Regarding Ming Chiao-lai's delays in handling the case at National Cheng Kung University
From:
rdca25@gmail.com
Date:
Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:21:47 +0800
To:
MOE
CC:
em50000@email.ncku.edu.tw
Minister Tu Cheng-sheng,
Minister of Education
Ministry of Education
Taipei, Taiwan
ROC
cc: Ming Chiao-Lai, president, National Cheng Kung University
7 December 2007
Dear Minister Tu,
I have repeatedly requested an appointment with the university president, Ming Chiao-lai, to finally resolve outstanding matters related to human rights abuses committed against me by National Cheng Kung University officials starting in 1999. These abuses were made in a negligent, defiant, and willful manner. They are unacceptable, especially for a university with academic exchanges in democratic countries like my own.
I believe the university president is not acting speedily enough, and with due respect to my dignity as an American professor as well as to the issues and principles involved. It is not only that he has delayed seeing me to resolve this matter; apparently he doesn't even see the need to contact me about these delays to show sincerity and good will. Rather I have to repeatedly contact his office. I don't see where it should be difficult for a faculty member to visit his university's president for any reason, much less a reason as important as human rights.
Nor is the issue complex by those who observe principles of reason. I won an appeal. The same officials who participated in that appeal, and even held appeal hearings themselves, contested my right to appeal after I won.
This duplicity is unacceptable, by international standards if not by Taiwan standards. Even after losing its claim that Americans have no right to appeal—morally dubious as it was to begin with, since Taiwan students and faculty are protected in the US—the university still contested my right to compensation in the courts.
Yet this case has taken up nine years of my life. Why should I be denied compensation or the satisfaction of knowing the party that violated my rights has paid a settlement for doing so?
Moreover, in contesting my right to compensation in the courts, the university showed a defiant attitude and a failure to acknowledge the gravity of its human rights abuses. Bear in mind, if the university did not engage in legal duplicity in the first place—defying a legal Ministry ruling and the Ministry's repeated requests to enforce that ruling—this matter would never have reached its present crisis.
I wish to make clear to the Ministry of Education that if this case is not handled properly and promptly by the current administration, I shall feel free to contact human rights groups in the US (as I did during Kao Chiang's administration), as well as American academic institutions that have exchanges with National Cheng Kung University.
Sincerely,
Richard de Canio
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan
