President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday said she would not intervene in the National Taiwan University (NTU) leadership controversy after Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔), the school’s president-elect, on Sunday called for her to resolve the problem
The Ministry of Education on April 27 declared Kuan unqualified for the post, because he had illegally served as an independent director and a member of the salary and auditing committees at Taiwan Mobile when he was a professor at the school, and because the election had been compromised due to a conflict of interest.
Kuan on Sunday said that he believed Tsai knows who was responsible for the ministry’s decision.
He has previously described the decision as an attempt to undermine the university’s autonomy for political reasons.
He said he hoped Tsai would resolve the dispute by the second anniversary of her inauguration this coming Sunday.
He also urged “those who are concerned about the election to take concrete actions to help the university by donating money.”
Without a formal president, the university could lose funding and its competitive edge, he said.
When asked about Kuan’s comments during a breakfast interveiw with radio talk show host Clara Chou (周玉蔻), Tsai said: “As the president, I will not make a decision on the issue, as it is the Ministry of Education’s responsibility.”
It is crucial the government prevent educational issues from becoming politicized, she said.
“This is a legal issue, not a political issue... Asking the president to interfere would be politicizing it. That would not be right,” she said.
Asked if she knew who made the decision to reject Kuan’s appointment, Tsai said: “Can he tell me who that person is?”
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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