A group of National Taiwan University (NTU) alumni on Sunday evening in a letter urged the Ministry of Education to stop university president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) from taking office next week, citing a potential conflict of interest in the election process.
Among the alumni were lawyer Lin Hsien-tung (林憲同), who on Tuesday last week reported former minister of education Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office for alleged corruption, as well as Meiho University president Chen Chin-chuan (陳景川), former NTU College of Agriculture head Shen Tien-fu (沈添富), Huang Hsin-tien (黃新田), Wang Wen-yu (王文猷) and Chang Pang-yen (張邦彥).
Although the ministry officially approved Kuan’s appointment on Tuesday last week, it could prevent the approval from taking effect by halting all work on the presidential transition scheduled for Tuesday next week, the letter said.
Photo: Liberty Times
The Executive Yuan should intervene by ordering the ministry to stop handling the presidential transition, and if the ministry and school officials insist on completing it, the group would press malfeasance charges against them, it said.
Kuan was elected on Jan. 5 last year and was originally scheduled to take office the next month, but the ministry in May demanded a re-election on the grounds that Kuan failed to report a possible conflict of interest in the election process, as he served as an independent director at Taiwan Mobile Co and company vice president Richard Tsai (蔡明興) sat on the election committee.
Yeh, who took office in July after two education ministers had stepped down over the election controversy, initially instructed the university to redo parts of the election without Tsai to correct what he called a “procedural flaw” in the process.
However, after months of negotiations with the university, which consistently refused to hold a re-election on the grounds that the ministry lacked a legal basis to withhold approval of the election, Yeh on Monday last week announced that he would “reluctantly agree” to Kuan’s appointment, but that the university would need to submit a report reviewing all controversies that arose during the election.
Kuan failed to fulfill his obligation to disclose his position as an independent director to the election committee and Tsai failed to recuse himself from the election, the letter said.
The undisclosed relationship contravened the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法) and disqualifies Kuan from serving as president, it added.
According to Article 162 of the Constitution, all public and private univesrities are subject to government supervision, it said.
Public universities can select their presidents only because the education ministry has delegated that function to them, it said, adding that the ministry has the final authority to reject election results or request a re-election.
Government supervision of universities, as stipulated in the Constitution, does not contravene universities’ autonomy and academic freedom, it added.
That the ministry was only exercising government supervision is confirmed by the Executive Yuan’s decision on Wednesday last week to reject three administrative appeals filed by the university, Kuan himself and a group of students to request that Kuan be appointed president last year, it said.
The Executive Yuan rejected the appeals on the ground that the re-election request from the ministry was not an administrative injunction, but rather a form of government supervision, it added.
The letter ended by urging faculty members and students to join the petition to stop Kuan from taking office.
Additional reporting by Ann Maxon
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