The Challenges for Establishing World-Class Universities in Taiwan
Following China, Korea, and Japan, Taiwan began an initiative in 2005 to build world-class universities. The Ministry of Education (MoE) initiated a project called the Plan to Develop World-Class Universities and Top-level Research Centers. The project is
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The Challenges for Establishing World-Class Universities in Taiwan Dian-fu Chang
11.1 Introduction This chapter focuses on how WCUs (world-class universities) have been adopted, interpreted, and institutionalized as a national policy in Taiwan; how leading universities have interpreted and responded to that government policy; and how individual units (departments or professors) have responded to subsequent challenges. This chapter addresses how WCUs have been institutionalized as social systems and have been culturally integrated within Taiwan as well as how WCUs have been institutionalized at the institutional and individual faculty level. In recent years, the world’s advanced countries have been providing special funds for university development, such as the UK University Grants Committee, the United States Department of Education with the project fund, Japan, and Germany. Even China has been providing funds to a small number of major universities, such as Beijing University and Tsinghua University, in the form of an annual 600 million RMB (Chinese dollars) and special grants (Chang et al. 2009). The Korean government has provided 1,342,142 million Korean won (equivalent to 1.4 billion US dollars) to promote the 7-year span of the Brain Korea 21 Project (BK21) (Shin 2009). The goal of structural reform of universities in Japan has been to achieve 30 universities (or research fields) of international standing. The California Government Planning Inter-Institution Research Center has provided grants over the last 4 years and gives each center one billion dollars each year. Since 2002, the EU has provided substantial funding (1.3 billion euros) for research projects in nanotechnology (European Commission 2004). In recent years, the development of higher education in Taiwan has been facing international and domestic pressures.
D.-f. Chang () Institute of Educational Policy and Leadership, Tamkang University, New Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] J.C. Shin and B.M. Kehm (eds.), Institutionalization of World-Class University in Global Competition, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 6, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4975-7 11, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2013
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Besides the aforementioned pressure from developed countries, there are domestic problems as follows (Ministry of Education 2004, 2006): 1. The expansion of higher education impacts the allocation of resources. An overemphasis on equal allocation of resources in the past has resulted in a lack of competition that makes it difficult to establish a well-run system of higher education. The excessive dispersal of limited resources has failed to help individual universities establish unique characteristics based on their expertise as well as having a negative impact on academic competitiveness. 2. The quality of education in universities faces new challenges. The rapid development of the higher-education population has outpaced the development of the necessary resou
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