By Genevieve Balance Kupang, WURI Historian
National Chi Nan University (NCNU), host institution of the 6th Hanseatic League of Universities (HLU) Annual Conference and the 2026 World’s Universities with Real Impact (WURI) Global Rankings Ceremony, occupies a position of singular geographic and institutional distinction. Established in 1995 in Puli Township, Nantou County, at the geographical center of Taiwan, NCNU was founded with the mission of cultivating internationally mobile, well-rounded graduates rooted in the humanities, management, technology, and education. Its campus is no mere administrative setting: sheltered by the Central Mountain Range, Hehuan Mountain, and the Xueshan Mountain Range, 88% of its 150-hectare grounds are covered by rolling grassland and surrounded by more than 12,000 trees of 113 species, its elevation reaching up to 700 meters above sea level. It is a landscape that any visitor from Baguio City will recognize as kindred highland terrain. It is an invitation, before the first session begins, to think differently about what a university can be and where it can stand. Puli Township itself, often called “the heart of Taiwan,” blends traditional charm with modern creativity, offering the global visitor a unique glimpse into local life, spiritual depth, and the particular grace of a community that has learned to hold the ancient and the contemporary in generous coexistence (National Chi Nan University, 2025; Taiwan Overseas Education, 2026).
NCNU’s institutional standing on the global stage has risen with commensurate velocity. In the 2025 World’s University Rankings for Innovation, NCNU entered the global top 100 for the first time, placing 99th overall, a substantial leap from its 118th position the prior year, in a competitive cycle that saw 87 countries and 1,253 universities submit a total of 4,866 innovation cases (NCNU, 2025). Its distinction was recognized across three WURI subcategories: 3rd globally in Funding for Sustainability, 3rd in Infrastructure and Technology, and 20th in University Branding and Reputation. In the domain of environmental governance, NCNU holds a place among the top 44 Green Universities worldwide in the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings, the world’s first and widely recognized university sustainability ranking system. NCNU served as host of the 2025 UI GreenMetric Rankings Announcement Conference, the first time this global convening came to Taiwan. The university also holds a QS Asia ranking of 595. Taken together, these metrics describe a rising institution; they depict a university whose philosophy of education is increasingly aligned with what the global community most urgently needs. That alignment is precisely why Puli, in May 2026, is where the world’s most innovative universities will gather.
It is against this backdrop of accelerating recognition that NCNU has secured the hosting rights for the 2026 6th HLU Annual Conference and WURI Ranking Ceremony. From May 6 to 8, 2026, over 200 university principals, international relations officers, deans, higher education scholars, and institutional leaders from more than 30 countries will convene in Puli to shape the future of innovative universities. It will be in a mountain-cradled campus that is itself a living argument for what higher education rooted in place, sustainability, and genuine community can become. NCNU President Dr. Dong-Sing Wuu has additionally been appointed the 2026–2027 rotating chair of the Hanseatic League of Universities, a further testament to the university’s emergence as a beacon of resilient, innovative, and globally engaged higher education in Asia. After presiding over the 2026 conference in Puli, he will formally assume the chairmanship and travel to Cairo in 2027 to hand the leadership to Badr University in Egypt, a succession that reflects the genuinely global and horizontal nature of the HLU network (NCNU, 2025).
National Chi Nan University President Dr. Dong-Sing Wuu extends a warm welcome to distinguished leaders and scholars from around the world who will gather for the 6th HLU Annual Conference and WURI Global Rankings Ceremony in Puli Township, Nantou, Taiwan. Photo credit: NCNU.
For those of us who have traveled with this movement across its defining years, this gathering in Puli is more than a conference. It is a reunion among professionals, kindred creatives, and colleagues who share one conviction: that universities exist to innovate, create impact, and transform communities. The WURI network has, over the years, become a community of practice in the deepest sense of that term. It is a space where the formal and the relational, the data-driven and the deeply human, are held together without apology. This gathering in the highlands of Taiwan is, in the truest sense, a homecoming of ideas.
The World’s Universities with Real Impact (WURI) was founded on a conviction that has grown more urgent with time. The traditional measures of academic excellence: research citations, faculty-to-student ratios, and endowment sizes, tell only part of the story of what a university truly does for the world. WURI asks a different set of questions: Does this institution respond to crisis with creativity? Does it build bridges between knowledge and community? Does it take risks in the name of education that matters? These are the questions that have shaped the WURI rankings since their inception, and they are the questions that will define the 2026 ceremony in Taiwan.
From the Visayan Sea to the Heart of Taiwan: A Gathering in Motion
The standard for this year’s gathering was set, in no small measure, by those who came before. The 5th HLU Annual Conference, convened in Dumaguete City and the island of Siquijor, and co-hosted by Negros Oriental State University, Saint Paul University Dumaguete, Silliman University, and Siquijor State College, established a compelling precedent for what this gathering is capable of becoming. The Visayan hosts organized a memorable conference and curated an experience. It was one in which substantive intellectual exchange was held in generous tension with rich cultural immersion and the distinctive warmth of island hospitality. Delegates returned with meaningful memories, ideas and with a felt sense of place, of welcome, and of the kind of belonging that only the best academic communities know how to offer. It was a gathering that reminded every attendee that the geography of a conference is never incidental. It was where we meet that shapes what we are willing to think and say together. NCNU inherits that legacy with a campus equally endowed with natural beauty, cultural depth, and the institutional resolve to host with distinction.
