East Asia Workshop: Politics, Economy and Society

Jan 25 Workshop

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Workshop on East Asia:
Politics, Economy and Society Presents

“Embeddedness and Autonomy: Community University Movement in Taiwan since 1997”

Chengpang Lee
Doctoral Student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
4:30-5:50pm, Tuesday
January 25, 2011
Pick Lounge
5828 South University Ave.

Workshop website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/eastasia/
Student coordinator: Jean Lin (jeanlin@uchicago.edu)
Faculty sponsors: Dali Yang and Dingxin Zhao
The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with disabilities who believe they may need assistance, please contact the student coordinator in advance.

Abstract:
Scholars interested in East Asian countries share a belief that the successful economic achievement is associated with government’s educational investment. In the late half of the twentieth century we witness an expansion of global higher education. A vivid case is the growth of college student enrollments. For example, during the 1990s period, the number of colleges in Taiwan has risen from under 50 to around 150 given the birth rate keeps shrinking. However, fewer works have been done on issues of the dark side brought by this state-directed, technology- based and western- oriented higher education expansion. My topic is hence focused on one- case of the resistance to this dark side- Community University Movement. The initiator and leader of this movement is a prominent professor in the Mathematics department of National
Taiwan University- Huang Wu-Hsiung who is also the leader of the first educational reformation strike in 1994. The initial goal of this Community University Movement is to fix the fragmented and one-dimensional knowledge brought by the modern higher education and bring the full knowledge to common people. Besides this pedagogical goal, the movement also wants to create an ideal civil-society where citizens can communicate thoughts in a civilian and reciprocal way. In my
presentation, a brief history of this movement will be discussed and a sociological explanation to the emergence of this movement will be given.

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