Original Thread: NCTU and NTHU joined up ?
roger
Hi,

My China room-mate from Xiamen tells me NCTU and NTHU, Hsinchu have decided, at last, to join up.

Can anyone reveal more info?

What was the point anyway? The competitive spirit between the two universities were healthy, IMO.


soda-popenski
Nope, talks are still on, i don;t think they wud be able to merge together coz too much of ppl against it. 80% of the professors and almost all the alumni are against it. Well u are an alumnus of NCTU, whats ur say? Below is a letter from NTHU's ®Õ±i to all the ppl in NTHU. On the Merger of NTHU and NCTU Message to the Tsing Hua Community 24 October 2004 This message gives the longer exposition of the merger talks taking place among the Office of the Premier, the Ministry of Education (MOE), National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), and National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) that I promised to the university community as soon as the details of the government proposal were made clear. There have been many inaccurate newspaper accounts of these discussions that have distorted the history, the motivations behind the move, the agreements that have or have not already been reached, and the degree of support of or opposition to the plans among the university community. During the first week of November, the Vice-Presidents and I will be visiting each College of NTHU to explain the situation to faculty and staff and to answer their questions. We will also be attending a meeting with students being organized by the Dean of Students and the Dean of Academic Affairs. The purpose of this message is to provide a background of information to these meetings. When the facts are fully laid before the NTHU academic community, I hope that each of you can make your own rational judgment about the case, and transmit your views accordingly to your university representatives when the University Senate meets to debate and vote on the merger issue. History A body named the Science and Technology Advisory Group (STAG), co-chaired by President Y. T. Lee of Academia Sinica, formulates national science and technology policy in industry and higher education for the Premier to consider. I am currently a member of this group, as is President Chang of NCTU. Eight years ago, STAG recommended to the Premier that Taiwan establish at least one university of world-class standing. Many of the special funding programs promoted by the MOE since that time evolved in response to the STAG recommendation ¡V the Excellence Projects, the University Integration Program, and now the World-Class University Initiative. When the search for a new president of Tsing Hua occurred three years ago, I was recruited on this basis, and I have always regarded my one mission here as to help in the effort to establish at least one highly ranked research university in Taiwan. A parallel crisis helped to drive the current initiative. Over the past two decades the number of universities and colleges has grown rapidly to accommodate an explosion in the student population receiving tertiary education. There are now about 160 institutions of higher education in Taiwan, all clamoring for public resources. Unfortunately, the budget for higher education has actually declined, even in constant dollars, for the past dozen years. The contribution of the MOE to the direct support per student to NTHU has almost halved since the high-water mark established under President C. S. Liu. The student-to-faculty ratio has not fared as badly, rising from a ratio of about 16:1 to its current 19:1. NTHU faculty have fared better than any other university in this regard, with the possible exception of National Yang Ming University (NYMU). We are a research-intensive university, whose researchers are very competitive in securing NSC grants. The budget at the National Science Council (NSC) has grown impressively over the same interval, and it will continue to do so for the next few years. However, even this development has served to impoverish the University infrastructure and operating funds for activities other than research, because the overhead rate on grants, long fixed at 6%, was far too low to reflect the true costs to the university of doing research ¡V student needs, faculty start-up costs, matching funds for expensive equipment, journals and books, telecommunication and computers, office and laboratory space, electricity and water, waste management, etc. The experience in the United States is that annual maintenance costs for research-related activities are 5 to 7% of the accumulated working capital investment, which at a good research university like Tsing Hua, might amount to 10 times the annual grant funds received by the total faculty. Thus, overhead rates on grants in the United States are typically 50 to 70%. The disparity in Taiwan between true costs and nominal costs of doing research means that the University as a whole has actually been growing poorer, in terms of neglected infrastructure maintenance and construction, for each grant dollar received. The solution is not lower levels of research, but higher overhead rates. I have been a consistent advocate at STAG meetings for higher overhead rates, and I am glad to report that the overhead rate at the NSC will rise to 15% over the