Pray Silently for LSE and NTU

Jerry Hsia, DPA

Professor/Former Director of National Taiwan Normal University

Whether Tsai Ing-wen had indeed received a doctorate degree from the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), and whether her dissertation had indeed passed the oral examination, continually raising controversies around the globe. 

In response to the above mentioned issues, including: missing dissertation, strict limitation on the circulation and in-library reading of Tsai’s doctorate thesis, locking up the hard copy of Tsai’s Ph.D papers for 30 years, and missing pages in Tsai’s papers… etc (so called the“Six Doubts”), the Presidential Office of Taiwan (ROC) released a sheet of “Q&A” on September 23, 2019.

Among them, “Why the writing format and marginal setting are obviously different from page to page? Why are there evidences of handwritten amendments and photocopies existing in the hardcover dissertation for library collection?” were the most strongly questioned agendas by the international societies.

In the “Q&A”, the Presidential Office publicly responded: “When Tsai Ing-wen wrote her thesis 36 years ago (1983), she used typewriter (computer was not available at that time) . If you look at what happened 36 years ago with modern eyes, you will definitely come up with wrong assumptions and conclusions. Since the writing period of Tsai’s thesis was from 1981 to 1983, Tsai had to set up the margins of her typewriter “page by page” in order to type “page after page”. As a result, “There will be alignment, if margins are set. If there is no setting, then there will be no alignment.” In the mean time, since a typewriter was used for typing the thesis, if only a few words were needed for amending, then “retyping the entire page could be very time-consuming.” Due to the oral examination committee passed Tsai’s thesis on the spot and did not request her to revise any of the content, hence “to correct typos by handwriting” would be considered appropriate due to the context quality and its completeness were not affected. And for the photocopied replenishment of Tsai’s dissertation was sent to LSE in late June, 2019, thus there are some stains can be traced in her thesis.“

Three and a half years later, Chen Mingtong issued the following statement through his lawyer on February 14, 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan: “In order to assist him (Yu Zhenghuang) to complete his master thesis and to pass the oral examination within half a year of the graduation deadline after changing the topic of his thesis, the “Preset” content (public version) is “customized” and provided to graduate students by me. The content inside of the “Preset”, in addition to the notes and annotations of thesis writing, and examples of the writing format of references, every word and sentence, including: thesis structure, chapter arrangement, research methods, objects and data sources, analysis tools, a total of 17 statistical tables, and the forms of exemplary writing and interpretation of data, are thoroughly my own creation, said by Chen Mingtong who was the former Director of the Graduate Institute of National Development, National Taiwan University (NTU) . 

Together with Tsai Ing-wen’s statements of “There will be alignment, if margins are set. If there is no setting, then there will be no alignment” and “retyping the entire page could be very time-consuming for typo corrections”, and Chen Mingtong’s “(the so-called) “Preset” (public version) is “customized” and provided to graduate students by me”, such unbelievable “myths”, are no doubt a joint humiliation, not only to the people’s intelligence of Taiwan, but a major insult to both LSE and NTU, two top universities of the world!

In other words, if Tsai Ing-wen’s “myth” is true, then which doctoral dissertation(s) of LSE at the same era has/have been similarly “covered up” as “There will be alignment, if margins are set. If there is no setting, then there will be no alignment”and “retyping the entire page could be very time-consuming for typo corrections”? Furthermore, if such negative examples which do not conform to the most basic “format” norms of thesis writing are instead a common issue at LSE, then how could LSE be ranked 56th (QS) among the world universities? Hence, should not LSE to make a public announcement that its training on the most basic academic skills is regretfully insufficient!

In contrast to Tsai, Chen Mingtong publicly admitted that “(the so-called) “Preset” (public version) is “customized” and provided to graduate students by me”. Such non-ethical conduct serverly violates the “basic code of ethics for academic research and the self-disciplined research behavior norms of academic community completely. This kind of overwhelmingly dishonest, irresponsibility, and Injustice, have already causing tremendous of social distrust and huge backlash in Taiwan. It is fair enough to say: How relentlessly, Chen Mingtong has indeed brutally blow NTU (#77, QS ) to the fate!!