President Ma Ying-jeou met with University of California, Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Mrs. Birgeneau at the Presidential Office on the morning of September 24. President Ma extended a warm welcome to Chancellor Birgeneau and thanked him for leading a delegation to sign a memorandum on the cultivation of talent and academic cooperation with Taiwan's top universities.
President Ma stated that UC Berkeley has turned out many outstanding alumni over the years. In particular, 60 Nobel laureates and 20 recipients of the American National Academy of Sciences Award were trained or carried out research at the university. Distinguished graduates include Chinese-American physicist Dr. Wu Chien-Shiung, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Dr. Yuan-Tseh Lee, US Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu, Academia Sinica Fellow Dr. Lawrence J. Lau, former Taiwan Provincial Governor James C. Y. Soong, newly appointed Academia Sinica Fellow Teresa H. Meng, National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Building and Planning Professor Hsia Chu-joe, and renowned writer Yang Mu.
President Ma commented that the ROC Ministry of Education began to engage in cooperation with California's Department of Education in 2005. The projects include bringing foreign English-teachers to Taiwan, introducing Chinese language teachers to the California school system, and administering student exchange programs. In addition, from 1966 to the present, universities and colleges from Taiwan have entered into 153 academic cooperation agreements or projects with renowned universities in California. UC Berkeley, for example, has signed 11 such agreements with nine universities in Taiwan. These efforts are conducive to enhancing Taiwan's academic research and quality of education, and afford Taiwan's universities opportunities to vault into the ranks of the world's leading universities, just like UC Berkeley, the president said.
Taiwan's top universities recently formed an alliance to work toward becoming world-leading institutions, the president explained, and toward that end they wish to establish strategic alliances with schools such as UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The academic exchanges initiated under such alliances would provide for five exchange students from each school each year, along with visits to UC Berkeley by post-doctoral research students and visiting scholoars to engage in further study and research. The president said he is confident that this would be extremely beneficial to both sides.
Chancellor Birgeneau and Mrs. Birgeneau were accompanied to the Presidential Office in the morning by Deputy Minister of Education Lin Tsong-Ming to meet President Ma. Also attending the meeting was National Security Council Deputy Secretary-General Chih-kung Liu.