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清大校長英文公開信
Open
Letter to Faculty, Students, Staff, and Alumni of NTHU
Frank Hsia-San Shu,
President
19 October 2004
Recent
reports in the popular press on the merger of National Tsing Hua
University with National Chiao Tung University prompt me to write
this message on a more rapid time scale and in a briefer format than
I would have preferred. I had hoped to write a full report for
distribution among the wider university community, giving details of
the proposed agreement among the government, the Ministry of
Education (MOE), and the two universities, as well as a balanced
exposition of the pros and cons of the proposed action, before
bringing the topic for discussion, debate, and a final vote by the
University Senate. An open discussion of this important issue,
crucial to the future of higher education and research in Taiwan,
should be postponed until the government』s commitment in added
resources to promote the action, as well as its requirements and
schedules for milestones, are better fleshed out, with the agreement
in principle of the top administrations of our two universities to
an action plan. Premature debate will lead only to unrealistic
expectations and, perhaps, a counter-productive hardening of
positions among advocates of different points of view. Thus, I
urge everyone to suspend judgment until the details of the proposal
are known and put forward in a proper forum for frank and positive
debate. The issue is far too important for frivolous gossip
and uninformed opinions to influence a balanced and rational
decision that is best for future of the entire academic community,
for society, and for Taiwan. My report below will thus be
deliberately spare in details.
Motivation
for Action
The
initiative for the proposed merger comes from the highest levels of
the Taiwan government. It has the support of the Ministry of
Education and the Science and Technology Advisory Group that helps
formulate higher education and research policy for the Premier to
consider. Public statements have been made by various
government officials that additional resources will be given to NTHU
and NCTU to
promote this merger. At the request of the MOE, the two
universities have submitted a ten-page pre-proposal to the MOE of
our aspirations, goals, budgetary needs, and an outline of
milestones that span a twenty-year period, with a more detailed
action plan for the first five-year period. The MOE has agreed
to most of the points of our pre-proposal, and they have sent a
draft of a memorandum of understanding to be brought to Premier Yu
Shyi-Kun for discussion and implementation. We have drafted a
response to this memorandum of understanding that makes more
explicit our long-term plans and needs, as well as our concerns
regarding certain specific issues likely to be of interest to the
wider university community. President Chang and I will meet
with the Minister Tu and Premier Yu on 21 October 2004 to discuss
the relevant issues in person.
Benefits
of Merger
The
rationale for a merger of NTHU and NCTU is to promote excellence
– excellence of our teaching and research programs; excellence for
our visibility in the increasingly competitive arena of top
international research universities; excellence in our ability to
attract top domestic and foreign scholars and students; excellence
of our overall academic and campus environment and infrastructure;
excellence in our nurturing of the professional development of our
faculty and staff; excellence in our course and laboratory offerings
to all students to give them the best
contemporary preparation for a life of the mind; excellence in our
contributions to the future innovativeness of Taiwan』s industries
and to the vitality of its arts, literature, and refined social
discourse; excellence in the training of the future leaders who can
promote a bright economic and cultural future for all the citizens
of Taiwan. To be
specific, the rationale is not to save money; indeed, the
accomplishment of the stated vision of excellence will require the
government to allocate greater financial resources to the merged
institution than the sum of the separate budgets of the two present
universities.
There
will be savings of scale, but these savings will be applied to
increase the quality of the combined institution, not to reduce the
scale of the operations. The most important savings will be in
the area of formal classroom teaching per faculty member, because
roughly the same number of courses will be offered in each
discipline as offered before, but separately, on the two campuses.
Together with an increase in the total number of faculty, students,
and research and other staff on the
two campuses, these savings in formal classroom time will be applied
to allow expansion of the contact time between faculty and students
in research projects and more personalized supervision. The
quality of academic life will thus improve for both faculty and
students in the merged institution.
There
will also be savings in our library acquisitions – only one copy
of a book or journal now need to be purchased where previously NTHU
and NCTU had duplicate acquisitions. Again these savings will
be applied to increase the variety of our holdings, not to reduce
the quantity of our overall acquisitions, leading to many scholarly
benefits to the community as a whole. A welcome flexibility in
the use of shelf and building space will result.
There
will also be savings in our purchase of expensive equipment and
computer systems if like-minded research groups can share facilities
and hardware. Software purchases can also gain from the
advantages of scale. Most
important, however, will be the increased interactions and synergies
that will occur when one puts together greater-then-critical masses
of scholars and students under a common roof. The vigor of the
resulting enterprise is an exceedingly exciting prospect.
Name
Change and Mei-Chu Games
There
are also shortcomings, of course, to any merger between established
institutions with their own histories and traditions. If there
weren』t such shortcomings, there would have been many more mergers
than have actually occurred in Taiwan』s system of higher
education. But the advantages in the case of NTHU and NCTU so
outweigh the disadvantages that I think everyone should set aside
their preformed prejudices to judge dispassionately the long-term
advantages that accrue
to a combined effort, against the short-term inconveniences that
result from a merger. In the final analysis, consider the
following question: If one were to start afresh and build a
center of excellence in Hsinchu in higher education and research,
would one build two universities or one? I personally think
the answer to that question is clear. Well, the future is
infinitely long compared to the past, and the government has given
us a chance to begin afresh to prepare for that indefinitely
long future. Do we grasp the opportunity or not?
The
greatest practical problem facing a merger is what to call the
combined institution. This is an obstacle but not an
insurmountable one. We
hope every member of the academic community will rationally discuss
this question with your peers and friends to make thoughtful
suggestions to the community on this problem. The
administration remains open to suggestions; we seek consensus on
this issue rather than necessarily creativity.
The
second most-common question that has been raised is: what will
happen to the Mei-Chu Games? Well, I personally hope that they
will continue. They are a wonderful tradition, and I believe
that the healthy rivalry can remain if we adopt an English-style
system of a single University (e.g., Cambridge University) but
separate Colleges (e.g., Kings or Trinity or Churchill, etc.), named
after the physical campuses
– Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung – to which students and alumni
can have life-long affiliations. But here, perhaps, there is
room for more innovative ideas.
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