DPP lawmakers yesterday said the Ministry of Education was hiding its head in the sand for not resolving plagiarism charges surrounding Peng Tso-kwei (
The lawmakers said the ministry should have asked Peng to resign his post immediately; earlier this month the National Science Council said the university president had plagiarized the work of a US academic.
"The Ministry of Education should demand Peng to resign right away on the grounds that Peng was found to have plagiarized by the National Science Council," said DPP lawmaker Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) yesterday.
On Jan. 9, the council's investigation team concluded that Peng had plagiarized the work of Bruce Gardner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland.
"The ministry should not pass the buck on this matter by pushing all responsibility back to the university," Chen said.
"After all, Peng was selected and appointed by the education ministry," he said.
On Tuesday, the ministry asked Chung Hsing's election committee to figure out what to do about the Peng matter.
But representatives of the school say the education ministry should decide how to handle the Peng affair, as the ministry appointed him in the first place over the objection of some university officials.
Under the University Law (
A selection committee within the university chooses two or three candidates. That name list is then submitted for consideration by another committee convened by the education ministry, which makes the final selection.
The lawmakers say the education ministry was well aware that Peng had been accused of plagiarism when its committee was handling his appointment in August.
"But they [ministry officials] still selected Peng to be the president regardless of the fierce criticism from the school's professors," Chen said.
"They should provide a clear-cut solution to the issue immediately -- asking Peng to step down and penalizing the responsible ministry officials," Chen added.
Minister of Education Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗) has been vague in his comments on the plagarism issue.
The minister has said there are different degrees of "borrowing information from others' academic works" and that he needed to "understand all details" before forming a conclusion.
At a meeting yesterday, school authorities agreed to follow the ministry's lead in handling the Peng affair and assigned the school's selection committee the job of watching over the issue.
Lu Hsun (
"The election committee was dissolved once the election ended. There is no more committee," Lu said.
According to Lu, most of group's former members do not support reconvening the committee as it has long been dispersed. In addition, he said, the group would be on shaky legal footing.
"There is just no precedent for it," Lu said.
Wu Ming-ming (
"How can the school decide the future of its president?" Wu said.
"It is the duty of Minister Tzeng to come up with an explicit measure to work out the controversy," Wu said.
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