It is not new that most departments suffer from crammed space, lack of manpower and a shortfall of funding. All these problems were vocalized once again to the university last month when the President, Flora Chang and Vice Presidents, Feng Chao-kang and Kao Po-yuan as well as the Dean of the Office of Academic Affairs, Keh Huan-chao visited all colleges in order to visualize clearly the plights of each individual college. During this visit, the President promised the College of Engineering (CE) that the university would deal with their problems such as that of space first as a gesture of appreciating their academic achievement is recent years. However, in demonstrating her even-handiness in all issues, the President with her entourage will begin a walk-about tour in various colleges and administrative units this Wednesday, November 24, to understand first-hand what contribution the university can provide in resolving the problems mentioned above. Based on the information gathered in this tour, the university will determine a list of priority in terms of emergency, available manpower and resources it is able to render in assistance.

The information necessary for reaching such a list, will derive from the President’s heart-to-heart talk with all the deans, chairs and faculty representatives concerned. She is expected to hear about the possible bottlenecks some of them are facing or will be facing. She will also be briefed about their counter measures in dealing with these problems and their anticipation in the nature of assistance from the university. It will be a challenging task to the President as no doubt that all academic and non-academic units alike are ambitious in expanding and extending their existing projects, be it long or short term one.

So far the university is aware, thanks to the President’s tour last month, that, for example, the CE is in desperate need of more research rooms to accommodate their 139 faculty members. The Engineering Building and the Main Engineering Building house mostly classrooms so it leaves very little room for teachers and departmental office serving 6,599 students. The crammed situation can be best illustrated, according to Yu Gwo-hsing, the Dean, by the statistics which states 13,440 times of visit by students to all the labs of each department per year. Such a place, he believes, can create alienation easily; therefore, it is the task of the college how to foster a much more intimate atmosphere, such as that of a ‘family’, by using their space wisely and humanely.

Other issues the President learned in her last tour and will be elaborated in this tour in various colleges and departments range from difficulties and restrictions in recruitment to shortfall in funding for research and equipment. In particular, the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, despite a new building providing the needed space next year, is still very concerned of space, as they will continue to expand in the next few years. Several departments (Japanese, Spanish, German and Russian) intend to set up their own graduate institutes for languages, for example. For this expansion, they are also worried about finding quality faculty. However, departments in other colleges are facing different issues such as reduction in enrollment and changes of system.