1 out of 3 Private Univ. Professors Excluded from Promotion Screening

It has been revealed that the exclusion rate from promotion screening in some private university professors such as Ewha Women’s University (EWU) and Sungkyunkwan University (SU) has been higher than 30 percent.

The SU announced yesterday that 31 promotion candidates out of 93 candidates have been omitted from the screening process, showing an exclusion rate of 33.3 percent, which is higher than that of an average yearly rate (20 percent).

In the case of the SU promotion screening for the second semester, 24 assistant professors (30.0 percent) out of 79 did not get promoted as associate professors, and among 11 candidates to be fully tenured professors, 5 associate professors, 45.5 percent, did not pass the promotion screening process. And two out of three lecturers failed to be assistant professors, showing a high exclusion rate of 66.6 percent.

In the EWU, this year’s 37 promotion candidates, 39.4 percent, out of 94 did not pass the screening process. In particular, out of 8 lecturers, just one candidate has been promoted as an assistant professor leaving 7 other candidates (87.5 percent) who were passed over.

In Sogang University, which had increased its standards for evaluating professors’ research achievements by a large margin last September, 2 out of 9 tenure candidates did not pass the university’s screening process.

A representative of SU’s human resource team said, ``As the evaluation standards get more complicated, a higher exclusion rate will follow.`` ``In the case of the school of medicine, one has to be a main author of more than one thesis registered in the Science Citation Index (SCI), and in case of the college of science or college of liberal arts as well, the candidates have to be those who published more than certain number of theses on authoritative journals.`` he explained.

credo@donga.com