There are many different ways for college graduates to celebrate their graduation day, but there is probably no better way to celebrate the occasion by expressing the patriotism of the young mind.
Hundreds of graduates of I-Shou University in Kaohsiung carried, wore, bore and held up the national flag in various sizes or put flag stickers on their foreheads at their graduation ceremony on Saturday. The move came after students learned that the school authorities allegedly removed the flags installed at the auditorium in a bid to avoid embarrassing presidents of the university’s sister schools in China, who were in Taiwan to participate in a forum scheduled on the eve of the ceremony.
Some students slammed the school over the “ridiculousness” of “not being able to show our national flag in our own nation,” while others said they felt “deeply insulted” by the removal of the flags.
I-Shou University president Fu Shen-li (傅勝利) said the flags had been removed because the auditorium was redesigned when the school hosted the 53rd Asia Pacific Film Festival in December last year. However, this did not explain why the school never reinstalled the flags after the festival and what the rationale was behind the new design without the flags.
The fact that the incident took place in the university that has the most Chinese exchange students among universities in Taiwan is significant.
While the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government is preoccupied with attempts to push through amendments to the Act Governing Relations Between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the University Act (大學法) and the Vocational School Act (專科學校法) to allow Chinese students to enroll in Taiwanese schools and to give recognition to Chinese diplomas, I-Shou’s students are showing the school and the administration how disturbing the proposed policy is and how dissatisfied they are at the school’s and the government’s China-leaning policy.
Their voices were loud and clear, but did the government hear it?
Ho Cho-fei (何卓飛), the director of the Ministry of Education’s Department of Higher Education, told the I-Shou forum on Friday that the bills are expected to clear the legislative floor in an extra session to be held sometime between early next month and early August.
The ministry and the KMT may have to think twice now before taking advantage of the party’s legislative majority to force through the bills during the extra session.
Legislators have other bills that should be given higher priority if they were to hold an extra session, including a geology bill that would restrict development in sensitive areas or areas vulnerable to disasters, an amendment to the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act (災害防救法) and bills related to land preservation and disaster relief — bills that could help save lives in the next typhoon season and many years to come.
Lawmakers passed significantly fewer proposals — a total of 76 — in the spring session compared with the number of proposals that cleared the floor in the previous four sessions of the current legislature. Their best record was 134 proposals in the spring session last year.
It is time for our lawmakers to wake up and get down to real business.
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