Former premier Simon Chang (張善政), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate for Taoyuan mayor, denied allegations that he plagiarized content in a research report that he was commissioned to write for the Council of Agriculture in 2007.
Chinese-language Mirror Media, which first published the allegations on Tuesday, said that Chang’s research team had failed to cite their sources for some of the content in the report. Chang defended himself by saying that as the report was not academic in nature, the lack of citations could not be considered plagiarism.
However, Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) said that although the research was not for academia, all research commissioned by the government should adhere to certain regulations and be checked by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics before the project is closed.
The crux of the matter is that Chang was paid NT$57.36 million (US$1.88 million) of public money for research of which the quality and integrity is now under question, while Chang is running for mayor.
Both major political parties have been digging into candidates’ backgrounds looking for evidence of plagiarism and other wrongdoing, and the sheer amount of accusations that have been raised is staggering — which points to a serious systemic problem.
Former Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), the Democratic Progressive Party’s Taoyuan candidate, withdrew from the race last month after being accused in late July of plagiarizing his master’s thesis. A spate of other accusations of plagiarized theses then emerged involving Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如), KMT Nantou County commissioner candidate Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) and Nantou County Council Speaker Ho Shang-feng (何勝豐).
The issue is of concern because if a politician demonstrates poor academic integrity, how can they be trusted with larger issues that concern the residents of their constituencies?
The question is who should be held accountable? Should it be the universities that allow candidates to graduate with plagiarized theses; the Ministry of Education (MOE), which is the authority recognized in the Degree Conferral Act (學位授予法); local election committees, which allow candidates to register for elections without investigating their backgrounds; or some other supervisory body?
Maybe the education system itself is to blame. It is no secret that Taiwan’s education system is test-oriented, and does not facilitate original thought or analysis. An opinion piece published by The News Lens on Oct. 14 last year said that Taiwanese students spend more time each day studying than students anywhere else in the world. The piece cited a graduate of Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls’ High School named Janice Yeh as saying that Taiwan’s schools are conservative and “reactive.”
“The information that students acquire isn’t done so by themselves, but instead, they are spoon-fed the information, which is harmful,” she said.
This approach to education might be conducive to preparing students for entrance exams or for public service roles, but it does little to create independent thinkers of the type who would enter graduate school.
There is an idea in Taiwan that to be competitive you must go to graduate school, but in reality, graduate school should be a pursuit for those who have original ideas they want to explore, or problems they want to solve. Plagiarizing a master’s or doctoral thesis just to graduate completely misses the point, as the intention is to obtain a paper to show others, rather than to explore answers to burning questions.
On a superficial level, schools and the MOE could better supervise students’ academic work, but to solve the issue in a meaningful way will mean changing public perception of what graduate school is all about.
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