Brief History

Founded in 1950 as the Tamkang Junior College of English by Mr. Ching-Sheng Chang and his son Dr. Clement C. P. Chang, TKU was Taiwan’s first private college. It became the Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences in 1958, before being elevated to Tamkang University in 1980. From its humble beginnings as one of the first schools of higher education in Taiwan, TKU now has four campuses: the Tamsui Campus, the Taipei Campus, the Lanyang Campus, and the Cyber Campus; comprised of 9 colleges, with total about 23,000 students, around 2,000 faculty and staff members, and around 310,000 alumni.

Tamkang is a university of ideals, vision, and creativity. It sees the pursuit of excellence and ongoing innovation as characterizing sustaining its fundamental management philosophy. Over 70 years, since its foundation, TKU has focused on developing academic research, teaching, and learning services with an innovative spirit. It was the first university in Taiwan to employ Total Quality Management (TQM), which was introduced in 1992. In 2006, the Tamkang Quality Award was initiated to recognize outstanding departments committed to TQM. It has generated impressive results and garnered positive public feedback. TQM efforts were significant in helping TKU win the prestigious National Quality Award in 2009.

Since its inception as a university, Tamkang has had six scholar-educators serving as presidents: Clement C. P. Chang, Yea-Hong Chen, Louis R. Chow, Yun-Shan Lin, Horng-Jinh Chang, Flora Chia-I Chang, and the current president, Huan-Chao Keh, who assumed the presidency on August 1st, 2018. President Huan-Chao Keh will lead TKU to continue developing and constructing the “Fifth Wave of Tamkang,” enhance Tamkang Culture, refine and activate organization, strive for resources of industry, government and alumni and cooperate with the Ministry of Education’s Higher Education Sprout Project, the government’s "5+2" core industries and artificial intelligence industrial applications, as well as the New South-bound Policy. As the new course of development of the "Fifth Wave of Tamkang" was launched "The Transcending Period," taking the vision of the "Collaboratively Creation of a Great Tamsui; Embracing a Smart and Magnificent Future", Tamkang implements local links, regional cooperation, international chains and innovation practice.

Tamkang’s administrative teams have applied innovative strategies to promote the Three Circles and Five Disciplines of Education. The “Three Circles” refer to Tamkang’s professional curriculum, general curriculum, and extracurricular curriculum, while the “Five Disciplines of Education” include conduct, intelligence, physical education, teamwork, and beauty. TKU has nurtured academic growth through its “Triple Objectives of Education,” which refers to globalization (the spatial pattern of the future), information-oriented education (the life pattern of the future), and future-oriented education (the time frame of the future). With its motto of “Simplicity, Truthfulness, Firmness, and Perseverance,” Tamkang strives to fully develop students’ potential. It aims to help every Tamkangian establish a firm foothold at school and seeks to become a world-renowned, top quality comprehensive university by providing students with the most modern learning resources and training possible.