I’m curious if anyone here has gone from lecturer to assistant professor on only a master’s degree?
While searching through Taiwan university websites related to the arts, I’ve noticed a fair amount of teachers with only master’s degrees attaining assistant professor status.
I’ve read previous discussion on this forum from 2011, but I’m not sure if anything has changed much. Can you get a promotion while teaching English at the university level despite the fact your master’s degree is in something other than English?
There currently seems to be an emphasis (at least in the West) on interdisciplinary research/creative work. I have a master’s degree in the arts, so I would be a bit surprised that despite teaching English, things would be so strict as to discount substantial interdisciplinary work between art and language learning. I have considerable creative/original output.
One thing against me is perhaps I’ve not been in the MOE system long…Don’t know.
Just curious if anyone else has an idea on what I would face if I try, or could kindly tell me that attempting Everest would be an easier option.
I know I could just do a Ph.D., and get promoted this way. But I’d rather devote my time to my art and creative output, than jump through hoops for a 5-6 year Ph.D. degree in Taiwan. I personally gain much more meaning from how my work has affected teaching around the world.
If I am indeed stuck as a lecturer, I suppose I could try to find a teaching job at an arts university…
Unfortunately in this day and age it’s almost impossible to get a professorship without a PhD. It’ll be hard enough just staying employed with the impending implosion of enrollment due to the birthrate decline. If you don’t want to do a PhD, then one thing you can do to secure your position is try to get a paper published.
At least in the public system (i.e. the so-called “National” universities) a PhD is sine qua non for faculty at the assistant professor rank and higher. There are exceptions, but they typically have been grandfathered/grandmothered—it would not apply to anyone hired in the past 15 years.
I got a promotion by getting a PhD. Maybe you could get a promotion with a whole bunch of publications in highly regarded journals, but I haven’t heard of that happening lately. Are there metrics with the arts and creative stuff you’d like to do, like government grants acquired? If yes, promotion MAY be possible. If not, I very much doubt it.
Note that I don’t particularly recommend promotion anyway. As a lecturer I was pretty much free to do what I wanted. Now as an assistant prof I’m under publish or perish pressure, and because I lost overtime hours, I haven’t really got a raise anyway. Ok, I’m teaching four fewer hours a week, but those were really easy hours I lost.
Is that the rule for all universities? You lose overtime pay after promotion to assistant professor? Didn’t know that. With overtime pay I hit around 70-80K a month…so, I’m guessing it won’t be much better than if I get promoted with no overtime pay.
Actually the public ones (those that receive government funds) are in much better shape than the private unis. At least that’s what our chairperson said at our departmental meeting last semester.
Not sure, and it may even have changed at my school due to complaints from our chair about having to suddenly juggle schedules, but too late for me. There is (was?) a rule that “new” profs couldn’t teach overtime, because after all they’re new to teaching, right? Even if they’ve already been lecturers for over a decade. I’ll be able to get OT again, if more classes open up, but with dwindling student numbers I’m not sure how likely that is. And I had a sweet deal in that the classes I lost were low-marking duplicates of courses I was already teaching, whereas any new classes I get are likely to be a new course with a lot more prep.
EDIT: a bit more on salaries; the promotion salary increase almost exactly matched the four hours per week of lost overtime, net across the year, but now at least my salary is more even, rather than dropping significantly in the summer. Plus with a promotion you can get a couple more years of automatic raises, although that’s only a factor if you’ve been in the system a couple of decades. Pension info is so unclear I don’t know what if anything has changed.
The Tsai government eliminated the discriminatory pension scheme so now non-citizen faculty members are eligible (at least in the public system) to receive a monthly stipend like our Taiwanese peers and not just a one-time payout—but for a reason that eludes me, this welcomed change applies to faculty at the assistant professor rank or higher, and not to lecturers.