next two years. It is still not enough, but it is a good start. At the MOE, the response to the fiscal and educational crisis created by the over-expansion of the number of institutions of tertiary education and to the recommendations of STAG was the creation of a Long-Range Planning Committee for Higher Education under the chairmanship of the former President of National Central University (NCU), C. H. Liu, currently the Chancellor of the University System of Taiwan (UST = NCU+NCTU+NTHU+NYMU). Last year, the Liu Committee came forward with three principal recommendations: 1. The universities and colleges in Taiwan should be formally divided into four categories: research universities, teaching universities, colleges for customized education, and community colleges. Each category should have its own Board of Trustees. 2. There should be a loosening of the regulations that now bind all institutions of higher education to a single set of rules. Flexibility will allow each university or college to find its own path to academic success. 3. The government should institute a special funding program, amounting to 50 billion NTD over 10 years, to elevate the performance of the premier research universities in Taiwan. In my opinion, the amount requested in item 3 was too low (I was not a member of the Liu Committee which was established before I arrived at Tsing Hua); however, the Long-Range Planning Committee was working under the constraints of the times. In any case, the government response to the recommendations of the committee was better than expected. The MOE has made item 1 part of its official policy. It will allow an institution to deem its own category, in the knowledge that it has then to compete for future resources and meet the benchmarks set for the missions of that category. The University Statute measure before the Legislative Branch addresses the loosening of regulations of concern in item 2. And the five-year fifty-billion plan also before the Legislature is an effective doubling of the special annual funding level requested for premier research universities in item 3. There have been complaints within the academic community that the government¡¦s approach is too short-sighted or that it has ulterior motives in proposing special funding programs. I have a different perspective. As far as I can see, the government is trying to do the best it can under the fiscal and political constraints of the times to respond to the recommendations transmitted by the most prominent representatives of the academic and research communities themselves. The programs appear short-range only because of the nature of governmental budgetary processes that are imposed by the calendar year and election cycles. In this regard, the science and education policies of every government on Earth look short-sighted to the academic community. Except for the disastrous decision to expand the total number of institutions of higher education, Taiwan¡¦s government is doing relatively well. The dilemma is how to fix the problem of that disastrous development in a democratic society where every voice and every locality demands equal treatment. The government¡¦s response has been a series of special programs within the MOE where equitable access to additional resources is granted through open competition, but where equitable reward is granted on the basis of ability and performance. The Excellence Projects helped the establishment of several cohesive research groups, but it did not address the capability of the university as a whole, neither in terms of the important task of faculty recruitment, development, and retention, nor in terms of improving a decaying academic infrastructure and environment. The limited success of the University Integration Program arose because it was funded at too low a level, and because the orientation had too narrow a focus on direct research support, which I have always maintained should not be funded by the MOE but by the NSC, through a process of open competition followed by rigorous and fair peer review. Fortunately, the UST was successful in convincing the MOE that our funds from the University Integration Program could be used to support infrastructure-building activities, such as integrating and improving our library collections and networking capabilities, as well as providing seed money for intercampus research centers in four important, broad, research fields. Our effort received the highest rating for two years in a row from an external review panel, and the UST currently also gets the most financial support under the University Integration Program. However, the success comes at a tremendously high cost in effort and time because of the need to confer and concur among four different campuses separated by considerable physical and cultural spans. In a certain sense, intensive collaboration is harder than merger, especially if the government cannot justify supporting the former at nearly the same financial levels as the latter. Response of NTHU and NCTU The Ministry of Education under Minister Huang¡¦s administration set as a ten-year target the elevation of at least one Taiwan university to the top 100 research universities in the world. There would be special funds set aside for accomplishing this goal. Minister Huang made clear at