Friday, October 14, 2011

NTU drops ‘national’ when cooperating with China

Aside from the name change, a list of visiting scholars at the department of humanities and social sciences shows that of the 52 foreign academics taken in this year, 46 are from China

Almost every department at National Taiwan University (NTU), the nation’s top academic institution, is dropping the “N” from the school’s initials when it holds joint conferences with Chinese schools or cooperates on academic work, sources said yesterday.

The practice, described as “university-wide,” began more than a year ago, a source at the university told the Taipei Times on condition of anonymity, referring to official documents on conferences and panels held with Chinese universities.

According to another academic at the school who was also in a position to see the documents, the removal of the “N” in the university’s official initials — a source of pride for many Taiwanese — applied to “a lot of, if not all departments” involved in exchanges with China. However, it has yet to be determined whether the practice is now official policy at the university or was initiated by department heads or individual academics.

My article, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.

2 comments:

Mike Fagan said...

Visceral reaction: terminate all State funding for all of the Universities, starting with NTU. Do it now.

A State-run education system will be an enormous liability in the event of PRC annexation.

Anonymous said...

While I was studying there two years ago, I was told by one of my professors that most often, when research papers were published in journals, the word "national" had to be removed upon submission. Also, he said it has been like this for many years.