In 1981, NTU President Zhao-Zhong Yu proposed the idea that ideal education should be liberal and well-rounded, and the Group for General Education was therefore established. According to an NTU Affairs Meeting in 1992, the Planning Group for General Education was formed to plan the courses for general and liberal education while the Curriculum Planning Commission was established in 1994. The General Education Commission was founded the following year with the mandating of implementing the planned curriculum, and was reformed as the General Education Center. The General Education Curriculum Planning Commission, which belongs to the General Education Center, is still in charge of planning courses for general education. In April 1996, the Commission for General Education (CGE) was established to promote and administer general and liberal education and other related matters. In 2006, the Commission for General Education was again transformed as the Center for General Education, and became an independent academic organization instead of an administrative organization.
CGE has two subordinate units in charge of the University’s general education requirement: the General Education Division, and the Liberal Education Division. The former is responsible for university-wide general required education, including College Chinese and Freshman Foreign Languages; nowadays, the General Education Division is devoted to the core competencies courses to provide students with a solid foundation in academic and professional communications. The core competencies courses can be counted toward the general education requirement. NTU’s liberal education courses are mainly offered by the related departments; when courses are deemed necessary but cannot be offered by the related departments, the Liberal Education Division can play the role of recruiting instructors to offer them as supplementary courses embodying the quintessence of liberal education.
In addition to the Department of Athletics, the General Education Division, and the Liberal Education Division, since academic year 2014, the CGE has flourished with an expanded role: the Center for Teacher Education was re-subordinated to the Center for General Education from the Office of Academic Affairs; in the meantime, Master's Program in has officially commenced operation; Master's Program in Sport Facility Management and Health Promotion, Master Program in Globl Agricultural Technology & Genome Science, Master's Program in Biodiversity recruits its first cohort of students in academic year 2016, 2020, and 2021, respectively.
In the future, the CGE will continue to plan, coordinate and regularly review the general education requirements of the University so as to keep pace with the times, build up the students’ knowledge, transferable skills and build a general education model for the Chinese community.