Universities should step up efforts to build museums on campuses to enhance students’ learning experience, a Cabinet official said yesterday.
The function of a university museum is not only to teach, but also to provide opportunities for students to experiment in certain areas, Minister Without Portfolio Huang Kuang-nan (黃光男) said at an international symposium on global collaboration among university museums.
In his speech, Huang highlighted the importance of university museums. Open to the public, a university museum has the same function as a typical museum, but also serves the same role as a higher education institution, he said.
Organized by the Taichung-based Asia University, the one-day event was attended by speakers from Taiwan, the US, the UK and Japan. Asia University is set to open an art museum on its campus next year.
Vice Minister of Education Chen Der-hwa (陳德華), who also attended the event, expressed hope that the symposium would help local universities learn more about their foreign counterparts in the museum field.
“The concept of a university museum has not received much attention in this country,” Chen added.
According to Huang, there are more than 20 museums on university and college campuses in Taiwan.
However, these institutions face a number of challenges.
The biggest challenge is their inability to illustrate their corresponding universities’ research achievements as effectively as those on US campuses. This is due in large part to the limited number of visitors to such museums in Taiwan, Huang said.
Huang, who was president of the National Taiwan University of Arts from 2004 until last year, also suggested that the establishment and management of university museums be listed as a criteria in university evaluations.
Meanwhile, Paul Smith, director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England, said at a news conference on the sidelines of the symposium that the key role of a university museum is to improve the quality of the students’ experience.
Campus museums provide a more rounded intellectual and cultural education, said Smith, who represents one of the oldest university museums in the world.
“That’s a difference between a university that has a good museum and no museum,” Smith added.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not