The National Taiwan University (NTU) Student Association yesterday issued an apology on Facebook, after a student raised a banner at an event that was deemed hateful toward indigenous people.
The association has designated this month as “free speech month,” during which students are invited to hang banners on campus to have their messages heard.
One student’s banner used a play on an idiom meaning “to be very angry” (huo mao san zhang, 火冒三丈), in reference to a government policy that grants indigenous students an extra 35 percent in an evaluation system that exempts some students from admission tests when applying to universities.
Photo: CNA
In their description of the banner submitted to the association, the student who made the banner wrote that “special privileges granted to indigenous peoples are an example of the government’s tyranny over the ‘people of the plains.’”
A group of indigenous students on Friday held a protest, where they called the banner’s message “discriminatory” and demanded an apology.
Another banner called for a ban on blood donations from gay men, which similarly resulted in complaints of discrimination.
The association yesterday said it had been negligent in organizing the event, as it had not created a mechanism to identify and prevent hate speech.
It said one mistake it later identified was that banners were not designed for their creators to explain their message in better detail.
The purpose of the event was to promote public discussion, but a failure to acknowledge the interpretive gap had exacerbated the inequality of power relations between ethnic groups, it said.
“It is also a serious deficiency of the student union that it has not been able to establish a sufficiently complete mechanism to actively promote dialogue in a substantive sense,” it wrote.
In related news, two candidates on the same ticket in an NTU student election could face penalties ranging from an official reprimand to expulsion, due to crude and discriminatory language they used in their campaign platform.
NTU said the two candidates in the Department of Economics’ student association elections had been referred to the university’s Gender Equality Committee over their offensive policy proposals, which were posted on the student association’s Facebook page.
Among the appeals in the students’ platform were statements such as “LGBTQ people and dogs are not allowed to play the online game Arena of Valor in the association’s office,” “Those who graduate without a boyfriend or girlfriend must be surgically sterilized,” and “People who have a body mass index of more than 20 will be prohibited from taking an elevator.”
The remarks caused a strong public backlash, including from the minister of education, prompting the candidates to apologize and suspend their election campaign on Sunday.
According to NTU, after receiving a case referral, the committee must decide within 20 days whether to hear it.
If it does accept the case, the committee assigns it to a working group to complete an investigation within two months, which it then submits, along with its recommended punishment, to NTU’s Student Rewards and Disciplinary Committee.
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