Ask any group of high school seniors preparing for the Joint University Entrance Examination which school they will list as their first choice, and the name most often repeated is likely to be National Taiwan University (NTU).
Founded by the Japanese colonial government as Taihou Imperial University in 1928, the school has enjoyed a long tradition of excellence. The Japanese hoped to build it into a top-class international university, and succeeded in cultivating several Nobel Prize nominees from among its professors during the school’s first seventeen years. After the ROC government came to Taiwan in 1949, the university was renamed, but the tradition of top academic quality was maintained.
Today, NTU has a solid reputation as the island’s best school in nearly every field. Although there is no systematic academic rating system for local universities, schools can be ranked according to the Joint University Entrance Exam scores accepted by each. For generations, NTU has been the most sought-after school and has thus consistently had the highest admittance scores in nearly every department of study. It also enjoys the largest campus and the most generous government budget of all public universities, about US$200 million for the 1994-95 school year.
NTU’s alumni roster lists many famous names, including President Lee Teng-hui ( 李登輝 ) and Taiwan’s only locally educated Nobel Prize winner, Lee Yuan-tseh ( 李遠哲 ), now president of Academia Sinica, who received the prize in 1986 for his work in chemistry. A large percentage of Taiwan’s high-level politicians also graduated from NTU—members of all three main political parties, the Kuomintang (KMT), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and the New Party.
It is little wonder that NTU has a reputation for cultivating political leaders. The school’s students are famous for being outspoken and opinionated, for spending their time giving streets speeches on the environmental hazards of golf courses or joining demonstrations against sexual harassment rather than remaining tucked away in the libraries and study halls.
One example of the school’s independent spirit is the greater freedom and power that its student government and faculty enjoy compared with other universities. In 1988 NTU became the only university to elect its student body president through a direct student vote. The students simply staged an election, disregarding the approved election system in which the post was filled by a vote among student government representatives only. Traditionally, candidates for student body president held close ties to the university’s KMT-affiliated military advisor, thus linking student government to the party. Today, most other universities have followed NTU’s lead and the Ministry of Education (MOE) has accepted the change.
In 1993, the school took an even more radical step. Despite the objections of the MOE, a group of administrations, along with professors representing each of NTU’s college, voted to change the status of its courses on military training and nursing from required to optional. These courses are mandatory at all Taiwan universities. It also revised the other required courses on the teachings of Sun Yat-sen, Chinese, English, and history. (Restrictions on these courses were later lifted under the 1994 revisions to the University Law.) The university broadened the subject matter covered and gave students a range of courses from which to choose, a system that NTU professors feel better meets the academic standards of the university. “When the universities couldn’t determine the content of these courses, it reduced the possibility of cultural diversity,” says Cyrus Chu (朱敬一), professor of economics.
No other school has usurped the power of the MOE in this way. As a result of highly publicized acts such as these, terms such as “independent,” “nonconformist,” “liberal,” and even “anti-authoritarian” are often applied to NTU.
According to Professor of Chinese Literature Ke Ching-ming (柯慶明), NTU students and professors have traditionally enjoyed relative independence from the university administration and the MOE. Ke explains that long before the University Law was revised, giving schools rather than the MOE the power to make nearly all curriculum decisions, all changes in the course work at NTU were made through meetings between the administration and professors. One reason for the university’s autonomy, according to Ke, is its highly respected law department, which provides vast legal resources. Should the MOE attempt to curb the university’s powers in the future, he says, the school could draw on its own experts. “Backed up by so many legal specialists, we would say to the ministry, ‘Let’s go to the Grand Justices to interpret the University Law!'"
Ke says protestation is part of NTU’s tradition. “Don’t forget, the man who carried banners and led the New Culture Movement is buried on this campus,” he says, referring to Fu Szu-nien (傅斯年), NTU’s first president following the arrival of the ROC government in 1949. As a young man in mainland China, Fu was one of the student leaders of the 1919 New Culture Movement, or May Fourth Movement, which criticized the government’s actions at the Versailies Peace Conference as well as many of China’s established cultural, social, and academic traditions.
One gauge of the current level of social activism at NTU is its student organizations. There are 360 such groups registered on the campus, far more than the 150 to 200 that exist at other large universities. The interests of these extracurricular groups range from stock investment to Confucianism. Students concerned about environmental issues can join the Society of Nature Protection; those interested in lesbian rights can attend the Society of Women’s Research. The politically minded can join the Society for Researching Mainland Chinese Problems, the Society for the Study of Elections, the Society for Research on Parliaments, or the Club for Taiwan Nationhood, which supports Taiwan independence. Since the university sits near the heart of the government center, students also have many opportunities to serve as legislative aides or campaign volunteers.
NTU administrators stress that the school has adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward student societies. One administrator in the extracurricular activities department explains that it will approve any prospective group that follows the application procedures, which consist of submitting the signatures of at least thirty founding students and one professor. An average of fifteen new societies start up per semester, although many are small or short-lived.
Students such as Tsai Hsiao-chun (蔡筱君), a second-year graduate student in the Institute of Building and Planning, believe the diversity among student interests and political or social beliefs has led to an atmosphere of acceptance on the campus. “There is a special phenomenon at NTU that students respect each other,” she says. “Or maybe we are just indifferent about what our schoolmates are doing.” She says younger students are increasingly open to new philosophies. “Undergraduates have become more sensitive to the new currents in thinking than when my classmates and I were undergraduates,” she says. “They can easily grasp the meaning of democracy, women’s rights, and other causes. I think it’s because our society has become more free, which allows students to broaden their mental horizons.”
But students such as Wu Chung-chieh (吳中杰), a senior studying industrial management, have little respect for their activist classmates. “They’re like flies,” he says, “buzzing off anywhere that promises a protest or demonstration.” Wu believes these students are a small minority and that NTU’s reputation for social activism has been exaggerated. “In fact, in each class, there are few students who are concerned about social causes or local politics, and only one or two of them will engage in street protests,” he says. “The majority of students would rather join entertainment-oriented clubs.” Wu believes young students are becoming more social and less socially active. “Each year when I see the new class of freshmen enter the school,” he says, “I have the impression that they know better and better how to have fun.”
The largest campus organizations have traditionally included the NTU Chorus, the Photography Society, and groups that organize volunteers for social work. And many of the other organizations focus on socializing, through common interests in sports, reading, or pub hopping. There is even a cake baking club and a Society of Cartoons and Comics.
Even the student leaders of activist groups seem to share the belief that most of their classmates are apathetic. Wen Tsai-hung (溫在弘), a junior majoring in agricultural engineering and the former director of the Club for Taiwan Nationhood, says while members of the club regularly join in demonstrations supporting Taiwan independence, few of his other classmates take part in protests. “Contrary to my idealistic image of NTU students, I’ve found that they are not concerned about anything but their own lives,” he says. “They’re used to a secure and safe life.” He says students have become less motivated in recent years. “The student movements flourished at NTU in the seventies and eighties, but students today aren’t motivated.”
In the public’s eye, NTU’s law students have the strongest reputation for activism and political ambition, mainly because a large number of ROC legislators are NTU alumni. But some law students believe this image is wrong.
“Law students may be more concerned about politics and current events than students in other departments such as economics or engineering, but very few of my classmates actually get involved in political or social movements,” says Tai Chung-mao (戴仲懋), a sophomore majoring in both law and accounting. “Actually, few of my classmates join in extracurricular organizations. After class, many of them go to night school to study foreign languages or work part time as tutors. They have no free time.” In addition to preparing for the highly competitive national bar exam, which has a pass rate of less than 10 percent, many of Tai’ s classmates are studying for the entrance exam to graduate school.
Tai himself hardly fits the profile of a socially active student. In fact, he has never been to a demonstration. Because he is trying to finish his double major in five years, rather than the normal six, his schedule is packed from Monday through Friday. When he has free time, he attends two extracurricular groups, but neither focuses on political or social causes. He occassionally joins the Society of Research on Rural Youth Life, which sends volunteers to tutor junior high students in rural areas, or the Photography Society.
Professor Ke Ching-ming, who has spent the past three decades studying or teaching at NTU, believes the choices of Tai and his peers mark a shift among students toward focusing strictly on their area of study and restricting their ambitions. He believes the school is producing well-trained experts, but that students are losing their autonomy and creativity in the process. “They don’t want to be philosophical pioneers, but simply want to succeed within their narrow fields,” he says.
Student Body President Hsu Chia-hsin (許家馨) is more upbeat. He himself joined three hundred students from several universities, one-third of them from NTU, in a sit-in and three-day hunger strike in December 1993 to protest the MOE’s early revision of the University Law—a draft that gave universities little autonomy. He says NTU students do gather together when such important issues arise. “Since the 1994 revision of the University Law, students seem to be inactive. But it’s just because there’s no big event to cause student indignation or draw out political or social concerns,” he says. “I still believe students at NTU have the potential to show dedication to social activism.”
National Taiwan University
Indisputably Taiwan’s top-ranked university, NTU was founded in 1928 by the Japanese government as Taihou Imperial University. After the arrival of the ROC government in 1949, the university was renamed. Many of the island’s political, academic, and business leaders are NTU alumni.
Number of students: 23,092.
Student-to-professor ratio: 8:1
1994 average score on the mandatory Joint University Entrance Exam: For the colleges of liberal arts and management, 406 (out of a possible 600); for the colleges of science and engineering, 407.
Most common majors: medical science, electrical engineering, information engineering, law, industrial management.
Most competitive majors (based on the minimum entrance-exam score accepted): medical science, philosophy of law, electrical engineering, industrial management, information engineering.
Famous graduates: President Lee Teng-hui (1948, agricultural economics); Premier Lien Chan (1957, political science); Lee Yuan-tseh, 1986 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry (1959, chemistry); Founding member of the New Party Jaw Shaw-kong (1972, agricultural engineering); Mayor of Taipei and DPP leader Chen Shui-bian (1973, law).