Rejection of a Formal Apology by the NCKU Administration

Rejection of a Formal Apology by the NCKU Administration

In an email of 14 June 2011, I offered a draft of a sincere NCKU apology for human rights abuses, which appears below. That was rejected by the NCKU Secretary-General in the following reply (for the record, my first name is Richard, not John). The "official statement" about my dismissal, referred to by the Secretary-General, is a revisionist history of that dismissal as a legal action of "discontinued employment." I analyze that remarkable Orwellian statement (a masterpiece of exculpatory rhetoric) elsewhere on my blog ("Explaining and Explanation"). Here I wish only to point out the irony of a faculty member who, as member of the Teachers Union, contested my illegal dismissal but now, as an administrative assistant, claims an illegal dismissal never occurred (see "Explaining an Explanation").

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:56 AM, ccchen wrote:
Dear John:

Thank you for your proposal. We already have an official statement posted on NCKU website, which has been explained in the University senate meeting. If you can accept, I can arrange you to present in the university senate to express an official appreciation of your teaching for about 20 years in NCKU.

Thank you!

Best regards,

Chin-Cheng Chen
Secretary general, NCKU

What follows is a drafted proposal of a sincere formal apology that, as the above email indicates, the university administration has rejected for its own revisionist explanation of the 1999 illegal dismissal and human rights violations thereafter:

A FORMAL APOLOGY FOR THE ILLEGAL DISMISSAL
OF ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR RICHARD DE CANIO

June 2011

On behalf of the National Cheng Kung University faculty and administration I offer our sincere apologies for the illegal dismissal action against Richard de Canio when he was Associate Professor here in 1999.

The dismissal action was illegal to begin with. Accusations against the professor were neither proved nor investigated. He was not even notified of the initial dismissal hearing.

To insure Dr. De Canio's dismissal, an accusatory letter was solicited by an official and secretly circulated at oversight hearings. Committee chairs, who should have regulated these hearings in accordance with the law, instead colluded with lower committee chairs.

Those committees then closed ranks to protect colleagues who started the illegal dismissal, passing it, instead of protecting the professor's rights. Thus we undermined the integrity of our committees even as we compromised the rights of a professor.

When the dismissal was canceled, in December 1999, the university further undermined the professor's rights by reviving the case as a hiring action, as if an appeal had no legal effect. Our university even defied an appeal ruling by the Ministry of Education that favored the professor, delaying reinstatement by nearly two and a half years.

Since reinstatement, the university has avoided a formal resolution of this case. By refusing an apology for our illegal actions, the university has acted as if we excused those actions or even endorsed them.

Denial is not an option for a reputable academic institution. As partner of numerous universities abroad, we realize no university can stand except on human rights principles shared by those universities.

Thus we publish this formal apology to a professor from a country with which we maintain academic exchanges and where Taiwanese are treated with respect, according to principles of law and equality under the law. We apologize for our failure to reciprocate accordingly.

We cannot undo mistakes of our past. But a university, governed by laws, must remedy them, while insuring they will not be repeated. We hereby publish this formal apology as part of a formal closure to this case.

In sincere appreciation for Professor De Canio's contribution to our university over his twenty-two years teaching here,

[Signature of NCKU president should be here]