numerous meetings that the MOE did not consider UST as a single entity that qualified for such funds, nor would NTHU or NCTU qualify if we applied singly because of our small size. He encouraged NTHU and NCTU to begin talks that would lead to a joint organization of sufficient scope and scale. After getting authorization from the University Development Committees, NTHU and NCTU did organize regular meetings that included the two universities¡¦ Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Deans of Academic Affairs, Deans of Research, Secretary Generals, Dean of Students, Dean of General Affairs, Heads of Libraries, and Directors of Telecommunications and Computers. We encouraged our Colleges, Departments, Graduate Research Institutes to talk to their counterparts to see how the two universities could begin close programs of academic and research cooperation. When Minister Tu assumed charge of the MOE, he reiterated the position that the UST did not count as a single entity that could become one of Taiwan¡¦s entries into the top ranks of research universities. His administration sent a formal request for NTHU and NCTU to submit a pre-proposal on how our two universities might merge to become a single university that would be internationally competitive at the upper echelons in higher education and research. Again, after consultation with the University Development Committee, NTHU and NCTU prepared such a document, which outlined how NTHU and NCTU might be able to merge on a five-year time scale, achieve a ranking among the top 100 research universities in the world in 10 years, and be rated among the top 50 in 20 years. We submitted a reasonably detailed budget for the first 5 years and an outline of our escalating needs for the ensuing 15 years. At the end of the 20-year period, we proposed to have a total annual operating budget equal to that of UC Berkeley in 2003. All of these activities were reported at meetings of the University Senate. In our pre-proposal we made clear that we were responding only administratively to the MOE¡¦s request for a hypothetical plan of action and schedule. Any commitment actually to go ahead with implementation would depend on the government¡¦s meeting our budgetary request for carrying out the process, and a formal proposal could be sent only after approval by the University Senates of the two institutions. We believe that the pre-proposal that NTHU and NCTU sent in response to the MOE request was instrumental for the government in making its arguments to justify the expenditure of fifty-billion NTD over five years primarily to promote the elevation of one to three world-class universities. Prior to our pre-proposal, discussions ranged from the bulk of the monies going to National Taiwan University to a more even distribution among all the institutions of higher education in Taiwan. Our pre-proposal brought focus to what was the truly important motivation for the expenditure of these special funds. In other words, a dialogue between government and our two universities was necessary to make progress. In this dialogue, it was necessary for the two universities to speak with a single voice, and the administrations of NTHU and NCTU shouldered this responsibility as your chosen representatives. The five-year fifty billion NTD plan that emerged from Premier Yu¡¦s speech on 21 October 2004 indeed focuses on the elevation of one to three research universities to world-class status. In particular, it addresses the deficiencies of the Excellence Projects and the University Integration Program. My personal hope is that the government will recognize the successes of the prior efforts, for the purposes which those programs were designed, and find ways to continue them, perhaps at reduced levels, as supplements to the new five-year and fifty-billion year plan. But whatever the outcome, I believe optimistically that the government¡¦s consistent attempts to discuss and address the problems created by the over-expansion of the number of universities and colleges is a token of its genuine goodwill and commitment. It is also my opinion that the five-year fifty-billion NTD plan is only the first stage of a really long-term effort from which one or more top-rated research universities will emerge on Taiwan. Given the nature of political governance in democratic societies, I do not think it realistic to think that any government can guarantee a truly long-range funding allocation, and that a series of shorter-term actions can serve the ultimate practical goals that we in the academic community all hope to achieve. We simply need to be constantly vigilant and flexible in steering the course of the ship of higher education in the right direction. At the press conference where Premier Yu Shyi-Kun announced the goals and methods of the five-year fifty-billion NTD proposal, I expressed my honest opinion that, during the nearly three years that I¡¦ve been involved in the process, this plan represented the best chance of Taiwan¡¦s achieving the stated goal of acquiring one or more top-rated research universities in the world on a time scale of ten to twenty years. The Five-Year Fifty-Billion NTD Proposal The objectives and guideline of policies enunciated by Premier Yu on 21 October 2004 contain three principles: 1. The purpose of this special budgetary allocation is the promotion of one to three institutions of higher education to world-class status within a reasonable span of time. 2. To qualify for funding at a level of 3 billion NTD per year for five years, the university must have a sufficient scale of operations and scope of research and education. 