The controversy over the selection of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) president has continued for two or three months, with no resolution in sight. In the study methodology course that I teach at the university, students keep asking whether the paper that NTU president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) presented at an academic seminar on May 6 last year really contains any improper citations or plagiarism, as some people have claimed.
The media have reported that, although the paper coauthored by Kuan and the master’s thesis of a student surnamed Chang (張) were written by different authors, a number of diagrams in the two contain the same information. However, both papers say that the diagrams were compiled and drawn by the researchers separately.
When considered logically, there are several ways in which this could have happened. One possibility is that the authors of the seminar paper plagiarized or improperly credited the student’s master’s thesis.
Another possibility is that the master’s thesis plagiarized Kuan’s draft paper. In this case, even though the master’s thesis lists Kuan’s draft paper as a source in its bibliography, the main body of the thesis should not say that the author compiled the diagrams themselves.
Yet another possibility is that one or both of the papers were coauthored by all of those involved, but the other researcher or researchers were not listed as coauthors.
The university convened an academic ethics committee meeting specifically to discuss this matter, so that Kuan’s reputation would be cleared if he was found not to have been involved in plagiarism.
However, the committee ruled that there was no case, on the grounds that the seminar paper had not been peer-reviewed — even though a review date was announced in the call for papers — and that it had not been officially published and its authors had not applied for an international standard book number.
That means the committee decided that the paper was not an item that should be subject to the university’s guidelines for handling academic ethics cases.
This decision conveys two messages. The first is that papers presented at academic seminars can be exempt from the requirements of academic ethics.
The second is that neither the committee nor the university wants to pursue the truth of the matter.
Consequently, the committee has not dispelled doubts about plagiarism. Furthermore, its decision blurs academia’s usual understanding of academic ethics.
The forum at which Kuan’s paper was presented was clearly an academic seminar organized by Academia Sinica and the MTI Department of Economics, for which there was an open call for papers.
It might therefore come as a surprise that papers could be presented that did not even have a bibliography and that the page numbers of the symposium proceedings, in which the papers were published, are out of sequence.
To pose this fact as evidence that papers presented at the seminar were “informal papers” is really getting things backward.
There are indeed big differences between seminars and how rigorous they are. Many papers presented at seminars are just preliminary drafts of ones that are later submitted for publication in periodicals.
However, even though the papers presented might need to have their arguments strengthened or further data added, the basic standards for writing academic papers, including verifying sources and not plagiarizing, cannot be set aside just because it is a seminar.
Former NTU president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) decided of his own accord not to seek a second term because of a controversy concerning academic ethics. Furthermore, the university has a rule that all postgraduate students who serve as research assistants for the first time must take an online course in academic ethics.
This controversy over possible plagiarism is quite straightforward. All that the public wants to know is what went wrong to create a situation in which two academic papers contain the same diagrams, but say they were compiled by different authors.
If we could establish how the problem arose, it would help to prevent the same thing from happening again. Only then would the energy that has been spent on this issue somehow be worthwhile.
Bih Herng-dar is a professor in National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS