Renewed debate over President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) doctoral thesis from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) began at a public hearing on academic ethics at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Education and Culture Committee in Taipei yesterday.
The hearing was chaired by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖).
At the hearing, political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) said that he, Hwan C. Lin (林環牆), a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Belk College of Business, and National Taiwan University professor emeritus Ho De-fen (賀德芬) were “honored to become the first people in the history of Chinese Taipei to be sued by a sitting president.”
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
National Chengchi University Institute of International Relations researcher Yen Chen-shen (嚴震生) said that he found 444 spelling mistakes in Tsai’s thesis.
He placed a sticky note beside each mistake he found, he said, adding that if the thesis had been written by a student of his, he would not have accepted it.
He hopes that those who defend Tsai read the thesis, Yen said.
These proceedings are not a “privately established punishment hall,” Chen said, responding to criticism from the Democratic Progressive Party.
The hearing is live-streamed and people from various fields were invited, he said.
This is not the first time a situation involving an individual case has been discussed at a public hearing, he said, citing a hearing last year on the necessity of the Shenao Power Plant chaired by former DPP legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬).
Chen and others “have for several months, based on their electoral interests, avoided correct procedure of verifying with [the LSE] and proper authorities as they continued to concoct false information to mislead people and smear their opponents,” Tsai’s campaign office said in a statement.
It “highly regrets and strongly condemns” the alleged behavior, the office said.
Chiu Rong-jeo (邱榮舉), a former associate dean in National Taiwan University’s College of Social Sciences, said he has “mixed feelings” about the thesis issue, calling it one of “two major strange events” that has taken place in Taiwan this year.
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