TKU held its 17th Innovation in The Seminar in Instructional and Administrative Reforms on December 7. The theme of the conference revolved around three separate but related subjects: Quality for Tamkang, Wild Cards Effect, and Mass Collaboration, aiming to generate measures of infusing theories into practice that would bring the university to another level of change. The speakers of the forum were Clement Chang, the Founder, Flora Chang, the President, and three Vice Presidents who gave presentation on topics relating to the theme of the forum to 200 plus participants that included senior administrators, head of colleges and departments together with teacher’s representatives and new faulty members. In the afternoon, 8 small discussion sessions were arranged to explore the issues raised in the morning more elaborately.

Flora Chang, the President, gave a presentation on her vision for TKU which is to establish a House of Quality in which research, teaching, and learning can reach a level of excellence that can propel TKU to higher ranking. For this, she emphasized that there need to be clear goals and plans of operation. On a slightly different note, Clement Chang, the Founder, spoke about the Wild Cards theory which addresses the unpredictability of our future. He proposed how TKU could deal with such elements and how TKU could even become a wild card in some future competitions to clinch victory.

Following their talks, Tai Wan Chin, the Vice President for International Affairs presented his read on the bestseller Wikinomics (2007) written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, two top business consultants in the US and UK respectively about the power of mass collaboration that has been made possible by the Internet. Dai believes this model of business can work for TKU particularly in the way it collaborates with its sister universities. On a different future, Chen Kan Nan, the Vice President for the Academic Affairs, urged the university to take on a more aggressive role in combating climate change after he had read the book Degrees that Matter: Climate Change and the University (2007). He believes that the university should implement energy saving measures as soon as possible and educate students to be aware of their responsibility towards global warming and climate change through mandatory curriculum design. Finally, Kao Po Yuan, the Vice President for the Administrative Affairs, examined the history of TKU as an organization based on the frameworks discussed in the paper, The Study of Colleges and Universities as Organizations, that appears in the book, Sociology of Higher Education (2007). He drew comparison between the development of higher education in the past five decades in the US and that of TKU in terms of the Four Waves in the similar period of time. With this comparison, he hopes that TKU can continue to evolve as a smart, flexible organization in order to meet future challenges that will be brought on by an M-shape society. ( ~Ying-hsueh Hu )