One sunny morning last week 200 young men and women in faded khaki and blue denim uniforms filed into a warehouse on a barren hill west of the Formosan city of Taichung. They were there to begin their college education. Standing before piles of shipping crates, President Beauson Tseng, 61, welcomed them to a unique educational enterprise: Tunghai University, the first Christian university in Formosa's history.
Permanent Element. The academic ideal which came to life in last week's simple ceremony dates back to the end of the Japanese occupation of Formosa. At that time Protestant leaders in Formosa began to press for a Christian college similar to the 13 Protestant colleges on the Chinese mainland, which were partially supported by church groups in the U.S. and England. By 1951 the mainland colleges had been sealed off by the Communists, and Formosan educational leaders, hoping to use some of the funds thus diverted, appealed to the body through which major Protestant support had been channeled: the United Board for Chris tian Colleges in China. In 1953 the Board agreed that "a Christian university should be a permanent element in Taiwan."
The city of Taichung contributed the 345-acre tract on which the university is located. Architect I. M. Pei of Manhattan's Webb & Knapp, himself a graduate of St. John's University in Shanghai, a mainland Christian college, drew up plans for three terraced college quadrangles and four dormitories of open design. The college's 35 faculty members include refugee mainlanders, Formosans and teachers from the U.S. President Tseng was given leave from his post as professor of English literature at Taiwan National Uni versity to take over at Tunghai.
Tunghai's first class was selected last summer on the basis of entrance exams that attracted 5,800 applicants. Some 55% of the students are Chinese from the mainland, the rest are Formosans. Men outnumber women 3 to 1. By 1958, at full enrollment, Tunghai hopes to level off at about 700-800 students, thus maintaining small classes and close student-teacher contact. Tunghai tuition, room and board is a stiff 1,400 Formosan dollars ($38) a semester, but the college has liberal scholarship provisions.
Radical Innovation. Tunghai will consciously avoid imitating the mainland colleges in its educational program. The political realities of modern Asia, President Tseng believes, demand an education that is both broader and more practical than that offered in the traditional Chinese university system. Tunghai students will get heavy doses of history, the classics, the social sciences. They will also be required to do some nonacademic labor (a radical innovation in the Orient, where intellectuals have traditionally regarded manual labor as degrading). Since Tunghai is located in rich farming land, the university may eventually establish a student farm that will supply its own needs, and perhaps sell to the community.
President Tseng believes that one of Tunghai's greatest strengths is its very experimental nature: having no precedent in Chinese education, it must learn as it goes along. Said he last week, looking across his growing campus—still only two dormitories and four classrooms set into the raw, red earth of the hillside: "Pioneering will be our watchword."