A plenary session of the 5th HLU Annual Conference at Silliman University, Dumaguete City, Philippines, 2025, where four Visayan institutions co-hosted a gathering that raised the bar for what intellectual community, cultural generosity, and academic hospitality can look like in the HLU network.
The 5th HLU Annual Conference, Visayas, Philippines, 2025. Where one shore ends, another begins; the Visayan Islands passed the torch to the highland heart of Puli, and the HLU journey continues.
The HLU Journey Continues: Towards Another Milestone.
The conference program reflects the full complexity of what universities face in 2026. Twelve parallel session topics are organized under four thematic pillars: 1) the Future Transformation of Universities in the AI Era, 2) Global Engagement and Talent Development, 3) Sustainable and Resilient Universities, and 4) Innovation Ecosystems and Entrepreneurial Universities. From artificial intelligence and digital governance to net-zero transitions, from transnational education to university-driven startup cultures, the sessions map the terrain of a higher education landscape that is being remade in real time.
WUNI-L President Dr. Robert Frederick Hayden Jr. presides over the March 25, 2026 online meeting with fellow officers and members, discussing the upcoming 6th HLU Annual Conference and how WUNI-Leaders can take an active part in the event.
These themes live in the real world. They are the daily realities of universities in Baguio, in Busan, in Berlin, in Beirut, in Cairo, in Dhaka, in São Paulo, in Seoul, and in Manila. They are the questions being wrestled with in faculty meetings, boardrooms, and graduate seminars from one continent to the next. The 6th HLU conference gives those struggles a shared language and a global audience.
Beyond the parallel sessions, the event will feature the WURI Global Ranking Announcement covering the Top 500 and Category Rankings, University Presidents Networking Sessions, an MOU Signing Ceremony, sessions for Certified WURI Mentors, and gatherings of the World University Network for Innovation Leaders, the WUNI experts who continue to grow in membership, ambition, and collective resolve.
As WURI Historian, I have had the privilege of witnessing this movement across its most defining chapters. From the early years of building a ranking system that dared to measure what traditional rankings ignored, through the milestone conferences in Lugano, Seoul, and Busan, to this present moment in Taiwan, the journey has been one of growing courage and deepening conviction. Each year, the WURI community does not simply announce rankings. It renews a commitment. It asks every participating university to look honestly at what it has built, what it has risked, and what it has changed. That commitment spans excellence, the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, innovations that solve real-world problems, peace building and collaboration, good governance, the celebration of culture and the arts, sustainable enterprise, and the entrepreneurial spirit that turns classrooms into launchpads for change.
The 2026 WURI rankings, to be announced at NCNU on May 7, will recognize universities that submitted innovative cases across all categories. The anticipation across the global network is real. But beyond the rankings themselves, what matters most is the conversation they make possible. It is the moment when a university president, a vice president, a dean, or an international relations officer from Korea, Turkey, Romania, or the Philippines sits beside a rector from the United States or Germany, or a chancellor from India or Indonesia, and recognizes that they are all trying to answer the same question: how do we build institutions that genuinely serve humanity?
That question has no final answer. But the asking of it, together, in a mountain town in Taiwan, surrounded by the work of hundreds of universities from dozens of countries, that is in itself, a form of hope.
The WURI Ranking Announcement at the HLU Annual Conference will be held from May 6 to 8, 2026, at National Chi Nan University, Taiwan. Following this, the 3rd WURI Global Conference will be held in September 2026 at the Deggendorf Institute of Technology in Germany, Europe, and the 1st WURI International Research Conference will convene in November 2026 at Makati University in the Philippines, bringing the conversation home to Southeast Asia.
The mountains of Puli are waiting. The universities of the world are coming. And the future of innovative higher education, earned through hard work, shaped by wisdom, and full of possibility, will be written once again, together, by the HLU and WURI networks.
A consistent presence at the WURI Global Conference, National Chi Nan University is represented by Vice President Dr. Yung-Ping Emilio Tseng, who joins NCNU President Dr. Dong-Sing Wuu in welcoming the world to their campus as host of the 6th HLU Annual Conference and WURI Global Rankings Ceremony in 2026. Photo credit: NCNU.
Peace, force, and joy!
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About the Author:
Dr. Genevieve Balance Kupang is Dean of the Graduate School and International Relations Officer of Baguio Central University, Baguio City, Philippines. She also serves as WURI Historian, Secretary of the World University Network for Innovation Leaders (WUNI-L), and Board Director of the Cordillera Association of International Relations Officers (CAIRO).
A peace educator, applied cosmic anthropologist, and humanist activist, she is a co-author of a finalist book at the 43rd National Book Awards administered by the National Book Development Board of the Philippines, and a contributing writer for Pressenza International Press Agency.
