Human society is sailing into unchartered water as the Western-centric world order is fading. The center of the gravity of the world economy is shifting toward Asia at accelerating pace. Long-held ideas such as democracy, liberalism, globalization, and liberal international order are all facing mounting challenges. Their primacy, legitimacy and viability can no longer be taken for granted. The prevailing norms, institutions, and mechanisms of governance have been overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and depth of the looming crisis of social and ecological unsustainability. Science and technology have made great strides to improve wellbeing of mankind, but they pale in meeting the challenges of social disorder that technological advances brought about. The two largest economies in the world, the US and China, are at loggerheads with each other over trade and many other issues, casting a long shadow on the global political economy. More recently, the pandemic COVID-19 has thrown the world into the deepest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression. Against this backdrop of multi-dimensional uncertainty, the traditional theories in social sciences and humanities characterized by disciplinary autarky are clearly insufficient to address the burning issues and transformational trends.
It is thus an opportune time to introduce a new educational paradigm where teaching history, economy, management, politics, international relations, technology and ecology are interwoven into a comprehensive and synthetic web of knowledge for tackling real issues facing us today with a long time horizon. This paradigm shall be accompanied by a research platform that invites and encourages contending theories from East and West to debate as the traditional wisdom has been cast into doubt and new ideas need to flourish. It behooves us as social scientists and humanities scholars to respond proactively and creatively to the intellectual challenges arising from such an era.
Inspired by the founding of London School of Economics and Political Science more than a century ago, the TSE Foundation joined forces with National Tsinghua University to establish the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science (TSE) in which new intellectual ideas and potent analytical tools will be developed, and talented young scholars and professionals incubated to tackle the challenges of the 21st century.
http://www.tse.nthu.edu.tw/page/tse
The Taipei School of Economics and Political Science Brochure
