YSU partnership with Taiwanese university renewed

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Youngstown State University has renewed a partnership with Lunghwa University in Taipei, Taiwan, that promises to create more opportunities for YSU faculty and students to teach and study abroad.

YSU’s Pollock House was the setting for a ceremony formalizing the agreement Wednesday. Lunghwa Vice President Rujen Lin and her assistant, Feihsin Huang, represented the private science and technology university; YSU President James Tressel, Provost Martin Abraham and Nathan R. Myers, who recently assumed the position of associate provost in the Center for International Studies and Programs, represented YSU.

Other guests included diplomat David Dong, acting director of the educational division of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago, and Florence Wang of Canfield, who has been instrumental in developing YSU’s relationship with Lunghwa University.

“An agreement like this is a win-win for everyone involved,” Myers said in a news release. “It helps to make our campus more diverse; it opens opportunities for our students and faculty to study and work overseas; and it enhances YSU’s global brand.”

YSU first signed a faculty and student exchange agreement with Lunghwa in 2006, and Myers said both schools hosted students in the years that followed. Several faculty members from both schools spent semesters as exchange professors, including YSU English faculty Linda Strom, Steven Brown and Barbara Nykiel-Herbert.

The agreement with Lunghwa had expired, before the recent signing, and the last two-way exchange of students and faculty was in 2013.

YSU has faculty and student exchange agreements with two other schools: the University of Jyv §skyl § in Finland and Yeditepe University in Turkey. The university expects to have close to 400 international students on campus in the fall, representing more than 50 countries, said Myers, and averages about 140 YSU students studying abroad each semester.