3. To allow the efficient and flexible use of the new resources, the university must agree to transform from an employment system of civil servants to one used by the ¡§private¡¨ sector. The coupling of the three principles has engendered much discussion in the academic community at NTHU. Considerable anxiety has been understandably generated because the details of the policies and practices under items 2 and 3 above have yet to be worked out. A deadlock threatens where the affected universities refuse to take action until these details have been clarified and the funds allocated, while the government refuses to allocate the funding until the universities have committed to items 2 and 3. The longer such a deadlock lasts, the greater is the danger that those who do not receive distributions from the plan will raise their voices loud enough to derail any action. If those who will benefit from this plan do not embrace it enthusiastically as an opportunity to excel, or if they shun the responsibilities that come with the added benefits, I do not see how we can expect society as a whole, or its elected representatives in government, to support our cause. It has taken considerable political will and courage to evolve the bill that is now before the Legislature for approval. If we spurn this opportunity to transform ourselves for the betterment of higher education, the consequences will be terrible for the university, for society, and for the future of Taiwan. The Merger of NTHU and NCTU Clause 2 of Premier Yu¡¦s statement of 21 October 2004 applied to NTHU and NCTU means effectively the merger of our two universities into a single institution. This is not a new idea; it has been in the air for years before I came to Tsing Hua. It has never been attempted in a serious fashion because (a) the motivation to merge was insufficient to overcome the many obstacles, and (b) the voices against merger under any circumstances were too strong to be balanced by those who felt neutral on the issue or were even mildly in favor of it. I believe that the circumstances have changed dramatically during the past year, and merger is not only a good option under the auspices of the five-year fifty-billion NTD plan, but it may be the only viable option. Please permit me to address some concerns that many may have. A. Why not just cooperate rather than merge? Cooperation between two universities is something that any two institutions can do; for example, NTHU has signed more than forty cooperative agreements with universities and research groups around the world. The government is not going more than double our current allocation from the MOE simply for NTHU and NCTU to sign another collaborative agreement, no matter how large in scope. It could not justify such action with the other institutions on Taiwan. From the university¡¦s perspective, to get the deep collaboration that would be needed to derive the greatest benefits requires a level of integration ¡V between the two campuses, between Colleges, between Departments, and between Research Institutes ¡V that would make cooperation (which requires two opposing sides to agree) actually more difficult than merger (which requires one side to agree). B. Why not try to get additional MOE resources on the basis of the strong reputations of NTHU and NCTU as separate and independent entities? This is exactly the strategy has been pursued by NTHU and NCTU for fifty years. The record of success during the last dozen years has not been encouraging. As individual outstanding institutions, we may think that we deserve special treatment from the MOE. However, in any pluralistic forum, we are consistently outvoted by one hundred and fifty other institutions and their clientele. A system of meritocracy ¡V equal opportunity based on application but unequal outcome based on performance and talent, which is absolutely necessary for first-rate research universities to emerge ¡V cannot arise from a bottoms-up approach. A meritocratic system can only be attained by top-down initiative, which everyone then accepts because it is to society¡¦s benefit and welfare to have competitive, elite institutions of higher education and research. As a merged institution, NTHU and NCTU can have the necessary scope and resources to become one of those elite organizations, which is why the government is willing to give us considerably greater resources if we agree to merge. C. What are the benefits of larger scale? It is sometimes argued that the model for NTHU or NCTU should not be the University of California at Berkeley, but MIT, Princeton, or Caltech. I believe this suggestion is misleading. MIT, Princeton, and Caltech are all wealthy private universities (although ¡§poor¡¨ compared to Harvard). MIT has a profile most often compared to Tsing Hua because both schools have about 10,000 students with a strong focus on science and engineering. But MIT has almost twice the professors we do (974 compared to 540, which we reached only because of aggressive recruitment and appointment during the past two years). MIT¡¦s annual operating expenses are 13 times ours. Princeton University has 1 faculty member for every 5.6 students and 2 staff members for every 3 students. Caltech is a highly specialized university with 390 faculty members (teaching and research) and only 2,666 students. Providing services and support for this community of faculty and students are 2,172 staff members. There is no way that Tsing Hua, as a public university in Taiwan, could ever hope to command the resources or the low student-to-faculty and student-to-staff ratios of MIT, Princeton, or Caltech. Among public universities, Berkeley is indisputably the best in the world. Without a medical school, it has a faculty of 1475 full-time faculty and a student enrollment of over 33,000 students. Thus, it has a student-to-faculty ratio comparable to those of NTHU or NCTU, but UC Berkeley is roughly three times larger in each category than either of our two schools standing alone. It has an annual operating budget that is approximately 4 or 5 times larger per student or per faculty member than ours, a formidable but not an insurmountable advantage. The basic point about university scale is that it is not the size of the student body that counts, it is the size of the faculty. I know of no public university of high quality in the United States, which serves the general purposes that the public has a right to expect of its best institutions of higher education, which has fewer than 1000 faculty members. For example, including their medical schools, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has about 37,000 students and 2,771 tenured or tenure-track faculty; the University of Wisconsin at Madison has 41,500 students and 2,060 faculty members; the University of Illinois at Urbana has about 39,000 students and 1881 faculty members. In contrast, with a faculty of 540 members, almost all NTHU departments are subcritical in size. The faculty suffers from this under-development because there are not enough colleagues in neighboring fields for them to discuss their research with, and the students suffer because there are holes in the coverage of areas of knowledge that they need to have in order to succeed in their professions. The merger of NTHU and NCTU would go a long way toward solving the problem of insufficient scale and scope, giving the combined institution a student body and faculty about the size of UC San Diego, one of the premier rising research universities in the world. UC San Diego is still growing and hopes to become eventually the size of UC Berkeley and UCLA. Another practical benefit will devolve to faculty and students from a merger. The number of courses to be covered in formal classroom settings can be reduced when one has twice the number of professors to handle the same curriculum. This will free up time for professors to spend in their research work as well as in the informal supervision of students inside and outside of the classroom, laboratory, or studio. The benefits of such informal learning experiences are immeasurably important for the development of the independent and creative spirit in our graduates. D. Recruitment, Salaries, Housing, and Working Environment When I first arrived at Tsing Hua, I sketched the improvements that could be made in the areas of faculty and student recruitment; faculty and staff salaries; faculty, student, and staff housing; and the general working environment at NTHU; if we could double our annual budget in five years. I will therefore simply refer the reader to those documents rather than review them again here. No one then took me seriously probably, but the annual operating budget at NTHU when I assumed the presidency in 2002 was 3.0 billion NTD. If we allocate half of the 3.0 billion NTD per year available under the merger proposal to NTHU, our annual operating budget in 2005 will be 5.5 billion NTD. In other words, we will have almost reached our financial goal in three years instead of five. The roadmap projections for the next five years made by NTHU departments are thus all realizable ¡V indeed, they are all insufficiently optimistic. But to make your dreams a reality, the merger plan needs to be approved by the University Senates of NTHU and NCTU. E. Name Change A vexing problem of any merger, whether for corporations or universities, is the question of choosing a name for the new organization. The names and identities of Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung are intimately involved when people mention the different traditions and cultures of the two institutions as an obstacle to any proposed merger. Indeed, I have been accused of being insensitive to these differences because I am an relative newcomer to the Tsing Hua campus. Let me begin by assuring skeptics that I have long been aware of the value of the Tsing Hua name. I was born in Kunming in 1943 instead of Wenchow or Beijing because my father was a graduate of Tsinghua University and moved with to Kunming with the other teaching faculty during China¡¦s war with Japan when Tsinghua was reconstituted there as part of the association known as the Southwest United Universities. When my family moved to the United States in 1949, all my parents¡¦ close circle of friends were Tsinghua