The Taiwan Higher Education Union and professors from National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday urged the Ministry of Education to ensure that at least half of university council members are faculty members in non-administrative positions.
The University Act (大學法) requires that each university establish a council comprised of lecturer representatives, heads of academic affairs and administrative units, non-teaching staff and student representatives, and other members to deliberate and make decisions regarding significant university matters, the union said.
The act states that lecturer representatives must comprise at least half of the council and student representatives should make up at least one-tenth of it, the union said.
However, at NKUST, lecturer representatives only comprise about 30 percent of council members, while heads of academic affairs and administrative units make up about 52 percent, NKUST Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Hsu Quang-cherng (許光城) told a news conference in Taipei.
Hsu, who is president of the lecturers’ association at NKUST, said that this meant that most of the resolutions passed at university council meetings had already been decided at administrative meetings, with few changes able to be made.
The proportion of heads of academic affairs and administrative departments in the university council at NKUST has increased from 44.06 percent in the 2018-2019 academic year, to 47.89 percent in 2019-2020 and 52.14 percent in 2020-2021, according to data presented by Hsu.
Meanwhile, the proportion of non-managerial lecturers in the council has fallen from 39.16 percent to 34.51 percent to 30.71 percent in those respective academic years, the data showed.
This issue affects the quality of higher education, NKUST lecturers’ association vice president Lin Chi-tsan (林啟燦) said, urging university faculty nationwide to speak out on the issue, and the ministry to take it seriously.
Many issues or improvements to be made at the university cannot be given “fair, just and reasonable discussion” when lecturer representatives do not make up more than half of university council members, as is required by the University Act, NKUST lecturers’ association vice president Kang Yaw-hong (康耀鴻) said.
The issue raised by the professors at NKUST is happening at other schools too, union organization department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) added.
However, he said that the situation at NKUST was “particularly serious.”
“The Ministry of Education must immediately correct the situation at NKUST as a start to reforming related issues across the nation,” he said, adding that many university council meetings have become echo chambers.
If the ministry and various universities do not adopt specific measures to improve the situation, the union and its 19 chapters nationwide are to launch further protests to “restore the normal environment of university campus democracy,” the union said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching