TKU authorities have decided to cancel the 2003 commencement ceremony and campus tour after accepting the advice of the Ministry of Education (MOE). It will be for the first time in the past 52 years that no graduation song will accompany the graduates when they are departing the school since Tamkang University (TKU) was founded in 1950.

Instead, a diploma and award presentation ceremony will be held at the University Commons on June 6.

Because SARS has not yet been controlled, school authorities though convened the first coordination meeting for the commencement ceremony scheduled to be held on June 7, Vice President for Administrative Affairs Dr. Flora C.I. Chang convened the unprecedented second coordination meeting at which participants proposed to move the site of commencement ceremony from Student Activity Center to outdoors and discussed whether the number of participants be limited, student’s parents be invited and how to measure participants’ temperature and implement mask enforcement. During the meeting, school authorities suddenly received an instruction from MOE, advising to cancel the commencement ceremony.

TKU President Chang Horng-jinh gave the instruction immediately to hold a graduate’s representative diploma and award presentation ceremony at the University Commons on June 6 instead. Participants will be deans, chairs of departments and institutes, and consultants of graduate classes. Graduates of Doctoral Program will receive the diploma in person while graduates of Master Program and undergraduate should assign representatives from each College to receive the diploma. As for award presentation, Chairperson of Board of Trustees Citation, the Academic Achievement Award, the Behavior Citation, the Physical Education Citation and the Service Citation will be received in person. School authorities will televise live all the processing and post it to the home page of TKU website for those who are unable to take part in the ceremony to download. Although the commencement ceremony has been cancelled, school authorities would try its best to maintain the cheerful atmosphere of graduation. A rehearsal will be held on June 5 at the University Commons. The Personnel Office (PO) has also agreed that the administrative personnel should be off duty on June 7.