alumni. My thesis adviser in college and in graduate school, Professor Lin Chia-Chiao, was a graduate of Tsinghua University. When I was starting out my professorial career in 1968, I chose to go to Stony Brook in part because of the presence there of Professor Yang Chen-Ning, who is also a Tsinghua alumnus. My father returned to Taiwan to assume the presidency of this campus in 1970, so I became familiar with the Taiwan campus. I became personally involved in the 1990s in the active promotion of Taiwan science when a then UC-Berkeley colleague, Professor Lee Yuan-Tseh, a Tsing Hua alumnus, returned to Taiwan to become President of Academia Sinica. President Lee was the Chair of the Search Committee that brought me to Taiwan in 2002 in my present position. My lifelong association with Tsing Hua over more than sixty years is the only reason I left Berkeley to try to help at this campus. After this litany, I hope my critics will please stop accusing me of having no emotional attachment to the Tsing Hua name. Thus, no one, least of all me, wishes to do away with the Tsing Hua brand. The proposals under consideration would all retain both the Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung names. The order of the names has not been determined yet, and in all official responses to the government calls for us to consider a merger, we have used the acronym ¡§NXU¡¨ for the merged institution, with the ¡§X¡¨ being a variable to be determined. All faculty, students, alumni, and staff can be assured that the words ¡§Tsing Hua¡¨ and ¡§Chio Tung¡¨ (contracted in English to ¡§Tsinghua¡¨ and ¡§Chiaotung¡¨ and represented by the single letters ¡§T¡¨ and ¡§C¡¨) will be part of the ¡§X.¡¨ The merged university will, of course, be a blend of Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung cultures and traditions. This is not a bad thing. Not all of Tsing Hua¡¦s traditions are good, and not all of Chaioda¡¦s traditions are bad. We have much to learn from each other; and the combined university will operate better when we adopt the best practices of both campuses and discard the worst. Indeed, the so-called ¡§Tsing Hua tradition and culture¡¨ are already a blend; those of the Science College differ from those of the Engineering College, which differ from the Life Science College, which differ from the College of Humanities and Social Science, which differ from the College of Technology Management, which differ from the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which differ from the College of Nuclear Science, which differ from the Commission on General Education. There is no reason that the merged Colleges, Departments, and Graduate Research Institutes from the marriage of NTHU and NCTU should get along less smoothly than the different Colleges, Departments, and Graduate Institutes now manage within the separate campuses. Being housed in the same buildings, as will eventually happen, of course, will force people in the same and neighboring disciplines to interact more closely, but this result will be one of the benefits rather than one of the hardships of the merger process. There will undoubtedly be short-term inconveniences, but the potential long-term benefits so outweigh these considerations that the differences in tradition and culture should not be a ¡§show-stopper.¡¨ The key to a good merger, as a good marriage, is trust, goodwill for the growth of the partner, and a generosity of spirit. Change from Civil Servants to Public-Sector Employees As I understand the debate on this issue, there are two main concerns. First, there is the concern that relinquishing our status as civil servants will endanger the retirement benefits contracted when we were first hired and on which basis we made our decision to enter employment by the University. Premier Yu has assured President Chang and me that the government will honor the commitments made to all current employees of NTHU and NCTU. Only new employees made after the conversion to the public-sector statutes will be affected by the new retirement policies. To get an explanation of the situation, NTHU and NCTU will invite Director Yeh of the Administrative Yuan to give a presentation on the subject and to answer questions that all concerned employees of the universities might have on the complex legal and administrative issues. As long as there is a legal requirement to honor the old commitments, I personally support the conversion to public-sector employment for two reasons. First and foremost, I believe it will give the universities much needed freedom to pursue their own academic destinies. If one wants a loosening of strangling regulations, as in recommendation 2 of the Liu Committee report, one must be prepared to accept some risks. Second, I personally believe that retirement reform is a necessary action facing every developed economy, where improved medical care and decreased fertility rates are producing a systematic ageing of the general population. Generous monthly retirement benefits are coming out of the bankbooks of our students, our children, and yet unborn generations. Fewer and fewer workers in the future will be working to support the retirement benefits of those now working or approaching retirement. It would be grossly irresponsible of any government to saddle the young with an