything resembling a mathematical model. (Ibid, p. 35)” | 25

Concluding Remarks

• Would it be possible that when NCCU tried very hard to be a hedgehogy fox as she has done in the past few years, she may inadvertently lose her originally talents and natural enthusiasm for social engagements? • Maybe this is a good place to remind us what Karl Popper once said in his magnum opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies: • “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth. (Ibid, p. 431)” | 26

Thank you. www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence