Accusations and allegations of politicians plagiarizing master’s theses are cropping up like mushrooms after a spring shower; in the weeks running up to November’s local elections there are likely to be many more.
Allegations first started flying more than a month ago, when Taipei City Councilor Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) accused then-Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) and Ho Li-hsing (賀力行), Lin’s former thesis adviser at Chung Hua University, of contravening the Copyright Act (著作權法) relating to a thesis Lin submitted in 2008.
This whipped up a political hurricane leading to further allegations of plagiarism, creating a vortex that sucked in National Security Bureau Director-General Chen Ming-tong (陳明通), adviser to Lin and Yu Cheng-huang (余正煌), whose thesis Lin allegedly plagiarized when writing his National Taiwan University (NTU) master’s thesis in 2017. The NTU academic ethics committee then recommended that Lin’s master’s degree be revoked, and Lin on Friday last week withdrew as the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate in the Taoyuan mayoral race.
The committee was chaired by Su Hung-dah (蘇宏達), dean of NTU’s College of Social Sciences, known to be a pan-blue supporter. Su called Lin’s case a scandal, leading to accusations from the pan-green camp of political bias. The KMT has tried to squeeze every last bit of political advantage, yet it must have known that counter-allegations would be made against its members. On Tuesday, master’s theses by Nantou County Council Speaker Ho Shang-feng (何勝豐) of the KMT and Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華), the KMT’s candidate for Nantou County commissioner, were called into question. The fallout extended to Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如).
The timing of the accusations against Lin makes them obviously political, but they also involve systemic problems in academia and issues of personal integrity. Regardless of whether Lin committed plagiarism, plagiarism occurred, and that was sufficient for it to be a scandal. The committee decided that the 40 percent similarity between the theses was far above the standard required to suggest plagiarism had occurred.
Hsu’s research was found to have a similarity of more than 70 percent. Will the KMT have her withdraw from the Nantou County commissioner race while the allegations are investigated? Is it beleivable that Ho, who did not even graduate from high school, wrote a successful master’s thesis in bioinformatics and medical engineering after years away from school? How much of a coincidence is it that his thesis was similar to his secretary’s, or that they had the same adviser?
In-service master’s degrees and executive masters of business administration are far more expensive than normal master’s degrees, and are known for the excessive flexibility and latitude given to the students, with stories of busy participants sending assistants to attend class and write papers.
Chen’s failure to notice the similarities between Lin’s and Yu’s theses raises questions about how much time advisers can spare to attend to individual students. He also had his duties as bureau director-general, and even though he advises a manageable number of students per year, Ho supervises more than 20 students per year. This is symptomatic of a flawed system. This flaw is a necessary result of the obsession with “diplomaism” in Taiwan. Why are politicians and elected officials expected to have a string of academic degrees unrelated to their jobs?
Finally, there is the issue of personal integrity and moral fortitude. If Lin is guilty of plagiarism, he is in the wrong, but what does this mean when this behavior is rife within the system, and when KMT leaders bay for his blood, but remain mute on allegations against their own members?
This is where the politics, systemic problems and questions of personal integrity collide.
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