National Taiwan University (NTU) on Friday night rejected allegations that university president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) plagiarized a student’s master’s thesis on the grounds that Kuan’s conference paper was not a “formal publication.”
A conference paper published last year coauthored by Kuan and National Chi Nan University professor Chen Chien-liang (陳建良) entitled An Empirical Study of the Effect of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement on Exports contains 15 uncited sentences and charts that are highly similar to those in a master’s thesis published in 2016 by one of Chen’s students, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chang Liao Wan-chien (張廖萬堅) told a news conference on Thursday.
The university said in a statement on Friday that Kuan did not violate its code of academic conduct, because the conference paper was not a “completed and formal publication that must conform to the specific academic style of its discipline.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
After consulting with the Academia Sinica Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, which co-organized the conference with the NTU Department of Economics, the university’s ethics committee concluded that the conference was an “informal conference [for academics to] share their research and receive feedback,” the university said.
Conference papers were not peer-reviewed and were only published in the conference proceedings, the university said.
The proceedings were designed to facilitate discussion among participants and do not have an international standard book number, NTU said, adding that conference papers are not available in major libraries and have not been formally distributed.
The university also said in the statement that Kuan had obtained its approval to serve as an independent director of Taiwan Mobile Co（台灣大哥大) on May 17 last year.
Wang Li-sheng (王立昇), an NTU professor and ethics committee member, said Academia Sinica had told the university that the conference proceedings were “a collection of working papers.”
However, the conference’s call for papers clearly required participants to submit their “full paper” by April 4 last year, and Kuan’s paper appears to be complete and does not contain any notes stating that it is a work in progress.
Several academics yesterday accused NTU of failing to properly investigate the accusations of plagiarism.
“There is no such a thing as an informal research paper,” NTU Department of Agronomy professor Warren Kuo (郭華仁) said, adding that the ethics committee members are unqualified for their job.
NTU Graduate Institute of National Development professor Liu Ching-yi (劉靜怡) questioned Academia Sinica’s role in supporting the university’s claim that papers presented at the conference were informal.
“Why is Academia Sinica diminishing the value of its own conference?” she asked, adding that maybe the institution should tell famous academics planning to attend Academia Sinica conferences that there is no need to go, because their papers would not be treated as “formal papers.”
Academics should take responsibility for any works they publish and where they publish is irrelevant when determining what constitutes plagiarism, National Taiwan Normal University Department of English professor Huang Han-yu (黃涵榆) said, adding that academics could even be charged with fraud if they received research subsidies for a paper they plagiarized.
Kuan’s supporters at NTU late on Friday set up a Web page demanding that Ministry of Education respect the university’s autonomy.
At press time last night, the page had collected more than 1,000 signatures from supporters, including former NTU presidents Sun Chen (孫震) and Lee Si-chen (李嗣涔).
FALSE DOCUMENTS? Actor William Liao said he was ‘voluntarily cooperating’ with police after a suspect was accused of helping to produce false medical certificates Police yesterday questioned at least six entertainers amid allegations of evasion of compulsory military service, with Lee Chuan (李銓), a member of boy band Choc7 (超克7), and actor Daniel Chen (陳大天) among those summoned. The New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office in January launched an investigation into a group that was allegedly helping men dodge compulsory military service using falsified medical documents. Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) has been accused of being one of the group’s clients. As the investigation expanded, investigators at New Taipei City’s Yonghe Precinct said that other entertainers commissioned the group to obtain false documents. The main suspect, a man surnamed
The government is considering polices to increase rental subsidies for people living in social housing who get married and have children, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. During an interview with the Plain Law Movement (法律白話文) podcast, Cho said that housing prices cannot be brought down overnight without affecting banks and mortgages. Therefore, the government is focusing on providing more aid for young people by taking 3 to 5 percent of urban renewal projects and zone expropriations and using that land for social housing, he said. Single people living in social housing who get married and become parents could obtain 50 percent more
DEMOGRAPHICS: Robotics is the most promising answer to looming labor woes, the long-term care system and national contingency response, an official said Taiwan is to launch a five-year plan to boost the robotics industry in a bid to address labor shortages stemming from a declining and aging population, the Executive Yuan said yesterday. The government approved the initiative, dubbed the Smart Robotics Industry Promotion Plan, via executive order, senior officials told a post-Cabinet meeting news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s population decline would strain the economy and the nation’s ability to care for vulnerable and elderly people, said Peter Hong (洪樂文), who heads the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Department of Engineering and Technologies. Projections show that the proportion of Taiwanese 65 or older would
Democracies must remain united in the face of a shifting geopolitical landscape, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Tuesday, while emphasizing the importance of Taiwan’s security to the world. “Taiwan’s security is essential to regional stability and to defending democratic values amid mounting authoritarianism,” Tsai said at the annual forum in the Danish capital. Noting a “new geopolitical landscape” in which global trade and security face “uncertainty and unpredictability,” Tsai said that democracies must remain united and be more committed to building up resilience together in the face of challenges. Resilience “allows us to absorb shocks, adapt under
RSS