Renaming is nothing new
In her address at an event marking International Human Rights Day organized by the Ministry of Culture’s Preparatory Office of the National Human Rights Museum, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) responded to a question about renaming roads and schools, an issue that has been hotly debated since the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) on Tuesday last week passed its third legislative reading.
In her response, Tsai said it would be a pity if the pain that we have all been through together was reduced to a mere issue of renaming streets and schools, and that achieving true transitional justice is a serious effort aimed at promoting reconciliation, which includes such things as investigating the truth, judicial rehabilitation, social communication and so on.
Tsai’s point of view makes a great deal of sense. We did not have to wait until the act was passed to rename roads and schools that are named after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who is also referred to as Chiang Chung-cheng (蔣中正).
In 2012, the Taichung City Government’s Civil Affairs Bureau announced that the road stretching from Taichung Railway Station, along Chung Cheng Road, Taichung Port Road and Zhongqi Road to the Port of Taichung — altogether 24.2km — would be renamed “Lin Ching-yuan Taiwan Boulevard.” This name change also included the renaming of Chung Cheng Road.
In New Taipei City, there are 19 roads named Chung-shan Road (中山路) — named after Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) — but most of them are not interconnected.
Having so many different roads sharing the same name has confused people over the years. In 2013, the New Taipei City Government therefore decided it would begin by renaming the more than 10km-long Chung-shan Road that crossed Sanchong (三重), Sinjhuang (新莊) and Taishan (泰山) districts.
Following an opinion poll conducted among the more than 10,000 residents living along the road, which showed that 70 percent supported a name change and more than 50 percent voted for Sinbei Boulevard (新北大道) as the new name for the road, it was decided that this should be the road’s new name.
There are many more instances of schools being renamed — such as Hsing Kuo University of Management, which was renamed to CTBC Financial Management College and the De Lin Institute of Technology, which changed its name to Hungkuo Delin University of Technology.
Pro-blue media outlets are singling out the issue of renaming roads and schools in the act and focusing their attacks on that issue, but they avoid talking about the issues of investigating the truth, judicial rehabilitation, social communication and so on. We all know what they are up to: smoke screen tactics.
Tsai Mei-chu
New Taipei City
Playing with ratios
The Executive Yuan last month passed a draft bill on the transformation and closing of private universities that is expected to make it more difficult for such universities to survive.
According to the draft bill, one key indicator of school performance that the Ministry of Education is to consider when determining which schools should be closed down is enrollment rates.
For the first time, the ministry is to publish the enrollment rates of all 157 colleges and universities across Taiwan, allowing the public to find out how many students are admitted to each school every year.
Earlier this month, the Chinese-language Liberty Times [sister newspaper of the Taipei Times] published 71 indicators that the ministry will use in its evaluation of universities.
According to the report, international students will not be included when the ministry calculates enrollment rates.
Worried that they might not reach the ministry’s threshold of a 60 percent enrollment rate, several schools have questioned the decision to leave out international students from the calculation.
This is very interesting news, because in March the ministry considered changing the way it calculates the student-to-teacher ratio by including international students and students who have deferred their graduation as a way to prompt schools to hire more teachers, despite the nation’s declining birth rate.
However, many colleges and universities strongly opposed the idea on the grounds that it would increase their costs, with the Association of Private Universities and Colleges even demanding that the ministry provide subsidies and allow them to raise tuition fees to cover the additional expenses.
The ministry’s inconsistent view on whether to include international students is bewildering. Why should international students be included in the student-teacher ratio, but not in the enrollment rate? Surely, these two approaches are contradictory.
In fact, there are at least two types of international students: short-term students not pursuing a degree and students pursuing a formal degree. International students pursuing a formal degree should be included in both the enrollment rates and the student-teacher ratios, rather than in just one of them, as only including them in one and not in the other would make little sense.
Huang Hsiu-li
Changhua County
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