About 20 Asia-Pacific Institute of Creativity (APIC) teachers and students yesterday urged the Ministry of Education to dismiss the school’s board at a protest outside the ministry, citing evidence of graft that they had collected since 2016.
Huang Ping-chang (黃平璋), chairman of Yi-shen Group — a corporation best known for its security service — became the school’s chairman in August 2016.
Since he took office, the school board has illegally cut teachers’ research allowance, forced students to transfer or drop out, and used the school’s budget to pay for products and services offered by companies under Yi-shen, said teachers who traveled from Miaoli County to protest yesterday.
In 2016, the school board fired the original school guards and hired a security company under Yi-shen, APIC associate professor Tang Jen-chung (湯仁忠) said.
While the previous security service cost only NT$100,000 per month, the new service is 40 percent more expensive, but of poorer quality, he said.
The board also held many meetings at a restaurant owned by Yi-shen, Tang said.
“You would expect a meeting of a 12-member board to cost between NT$30,000 and NT$50,000, but they spent NT$100,000 at just one meeting held at the restaurant,” he said.
The board also purchased nearly 90 boxes of moon cakes from the restaurant for more than NT$85,000, he said.
The pricey moon cakes were never distributed to faculty members and the purchase records show that they had not been approved by the school, he added.
The board also held training camps for new employees at Yi-shen’s security company on the school campus without paying it any fees, an APIC teacher surnamed Huang (黃) said.
“About four or five new teachers were also required to attend, but they said the training was all about security,” she said, adding that the school nevertheless had to pay the company about NT$15,000 for training the teachers.
Since 2016, Huang Ping-chang has founded two for-profit companies and registered them at the same address as the school, Tang said, but added that “he has never paid any rent to the school or signed any contract with it.”
“The school has clearly violated Article 81 of the Private School Act (私立學校法), which requires school boards to avoid conflicts of interest,” Taiwan Higher Education Union organization department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) said.
APIC teachers and students prepared receipts and financial records from the school as proof of their claims and demanded that the ministry dismiss the board and make the school pay their full salaries.
Ministry Department of Technological and Vocational Education Director Yang Yu-hui (楊玉惠) said: “Cutting the teachers’ research allowance without their consent violated Article 17 of the Act Governing Teachers’ Salaries (教師待遇條例).”
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater