November 11, 2010
The goal of this public letter about an illegal dismissal at National Cheng Kung University is to remind officials there that they are civil servants and, as such, are bound by law to carry out their duties, whether they find it expedient to obey the law or not. That's what "executive" means, "to execute" the laws, including those of the university and of the nation.
There's no dispute the law is on my side. The court ruling said so. The Ministry of Education ruling said so.
No matter that former university president, Kao Chiang, defied that ruling for nearly two and a half years. No matter that recently someone tried to revert the Wikipedia entry on this human rights scandal with the words, "If true, a travesty, but no evidence or specifics provided. Also, sadly, it is a fact that at the time the alleged incident occured, foreign faculty were not protected by the Teachers Law of the ROC."
Both of these claims are false, as Wikipedia sources now prove. This is no "alleged incident," it's a "fact." And what the writer claims, in his revisionist apologetics, was not a fact (that "foreign faculty were not protected by the Teachers Law of the ROC") was indisputably a fact: teachers were protected by the "Teachers Law of the ROC," as both Ministry and court rulings, both linked to the Wikepedia entry, prove.
Therefore, by this writer's own words, the human rights violations over the last ten years were indeed a "travesty" of justice and they will tarnish the reputation of National Cheng Kung University for years to come. Moreover, this is due to the lack of oversight at our university.
If our university committees had stopped this dismissal from the beginning, in the first College review, this scandal could have been aborted. But none of these officials lived up to their responsibility as custodians of the university's moral (and ultimately academic) reputation. Indeed, they sacrificed that reputation for their own selfish interests, indolent ignorance, or timid conformity.
In sum, the university effected an illegal dismissal in 1999. The salient facts are included on the National Cheng Kung University page of the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cheng_Kung_University). For more than ten years university officials have refused to enforce remedy of those violations at this university. The current president, Michael Ming-Chiao Lai, has not even deigned to see me once, though he's been president nearly four years.
Only this week President Lai assigned a vice-president (and president-elect) to talk to a member of the Teacher's Union about the case. In other words, after ten years, Dr. Lai still doesn't think this issue is important enough to talk to the plaintiff personally! Not that talk, at this late stage, would make a difference, but at least it would show minimal courtesy.
The president of the United States, with the whole world on his shoulders, will talk to the common people in a local dispute that happened thousands of miles from the White House; but the president of this university does not have the time to talk to his own colleague, indeed his senior colleague, about grievous human rights issues for which university officials are fully responsible.
Even as recently as today I was informed by Dr. Lai's office that he was busy with the university's anniversary, with no invitation to a meeting next week (unless the anniversary lasts the entire academic year)! This is typical of the dilatory tactics and disrespect NCKU officials have shown.
I have seen photos on the official NCKU web page of Dr. Lai with foreign students who elect to study at NCKU. He can find the time for these students, presumably to inflate the reputation of the university, but then he ignores human rights issues that he is bound, both by law and now by international law (President Ma recently signed international human rights charters) to enforce; and which, in the long term, will inflate or deflate the university's reputation far more decisively than a mere student testimonial that he chose to study at NCKU!
Even when subordinate officials deign to see me or a colleague about the issue, they use the usual "gathering the facts" tactic, a gambit that has been overplayed for ten years. If these officials don't know the facts of a serious human rights issue then they should be dismissed from office.
Don't officials at NCKU do their homework? As a student I would never visit a professor unless I had fully mastered the material and needed only to gloss a word, phrase, or sentence properly so we could engage in intelligent dialogue based on a shared knowledge.
Yet these officials invariably start every meeting with yet another review of the facts. Some studiously scribble on a pad to look responsive. But if they were responsive there wouldn't have to be a meeting at all; they would have acted on the facts they should have known.
Presumably these officials believe, though they are paid by taxpayers, they are accountable only to their colleagues. After all, they don't bump shoulders with the taxpayer daily, but with their colleagues, whom they have to please, not the taxpayers, which means, in the long run, not the law.
Thus a culture of arrogance has developed at National Cheng Kung University that the public should be aware of and that should not be tolerated if the public takes pride in its young, and still formative, democracy. If even high-ranked academic institutions in Taiwan lack moral probity or integrity, then there's less hope for democracy in Taiwan.
Public officials here must be given the message loud and clear: they are public servants, not public masters. Hence the phrase "civil servants," not "civil masters." They are servants because, presumably, they serve the people and the law that ideally protects the people. If Dr. Lai does not understand this he should be summarily removed from office. If he is not removed from office, or does not have the decency to resign, I shall continue to expose this case internationally anyway, which will further compromise the reputation of National Cheng Kung University. Yet my goal is not to compromise the reputation of the university; my goal is to protect my reputation and the reputation of American professors who come after me. I will not compromise that goal.
One thing I insure all parties involved: This case will be resolved according to the principles of law and of international law. The sooner this goal is achieved the better it will be for all parties involved.
Sincerely,
Richard de Canio
Formerly, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan
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