ROBERT YIEN: MING CHUAN UNIVERSITY

          Ming Chuan University in Taipei, Taiwan, founded in 1957 as a private women’s business college, is now a comprehensive university with 20,000 students across four campuses. Thanks to Robert Yien, MA ’68, PhD ’70, a longtime vice president of academic affairs at Saginaw Valley State University, MCU became first university in Asia to be accredited by the U.S. and will soon open a branch campus in Saginaw.

       “Everyone around the world envies the American university system,” says Yien.  “So who would have the audacity to come to the U.S. to establish a university?” Robert says the challenge to do so was too hard to resist, so he is postponing his retirement to do so—on the heels of earning U.S. accreditation for MCU. 

“It’s the vision of (MCU) President Lee Chuan,” says Robert, who is currently the executive director of MCU-Saginaw.  A native of Taiwan, Robert came to MSU in 1965 when he earned a graduate assistantship. He then spent more than three decades in SVSU as a professor and mostly as its vice president for academic affairs, helping build an engineering program from scratch. 

In 1989 he co-founded the Japanese Center for Michigan Universities.  He retired in 2006 to take on the challenge of earning U.S. accreditation for MCU, which finally came in 2010.  “It was like moving a mountain,” he recalls.  “Fortunately President Lee Chuan was committed to the goal.  We turned that university upside down.”  Robert says he loved his stay at MSU.  “I couldn’t go to the 1966 Rose Bowl so I vowed to go to the next one,” he says.  “I waited and waited. 

Finally, in 1988, I took my family.”  He was in Taiwan for the latest Rose Bowl, which he watched on television.  After MSU beat Stanford, he and his wife Amy decided to resume their support for MSU and joined the Presidents Club.  He plans on opening MCU-Saginaw this summer—yet another of many “firsts” in his career in education.