Viewing How the Education Ministry Looks Down at University Autonomy from Two Banning Orders

 Viewing How the Education Ministry Looks Down at University Autonomy from Two Banning Orders

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

April 14, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pneumonia pandemic, the Tsai government has frequently been referring to "advance deployment", but many measures are nevertheless short-sighted and contradictory. The two banning orders recently issued by the Education Ministry are cases in point: one is setting restrictions on distance teaching in universities, and the other is suddenly banning the use of the ZOOM videoconferencing platform system at various levels of schools. The two banning orders came quickly and urgently, catching schools off guard. Especially, the Education Ministry did promote the use of Zoom videoconferencing to conduct distance teaching on campuses, and later banned it overnight on the pretext of information security issues, exposing the coarse quality of decision-making and the absurdity of logic, becoming the greatest irony of the Tsai government's "advance deployment".

In recent years, the Education Ministry has repeatedly shown that it abandons educational professionalism in the service of politics; from the adjustment of textbook guidelines to blocking the appointment of Kuan Chung-ming, it has been willing to act as a political pawn again and again. Whether ZOOM should be banned ought to be professionally assessed and discussed by communicating with the universities. However, the Tsai government, just because of the doubts of a handful of Green legislators and Green media outlets, immediately issued the ban, without minding the tools of substitution, which was extremely unreasonable. Especially, the Education Ministry, being unmindful of the hard work injected by the faculty across Taiwan to familiarize themselves with this tool, immediately issued the ban; this brusque and absurd attitude is a shame to the word of "education".

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