National Taiwan University (NTU) president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) yesterday said he would make cultivating academic talent a priority as he outlined his plans.
The election on Friday of Kuan, a former National Development Council minister in then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, came as a surprise to many faculty members and students.
Kuan was elected by a university committee following two rounds of voting; he won on the third ballot by more than one-thirds of votes.
The 21 committee members were allowed to cast multiple votes and Kuan won 12 votes in each round of voting.
Kuan used a news conference yesterday to outline his management policy and enumerate the challenges facing the school, including maintaining its competitiveness, brain drain, academic innovation and ethics.
He said he would use Stanford University as a model for the schools’ development through 2028, and he proposed an “Asia flagship” program.
The program would focus on building an innovative platform to nurture creative thinking in students; forging a partnership with prestigious international universities and promoting lifelong education, Kuan said.
When he was minister, Kuan proposed establishing a pilot free-trade zone where trade barriers and other regulations, such as university education policy, would be lifted. The idea was roundly criticized at the time.
Kuan said ideas about partnering with foreign universities, including possibly allowing such schools to operate on NTU’s campus, was different from his free-trade zone proposal, because it was aimed at improving the competitiveness of NTU students and faculty.
Partnership programs launched by Singaporean, Chinese and Hong Kong universities have seen elite European and US universities setting up branches or launching colleges in partner universities, Kuan said.
NTU would partner with other universities to establish an international college and it would ask the Ministry of Education to help with funding, he said. Changes need to be made to resolve a growing shortage of academics, he said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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