Taiwan's Community Universities: Turning Classrooms into Public Squares

30-Second Overview: In 1994, Huang Wu-hsiung proposed the concept of community universities; in 1998, Wenshan Community University opened its doors at Muzha Junior High School; in 2018, the Community University Development Act granted this grassroots educational experiment a legal status. ^{1 2}

It is not about moving traditional universities into communities, but rather turning local history, rural life, rivers, old houses, and care issues into materials that residents can jointly research, discuss, and act upon. This article reveals how community universities, by borrowing school buildings and local public spaces, continuously balance lifelong learning, publicness, government resources, and institutional autonomy. ^{3 4}

In 1994, Huang Wu-hsiung, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at National Taiwan University, proposed the concept of community universities. Four years later, Taiwan’s first community university opened in the Wenshan District of Taipei. ¹ On September 28, 1998, the first semester of Wenshan Community University began, adding a new, somewhat unconventional entry point to adult education in Taiwan. ⁵

On June 13, 2018, the Community University Development Act was promulgated, granting community universities an independent legal status. ² These three years form a seemingly linear history of progress. Yet the most interesting aspect lies precisely in the fact that it was never about moving universities into communities, but rather attempting to turn "learning" into a tool for addressing local public issues.

The First Class at Fuhe Junior High

Imagine that opening day: not a university town, no ivory tower. Wenshan Community University’s classrooms were borrowed from Muzha Junior High School; students did not need to present academic credentials first, and lecturers did not simply bring in a set of standard answers. The emergence of the first community university stemmed from the preparations of grassroots educational reformers, not a central government plan. ⁶

This starting point is crucial. It indicates that what community universities sought to address from the beginning was not just "what adults learn after work," but who has the right to access knowledge, who can discuss the places where they live, and whether people can continue to participate in social reconstruction after democratization. Huang Wu-hsiung later described the initial two goals as "liberating knowledge" and "fostering a civil society." ³

Curator’s Note: The most counter-intuitive aspect of community universities is that they conceive of schools as spaces for practicing communal living, rather than merely service stations for acquiring skills.

In early 1999, five community universities in Taipei County were simultaneously organized. On September 20 of the same year, Yonghe Community University held its founding ceremony at Fuhe Junior High School. ⁶ Yonghe Community University’s courses had no departments, nor distinctions between required and elective courses; instead, they placed academics, club activities, and life skills within the same learning field. ⁶

This arrangement may appear loose, but it actually rests on a clear vision. Studying local history, learning plumbing, and discussing ecology are not three unrelated interests. They all ask the same question: How can an individual regain the ability to understand and change their life?

From "Attending Class" to "Doing Things"

If one looks only at course names, community universities can easily be mistaken for cheaper hobby classes. However, in a 1999 interview, Huang Wu-hsiung clearly distinguished the two: his concern was not the disappearance of community universities, but their loss of original publicness after becoming widespread. ⁷

This concern was not an abstract ideological debate. Early community universities faced unstable venues, insufficient funding, and weak social support. Teams outside Wenshan often had to recruit students, raise funds, and explain to local governments whether they were schools, clubs, or social movements. ⁸

A sharper dilemma was that community universities had to rely on public resources to maintain low tuition fees, yet could not simply become outsourcing units for the government. Huang Wu-hsiung once criticized how using the lowest bid to determine hosting teams might cause "reverse selection," replacing community universities with genuine educational capacity with cheaper providers. ⁸

Curator’s Note: If a school is to teach people independent judgment, it itself must not merely learn to comply with evaluation forms.

The most recognizable classrooms of community universities often lie outside the classroom. In Kaohsiung, Qimei Community University treats rural areas as schools, ranging from environmental education and rural workshops to community reconstruction after the Morakot typhoon; learning and local restoration are placed on the same table. ⁴

Fengshan Community University discusses local governance starting from the Cao Gong Canal and surrounding hydrology; Gangshan Community University incorporates new immigrant women, elderly learning, Qiaotou Sugar Factory, and the Agongdian Creek into its curriculum. ⁴ These cases are not mere decorations for "extracurricular activities," but rather transforming local experience into knowledge that can be jointly researched, discussed, and acted upon.

