More than 30 international scholars have accepted invitations from the Graduate Institute of Future Studies for a series of lectures and presentations in commemoration of TKU’s 55th founding anniversary. Among those invited, there are some heavyweights in this field, such as Tim Mack, the Chair of WFSF, Christopher Jones, the Secretary in Chief of the same organization, Walter Kistler, the founder of FFF, Walter Truett Andeerson, the Chair of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, Michio Kaku, a Japanese scholar in future technologies, Ervin Laszlo, the founder of the Budapest Club in Hungary, and Clement Bezold, a renowned academic of Future Studies from the US. The fact that TKU is able to invite so many leading experts to visit Taiwan is the result of the success of the university’s efforts in the past 10 years in promoting a future-oriented high education.

The first scholar to arrive is Pico Iyer, a columnist for the New York Times, who is also a well established writer. He will speak about one of his recent books, The Global Soul, in TKU at the end of October. Following that, there will be a Q & A session with him, Dr. Clement Chang, the Founder of TKU, and Sohail, another scholar in Future Studies. After this, there will be three further lectures given by Richard Slaughter from Australia. One of the lectures will be broadcasted via video-conference for students at the National Taiwan Normal University and Chinese Culture University.

Most of the invited scholars will arrive for the international conference entitled Global Soul, Global Mind and Action: Futuring from Survival to Thrivial, hosted by Tamkang between the 5th and 7th of November. Tamkang Times will run feature stories on these scholars in the next coming six weeks, and for example, in this issue, a special report is dedicated to Ashis Nandy, a scholar of post-colonialism in India. ( ~ Ying-hsueh Hu )