unsupportable debt burden by ignoring this problem. The academic community has a chance here to act unselfishly in this regard and to set an example for the rest of society. The second concern over conversion to employment as private-sector employees is whether government will eventually abandon its support of public universities. Here, the basic issue is one of a lack of trust. Government in a democratic society occurs by the consent of the governed. Elected officials are the public¡¦s representatives in the machinery of government, so there is always a recourse at the ballot box if there is an abuse of this trust. No one is more sensitive to this recourse at elections than elected government officials, so there can be no fear of government abandoning its responsibilities in higher education and research if we do our jobs well. We as educators and researchers need to keep the public informed about our accomplishments and needs. This is an ever recurring task that cannot be accomplished once and for all. Indeed, it should not be accomplished once and for all because checks and balances must be in place to ensure that we keep up our part of the social contract. It is thus a chimera to think that we in academia can or should get permanent guarantees from government or from society for a never-changing level of funding for higher education and research. The battles are fought each decade on new ground and under changing rules, so all we can hope for, and all we should hope for, is some stability over a sustained period of multiple years to carry out long-term projects and long-term plans. All that is needed for progress to occur is a basic commitment from society and from government that the appropriate level of funding will continue to flow as long as higher education and research continue to provide economic, medical, national security, environmental, cultural, and intellectual benefits. A five-year commitment on the part of the government from this perspective is perfectly acceptable as long as government understands that it must continue one way or another for the indefinite future if we are to reach the goal of building at least one world-class research university in Taiwan. The train that reaches this destination in Taiwan begins with the first car which is the five-year fifty billion NTD plan. The question before the NTHU academic community is whether we wish to hop onto this first car, or to be left behind in the exciting new leg in the journey of higher education and research in Taiwan. Over a hundred and fifty universities in Taiwan today would gladly trade their place in line for ours. I urge the NTHU community to accept this opportunity and responsibility with gratitude, humility, and enthusiasm. What Happens Next? As I have already stated at the beginning of this message, during the first week of November, the Vice-Presidents and I will be visiting each of the Colleges to answer questions from concerned faculty and staff. We will also meet with interested students in an open forum to be arranged by the Dean of Students and Dean of Academic Affairs. The next step will then be to pass a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in the University Senates of the Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung campuses that we are prepared to submit a detailed proposal with a schedule of milestones to the MOE for the merger of our two universities. We have asked the MOE to send us a draft of the MOU detailing the funding commitment, the key milestones, and the conversion to private-sector employs as they see it from the government¡¦s perspective. After the MOU has been signed by the appropriate representatives from the government and the two universities, we would begin the preparation of a detailed proposal stating the time scale on which we would set up a Board of Trustees, an integrated system of university governance and operation, the selection of a single president for the combined campuses, and the official transformation into a single university. An appropriate steering committee will be set up to coordinate this work. The proposal will then be sent for final ratification by the two University Senates. Upon passage of the proposal and its acceptance by the MOE, the funding will begin to flow.

paranormal
wow !! Soda, that's quite brief ... great info man, good work

aaron_wong
[8D]woooaah!thats a load of info there soda!!!![*-:)]thanxs for sharing it with us...!!!![*-:)][*-:)][^]thumbs up to u mate!!![:)>-]

roger
Wow, that is one load of information. Just curious, where you got that? Certainly this newsletter was sent in chinese. Regarding this issue, I just hope it ain't a plan by the goverment to do away with the trademark university names in the chinese world. I am just weary of the DPP. Two universities providing engineers to Hsinchu Science Park is hardly more than enough. Well, I am yet to finish reading the mega post you have there. The issue seems to be that the NSC will only increase the grants if the two universities paired up, interesting.

soda-popenski
®Õ±i is an ABC. [:D]

roger
quote:
Originally posted by soda-popenski
®Õ±i is an ABC. [:D]
Yea but the students are not ABC. Are you saying he cant' type chinese?[8-}]

soda-popenski
Yeah! 1 week later,the FL dept ppl produced a chinese version of it.[=D>]