President
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan
November 6, 2010
Dear President Lai and Colleagues,
To insure there's no historical revision of the issues surrounding my illegal dismissal in 1999 and the university's morally dubious role in that dismissal, I am attaching the official court verdict (2002) and subsequent rejection of the university's appeal (2003). The very fact the university litigated a legal Ministry ruling, based on hearings at which university officials participated, shows duplicity and bad faith. Why attend hearings of an appeal committee if you don't plan to honor a ruling that favors the appellant?
Why the university would appeal an illegal dismissal that should not have happened in the first place is curious, especially since National Cheng Kung University boasts of its high rank among Taiwan universities. I would rather boast of upholding human rights than of an academic rank that apparently ignores human rights!
Despite all this patent documentation, impossible to misinterpret, some parties continue in their denial that human rights were violated or at least refuse to acknowledge they were. Therefore either these attached (and other) documents (see the blog at http://rdca45.blogspot.com/) are forged or those who claim there were no human rights violated are grievously misinformed or deliberately misrepresenting the facts.
I have a reputation to uphold and I have the reputation of my compatriots to uphold as well. No one ten years from now is going to argue an American professor was dismissed for ethical or professional reasons, thus compromising all American professors.
Therefore I am determined to resolve this case with a formal acknowledgment from the university of human rights violations. Anything short of that will allow a revisionist history of these events to replace the facts now or in the future. I cannot allow that.
I would encourage those of my former colleagues at our university with human rights sympathies to assist me in this endeavor and reciprocate the rights and hospitality you or your children received when matriculated in democracies abroad. All it takes is a small number of you to insure human rights at our university. This will not only protect foreign faculty but also the reputation of National Cheng Kung University. Because I assure you, I will pursue this case through all legal channels until it is formally resolved according to international human rights principles.
The facts are plain and fully documented. In 1999, a defamatory letter was secretly circulated at several "oversight" committees to insure an illegal dismissal started in the Department of Foreign Languages. Presumably NCKU "oversight" committees were determined to exculpate their colleagues rather than protect the rights of the appellant.
After that dismissal was canceled in December 1999, the university claimed foreign teachers were not protected by the Teachers Law (patently false, as attached documents show), so the case was now punitively treated as a pending hiring action instead of a canceled dismissal action, jeopardizing the teacher's employment on a new basis. This violates the principle of appeal, namely that one benefits from a favorable ruling, or why appeal?
The university subsequently held "appeal" and "review" hearings at which the secret letter was circulated, and attended hearings at the Ministry of Education. When it lost the case, it then claimed foreigners had no right to appeal!
At least in US law the legal principle of estoppel prevents such duplicity, where a legal claim contradicts a previously established legal agreement (namely, my right to appeal, or why would the university hold appeal hearings and attend them in Taipei?).
Whether estoppel is observed under Taiwan law is beside the point. The university's action violated the basic principles of honesty and good faith. Grade school kids ("sore losers") are expected to act like this, but not university officials! If the university violates these basic principles of fair play how can it expect its students to abide by them? Or how, on that basis, can it expect to maintain academic exchanges with universities in democracies abroad?
When the university could not win at the Ministry level it then filed a lawsuit! When it lost the lawsuit it then appealed and delayed enforcing the Ministry ruling in the meantime, using the pending court appeal as a new tactic to deny retroactive contracts and reinstatement.
In fact two NCKU officials tried to intimidate me saying the university would delay the case indefinitely in the courts unless I resigned! This is AFTER I won a legal Ministry ruling based on hearings university officials attended and never contested! Apart from obvious ethical principles, this violates another legal principle of US law, that a party cannot make a claim it failed to make at the appropriate time.
After eight warning letters from the Ministry of Education (see my Human Rights blog at http://rdca45.blogspot.com/), the university finally complied with the Ministry ruling dated 8 January 2001 in May 2003, nearly two and a half years later! Scholars at Risk, an international human rights group now based in New York, also sent two letters.
Presumably the university thinks it's a law unto itself. This is okay if you follow higher laws (Jesus, Buddah, Confucius, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.) but not if you ignore them. And I see no rational excuse for ignoring the constitutional laws of one's own country, assuming they don't violate higher principles (equality under the law, basic freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, etc.). Moreover, these are laws university officials never contested until they lost the case.
Sincerely,
Richard de Canio
Formerly Associate Professor
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan
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