The law later acknowledged this. Article 3 of the Community University Development Act defines community universities as lifelong learning institutions outside the formal education system, with tasks including participation in public affairs, local culture, local knowledge studies, and community sustainability. Enrollment must not be restricted by academic credentials or nationality. ²

What the Law Guarantees, and What It Does Not

In 2017, the Executive Yuan stated that there were already 86 community universities nationwide, with 400,000 student-persons. In 2018, when the Ministry of Education announced the special law, it used 87 community universities nationwide as the benchmark for scale after institutionalization. ⁵ The difference in numbers may stem from different statistical times, but they jointly point to one thing: community universities have evolved from a grassroots experiment in Wenshan into an important network for adult learning across Taiwan.

The special law requires local governments to assist in providing stable venues, allocating broad budgets, and establishing systems through evaluations, learning certificates, and review committees. In the review committee, members with practical experience in community universities must not be less than one-third. ² These regulations transform what was previously sustained by individual passion into responsibilities that the government must face.

But law is not magic. In 2024, the National Federation of Community Universities noted in its review of legalization that although the special law was passed, local governments still varied in contracting, venues, evaluation, and the implementation of publicness. Community universities might also gradually become hobby-class-like under financial pressure, or be led by administrative demands. ⁹

This is the second layer of contradiction for community universities: they need institutional guarantees, but cannot let institutions flatten them. Without venues and funding, publicness is just a slogan. With only venues and funding, community universities might become another type of administrative service counter.

Curator’s Note: What community universities truly need to guard is not the word "informal," but whether learners can produce judgment, relationships, and action regarding their own localities.

A Taiwanese Study Without School Gates

When discussing community universities, Huang Wu-hsiung often made "knowledge liberation" concrete: it is not merely changing professional terminology into vernacular language, but allowing learners to start from their own experiences, connecting a "point" that suddenly strikes them into a "line," and then expanding it into a "plane" that can understand the world. ⁸

This explanation also clarifies why community universities value local studies. Rural courses in Kaohsiung, ecological dual-harvest in Yonghe, river patrols and cultural preservation everywhere, all transform experiences that residents originally considered "just daily routine" into local knowledge that can be recorded, discussed, and shared. ^{6 8}

Taiwan Panorama’s English report describes community universities as cultural nodes and fields for civic action, illustrating how they exceed the boundaries of traditional educational institutions through old tree surveys, local research, and community service. ¹⁰ This observation reminds us: community universities are important not because of how many courses they have, but because they bring the question of "who can produce knowledge" back to the community.

Therefore, community universities can also be seen as a form of Taiwanese study without school gates. They may not issue traditional degrees, nor necessarily have fixed school buildings. But they turn local irrigation canals, farmlands, old houses, ethnic memories, and public controversies into objects that a society can jointly learn from.

After More Than Twenty Years

Community universities have grown from one to dozens, from having no legal basis to having a special law. This history is easily written as a success story. But Huang Wu-hsiung warned as early as 1999 that the hardest part of community universities is not offering a popular course, but not reducing "civil society" to a beautiful enrollment slogan. ⁷

The problems they face today have also changed. Aging, low birth rates, learning resources in remote areas, extreme climate, local revitalization, and immigrant societies all require community universities to do more than provide courses; they must reimagine how learning connects with the future of localities. The Executive Yuan once viewed community universities as part of a lifelong learning system. Frontline workers continue to ask whether this system can preserve the grassroots nature of community universities. ^{5 9}

The answer will not be given by a single law alone. It may appear on an afternoon when a learner walks out of the classroom to conduct a river survey, or on an evening when a group of residents begins to argue over an irrigation canal, a piece of farmland, or an old house. The value of community universities lies not in turning everyone into experts, but in giving more people the opportunity to no longer be merely objects of governance.

Curator’s Note: What the first community university in Wenshan truly left behind is not a model of school buildings, but a question—Can we learn together how to treat our own localities as our own affairs?

The most memorable image of Taiwan’s community universities may not be the teacher on the podium, but a borrowed classroom at Fuhe Junior High: someone enters carrying the fatigue after work, someone leaves carrying questions about the locality. Twenty-something years later, institutions can preserve its position, but only continuous public participation can prevent that position from becoming hollow.

