Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taoyuan mayoral candidate Simon Chang (張善政) on Wednesday held a news conference to address allegations that he plagiarized content for research reports commissioned by the Council of Agriculture in 2007. Despite the news conference, many questions have yet to be answered.
First, Chang, who was in charge of the study, said that research projects are different from academic papers, so therefore plagiarism was not an issue. According to this logic, it was perfectly permissible to copy huge swathes of content from other reports without citations. Is that really the case?
Commissioned reports are without a doubt unlike academic papers, so at least Chang got the first half of his contention right. The project received NT$57.36 million (US$1.81 million) in funding from the council. It would be astonishing if anyone were paid that much for an academic paper, no matter how good their reputation, even if it were the prize for outstanding academic work in an important field. Not even a Nobel Prize comes with that much money.
In this regard, Chang’s report was significantly different from an academic paper.
However, he is not right in saying that plagiarism is exclusively an issue with regard to academic papers. Photographs on a promotional poster, a university president’s address at a graduation ceremony, a TV drama script and an essay for a speech contest are all examples of works that can be plagiarized even though they are not academic papers.
Had large numbers of Chang’s students handed in assignment papers that were clearly identical to each other, or if they had copied and pasted sections from Wikipedia, he would surely have cried foul and accused them of plagiarism.
Third, Chang is still trying to cling to the excuse of a “lifelong nondisclosure clause” to keep information about the research project under wraps, even though the agriculture council has said that the clause has long since ceased to apply.
Fourth, Chang said that the research reports’ purpose was to collect information for the council, but this is suspect, to say the least.
Was he saying that the research merely entailed amassing information? Did he just hire some interns and splash out hundreds of thousands of dollars to collect enough information to fill a flatbed truck and then dump it at the feet of the council, as if it were some wealthy benefactor?
Fifth, of course the simple collection of information does not amount to plagiarism. The question of plagiarism is related to how the information was incorporated into the research and how it was included in the final report submitted to the entity that commissioned it.
Finally, there is the matter of who was in government when the research was being conducted, and that the council did not question the report when it was submitted. At the time, no suspicions of plagiarism were brought up.
Do not forget that former Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien’s (林智堅) master’s thesis was originally accepted by National Taiwan University.
Why did the pan-blue camp not support him when accusations of plagiarism were made against him? Is this not an example of double standards?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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