A group of university students yesterday accompanied former National Tsing Hua University Students’ Association president Hsu Guangcheng (徐光成) to protest in front of the Ministry of Education building in Taipei, decrying the university’s “crude” decisionmaking process regarding its merger with National Hsinchu University of Education, which began on Tuesday.
Hsu, who had been on a hunger strike since Monday night, delivered an appeal to the ministry, asking that it revoke its approval of the merger.
Tsing Hua president Hocheng Hong (賀陳弘) revised portions of a proposal regarding the merger that the ministry asked the university to clarify, but then bypassed a university meeting and replied directly to the ministry, which approved the proposal, Hsu said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Hocheng’s actions meant that the ministry allowed Tsing Hua to flout the law and had been negligent in its duties to supervise the institution, Hsu said.
Because of this procedural violation, students and faculty members at both universities only learned that the merger had been approved after reading media reports, he said.
Yi Hung-ju (裔弘如), a member of the National Hsinchu University of Education Students’ Council, said the universities’ handling of the merger took away students’ voices, adding that most students are opposed to the move.
The public has attached discriminatory labels on the university, because students attending joint college entrance exams do not have to score as much to enter the university as those who are admitted to Tsing Hua, but officials at both universities did not seem to care about such discrimination, she said.
Yi urged Hocheng to to listen to student opinion and not to push the merger through.
Ministry official Tseng Hsin-yuan (曾新元) said Hocheng had not breached procedure, because revisions to proposals do not need to be reviewed at university meetings.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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