Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Lucas]

I'm in country, working at my current place.

BUT I have been given another contract at another uni, 3.5 basic with assured over time 8 months of the year, bringing up pay to 4.4 for those months.

This is mid to top end pay for a uni gig, right?

[PRagic]

How many contact hours? What type of classes? How many preps? Class size?

In Seoul? Rents have jumped. Housing provided? Term limits on renewals?

[Lucas]

[PRagic]

3.5 for 12 hours and 2 preps sounds decent, especially if there's not a ton of writing to grade. Toss in the overtime and a decent salary.

There are better paying positions in Seoul where you'd make the 4.4 (or even a bit more) without overtime, but not many as far as I know.

Have a buddy looking to leave his 4.5/month 12 hour job because 1) they've reached the limit for the housing so they've had to move out (might as well be a pay cut), and 2) they're upping their research/publication demands. Simply doesn't want to do research, for which he wasn't trained, and would prefer to teach, which he was hired to actually do. That plus having to fork out the coin for Seoul housing has soured him on the place.

Another buddy is looking to leave his 3.5/month job because they're demanding publications. Same reason as above.

Yonsei is about the only place I know of these days that pays a decent salary for a fair teaching load. They don't have term limits and you do get salary bumps up to a certain level. The downside is that now everyone has to do the treck out to the Songdo campus. Manageable, from what I've gathered, though, as they'll block off times and days to accomdate teachers. At least it's not adversarial, or so I'm told. No job is perfect.

Hopefully others actually in ESL at K universities will chime in here. I have a load of friends teaching at university in Seoul so I hear a lot of the good and the bad, but I've been out of university ESL for well, well over a decade now.

[wonkavite62]

This is an interesting discussion. I would love to know what kinds of publications these universities are demanding. Would publication be worthwhile or useful? Would it be about education, linguistics or English literature? Would publication be worthwhile or useful?
If it was about education, then why not write a dissertation about the failures and faults of ESL in South Korea? Why not examine the somewhat contradictory education policy changes in Korea over the last 15 years? It might be interesting or even entertaining.
If I was working at a university, I would want time to write. But I would be writing fiction. I want more time to write. I want to write a feminist version of Game of Thrones. I want to write about the different countries I have visited, including South Korea.
Seriously, though, in some ways people with university jobs can be lucky. Sometimes they earn more money, and have more free time than most people who teach English in this country will ever have. They may also have good colleagues. I do, however, appreciate that with the increasing demandds of the job, it can get pretty frustrating.

[ttompatz]

Uni publications are not about writing fictional prose.

For a university to get ranked it needs to have it's faculty conduct research in their specific fields and then have the results of that research published in peer reviewed journals or presented at conferences where the papers are published in what are called "conference proceedings" - the written collections of academic papers presented at the conference by various academics.

I wish I could get by with just writing fictional prose.
It is not the writing of the papers that is the issue... it is the research required behind the writing.

.

[PRagic]

What universities here WANT and what they actually GET in terms of publication quality are often completely different.

They want all peer reviews and ranked international (SSCI/SCI) publications. Conference proceedings are well down the publication food chain; they 'count' but the impact depends on the level of the conference.

Most decent universities here have point systems. To get a contract extension and to get promoted, you need to have amassed X number of publication points. Internationally peer reviewed and ranked journals get the highest number of points, domestic peer reviews and ranked get fewer points, then unranked international, unranked domestic, etc...

And then there may be a codicile that demands a minimum of X number of international publications to qualify for promotion. In the end, profs can therefore amass sufficient points by publishing in low ranked, nonranked, or even pay for play crap journals, and then eek by by publishing the bare minimum in decent, even the lowest ranking, internal peer reviewed journals.

This isn't optimistically what the university wants, but it's often what they get. Profs get busy and loaded down with job related responsibilities. Getting something in to top ranked international journals is tough, and even if accepted, it can take up to two years to get an article out. You're talking about people with careers and families, and about positions that are almost impossible to get. There is incentive for some to game the system to make sure they keep their jobs. I often find it ironic that universities rail against this while setting up the environment that perpetuates it in the first place.

[Chaucer]

At some places the level of--I don't know--doublethink springs to mind, is intense. My department head has told me (many times, in one form or another) "You were hired to teach classes. (there's not a foreign-held Ph.D. to be found in our dept--all MA TESOLs at best) Because you are not trained as a researcher, it would be almost impossible for you to get published in a ranked journal, especially in your field of English Literature."
And so my colleagues and I "publish" in the university journal (which actually rejects people--annoying), or in article mills, or on Amazon. And we are extended each year. We can even tell admin that we'll publish "soon" and they'll extend us and (surprise) there's no follow-through.
Unless we can get the university to think that some international article mill is a real journal, though (as one of my colleagues has done), we don't get promoted.
So I labor on in my sixth year at the same salary--but it's better than most places I guess, with time to work elsewhere and a blind eye turned to that work.

[PRagic]

Unfortunately typical. Plus, unless those journals are at the minimum SCOPUS ranked, they won't even help the university's ranking.

Tough to be sure without knowing someone in admin there, but I'd conjecture that faculty publishing, even by visiting instructors, and even if in non-ranked, paper mill, pay to play crap sources, is somehow linked to accessing government funding. That, or maybe they're trying to make themselves look as good and productive as possible so that they don't get closed or merged. Again, though, the irony kills me; publishing in crap journals can actually make you look worse, not better lol.

[wonkavite62]

It seems frustrating to have to do all that research, especially if it is pointless anyway. I used to moan about all the grading I had to do.

[PRagic]

Those publishing in non-ranked journals aren't really pouring a lot of effort into their research.