Ruey-Beei Wu (吳瑞北), a National Taiwan University (NTU) electrical engineering professor and a candidate for university presidential, yesterday filed an administrative litigation against the Ministry of Education and the school, asking that the university redo its presidential election from the beginning instead of from the final round of voting.
As a candidate, he would be able ask the court to speed up the judicial process and help resolve the controversy more effectively, he wrote on Facebook.
The university’s presidential election in January became embroiled in controversies after NTU finance professor Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) was elected president and then accused of failing to disclose a conflict of interest.
Kuan was an independent director and a member of the salary and auditing committees of Taiwan Mobile, while company vice chairman Richard Tsai (蔡明興) was a member of the election committee.
In May, the ministry ordered the university to repeat the election due to the conflict of interest, but the school refused and instead filed an administrative appeal requesting that Kuan be appointed as president based on the election.
On Monday last week, the ministry asked NTU to repeat the final round of voting with the same five candidates — Kuan, Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences director Chou Mei-yin (周美吟), physics professor Chang Ching-ray (張慶瑞), Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia professor Chen Ming-hsien (陳銘憲) and history professor Chen Jo-shui (陳弱水).
The ministry’s request was “not only illegal, but also illogical,” Wu wrote on Facebook, adding that student groups and the presidential election committee were unhappy with it.
“The university should repeat the election from the initial qualification review of all eight candidates, including Kuan and myself. The three rounds of voting conducted by the university council and presidential election committee following the review should, of course, be redone as well,” Wu said.
While the school had the right to file an administrative appeal, it cannot defy the ministry’s order to launch a re-election, he said.
By turning to the legal system, he hopes to bring a peaceful end to the controversy, which has caused “NTU’s reputation to hit rock bottom,” Wu added.
The other two candidates in the initial round were former Academia Sinica vice president Wang Fan-sen (陳汎森) and National Tsing Hua University vice president Wu Cheng-wen (吳誠文).
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