Dr. Flora Chang, TKU president, was pleased to see the advanced progress of the of the first stage construction of Lanyang Campus when she and her team that included Feng Chao-kang, the vice president of Academic Affairs and several senior administrators of Lanyang Preparatory Committee visited the campus on February 16. Her visit was to ensure this stage of construction to be on schedule in time for the inspection of the Ministry of Education (MOE) that is to take place this month. She saw that not only the construction was ahead of schedule but also met all the requirements set by MOE. Nonetheless, she reminded the committee to safeguard the creation of a spatially and technically well-designed learning environment that meets international standards.

MOE’s inspection is to mainly assess both the ‘software’ and the ‘hardware’ of Lanyang’s facilities, which should fulfill the requirements set by the ministry on the establishment of new colleges and recruitment of students. As Lanyang Campus will be an English style residential college, all future students (350 of them for 3 colleges in the first year) and faculty are expected to be on residence four days a week. The facilities and space that need to be created for them are primarily for teaching, accommodation, and sports/recreation. The first stage of construction, for instance, is to clearly divide the campus into teaching area, residential area, catering area and sports/recreation area. At this stage, a skeleton of each area should be completed by May and so is the outdoor International Wisdom Park that is filled with various regional floras brought and planted by delegates of TKU’s sister universities worldwide. This park will surely serve as the token of Lanyang’s internalization.

Lin Jyh-horng, the Director of Lanyang Campus, who is also the Chair of the Department of International Trade, states that there will be 3 colleges and 7 departments in the first year. He refers to College of Entrepreneurial Development that contains Department of Marketing and Distribution Management, Department of Tourism and Hotel Management, Department of Information and Communication Technology Management, and Department of Software Engineering; College of Global Research and Development that includes Department of Global Studies on Politics and Economics and Department of Global culture and Language Studies; and finally, College of Continuing Education and Professional Development that consists of Department of Applied Foreign Languages.

Hence, it is vital to complete certain requirements by July 20th so as to attain a License for Use, President Chang emphasized. However, it should not be on the expense of the quality. The overall construction skeleton is scheduled to complete by May, whereas the interior furnishings by June. When MOE arrives in March, Lanyang campus will prepare data on important figures such as sizes of buildings and department planning for inspection. (Ying-hsueh Hu )