National Taiwan University (NTU) late on Friday said that it would convene an extraordinary university council meeting after the Lunar New Year holiday, as more than one-fifth of council members called for a meeting to resolve a controversy surrounding university president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔).
The purpose of the meeting is to investigate Kuan’s alleged conflict of interest, as the NTU election committee has no legal basis for launching a formal investigation into the issue, the council’s student representative Tung Yu-wen (童昱文) said.
Tung had on Feb. 1 launched a petition to hold an extraordinary council meeting.
It was reported early last month that Kuan was an independent director at Taiwan Mobile and that company vice chairman Richard Tsai (蔡明興) was a member of the NTU election committee.
More doubt was cast on Kuan’s eligibility later in the month, when he was accused of plagiarizing a student’s master’s thesis in a conference paper he coauthored with National Chi Nan University professor Chen Chien-liang (陳建良).
The committee cannot investigate conflicts of interest that involve committee members unless it receives a request from a candidate to do so, according to the university’s regulations, Tung said.
The meeting would also provide an opportunity to discuss ways to correct procedural flaws in the election process, he said.
Tung said that he and many other NTU professors believe that the school should also investigate Kuan’s alleged plagiarism, but added that he does not think that discussing the incident at the meeting would be helpful.
“Even if the plagiarism issue were discussed at the extraordinary council meeting, the council’s decision would have no effect on the committee that is in charge of the issue,” he said.
The school must convene an extraordinary university council meeting within 15 days if requested by one-fifth of council members, according to regulations.
Tung’s petition, which gained the support of more than 35 university council representatives within one day, was submitted to the school on Monday last week.
The university has asked the petition organizer to collect the signatures of those who support it and specify the issues they want to discuss at the meeting, NTU secretary-general Lin Ta-te (林達德) said.
Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said that the ministry has asked NTU to clarify several issues regarding Kuan’s eligibility, including the alleged plagiarism, since a meeting transcript the school submitted to the ministry is not detailed.
Additional reporting by We Po-hsuan and CNA
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS