Yuanlin Township Community University in Changhua County has won acclaim since its opening in February. Since then, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County have followed suit with their own community universities. These new institutions have reaped impressive results in integrating local resources.
However, in the process of organizing community universities, we have also learned that Taiwan's higher education tilts heavily in favor of the north part of the island. As a result, we were not able to find any qualified instructors for community universities. In this light, one of the new missions that came out of the seminar is to raise public awareness of educational reform, to get reformers together for a discussion on how to strengthen the powers of self-improvement and self-reform in a new political milieu, and to call for public attention to the many benefits that come from community universities, to encourage more people to return to their hometowns and participate in the work of minimizing north-south and urban-rural differences.
Ku Chung-hwa is chairman of the Association for the Promotion of Community Universities and a professor of sociology at National Chengchi University.
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