A School Without Fixed School Gates

Caption: A view of the campus of Taichung Municipal Shuang-Shih Junior High School. This is not a historical photo of Wenshan Community University, but visual material used to understand how community universities often borrow junior high school buildings and hold classes in existing public spaces; the original file was photographed by kenming_wang and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. ¹¹

Community universities often borrow junior high schools, elementary schools, or other public buildings for classes. This spatial arrangement allows learning to be close to residents on one hand, and also reminds people on the other: community universities are not an independent building, but a method of organizing办学 (educational operation) that recombines originally dispersed public resources. Whether venues are stable thus becomes a question of learning rights rather than an administrative detail. ^{2 9}

The function of this campus photo is not to supplement a imagined photo for the historical scene, but to preserve the gap between the two. The first classroom of Taiwan’s community universities was indeed at Muzha Junior High School, but there is no reliable free-copyright photo that can directly claim to be the 1998 opening scene of Wenshan Community University. Therefore, only campus images with verifiable licenses and clearly marked shooting locations are used here.

Curator’s Note: Free-copyright images are not decorations. They must clearly state "what is photographed," "what is not," "who photographed it," and "which license is adopted"; otherwise, images will unconsciously disguise speculation as historical material.

Public Knowledge Also Appears on Bulletin Boards

Caption: Public bulletin boards in the urban settlement of West Central District, Tainan. This is not a community university course announcement, but an example of how local public information enters daily life; the original file is marked CC BY-SA 2.0, and the image page provides author and reuse conditions. ¹²

The "publicness" of community universities is sometimes not as conspicuous as a large-scale forum. It may first appear on a bulletin board, a local survey, a community walk, or a record of a group agreeing to meet next week. These things themselves may not be institutions, but they give local residents the opportunity to know what each other is caring about.

From the perspective of "experiential knowledge" mentioned by Huang Wu-hsiung, the significance of bulletin boards lies not in how much information they provide, but in placing information in a position where a person can stop to read, compare, and respond. ³ When residents begin to write down their own observations, public issues have the opportunity to transform from private feelings into materials that can be jointly handled.

Curator’s Note: Images should not draw conclusions for the article; they should bring readers to a scene where they can continue to ask questions. Campus illustrations explain space, bulletin boards explain how information is seen; both are merely entrances, not substitutes for evidence.

An Easily Ignored Criterion

Judging whether a community university is still a community university cannot rely solely on how many courses it offers, nor solely on enrollment numbers. More worth looking at is whether learners can bring knowledge from the classroom back to the locality, and encounter others' experiences there.

For example, a course about rivers, if it stops at water quality terminology, is not much different from a general lecture. But if learners begin to know which streams flow through their living circles, who is responsible for management, and how pollution is seen, the classroom has already stepped out of the classroom.

This stepping out does not mean every course must become a protest, nor that all learners must join the same organization. It is more like a change in scale: people no longer treat local problems as others' news, but begin to know they can ask questions, research data, find people to discuss, and even propose different approaches. ⁸

Similarly, life skills courses need not be excluded from publicness. Data from Kaohsiung community universities shows that courses in woodworking, brewing, natural farming, old house reuse, and local stories may all connect from daily skills to issues of environment, industry, or memory. ⁴ The key is not whether the course name has depth, but whether the course leaves space for learners to connect with each other.

This is also the most different aspect between community universities and general marketized learning services. The market asks whether a course can quickly fill its class. Community universities also ask whether this course gives the locality a bit more ability to understand each other. The former can be answered by enrollment numbers; the latter requires time to be seen.

Why It Is Still Needed Today

Taiwan’s public problems often do not lack experts, but rather lack a common language among experts, government, and residents. Community universities cannot replace research institutions or local governments, but can provide a common starting point that does not require formal identity first, nor mastery of professional terminology first. ²

This starting point is particularly important for the elderly, immigrants, laborers, caregivers, and those who have left formal education for a long time. Regulations not restricting enrollment by academic credentials is not merely administrative leniency. It pulls the question of "who is qualified to learn" back from academic thresholds to public life itself. ²

Of course, openness does not equal automatic equality. Venue distance, class times, tuition fees, language, and care responsibilities still determine who can more easily enter community universities. Therefore, the responsibility of local governments to provide venues and funding cannot be seen merely as subsidies for educational teams, but as basic investment in learning rights. ²

The next step for community universities should not merely be moving courses online or adding a few more popular topics. More importantly, it is whether new generations can bring climate, care, immigration, local industries, and housing issues into the learning scene, allowing community universities to once again become the place where contemporary social movements and local knowledge meet. ⁹

It does not need to propose grand answers every time. Enabling a person to move from "this is not my business" to "I want to know how this works" is already a concrete advancement in a democratic society.

Further Reading

• National Federation of Community Universities
• Ministry of Education, Department of Lifelong Education
• Taiwan Panorama: The Rise of “New Taiwan Studies”

References