Protest, Speech and Democratic Principles

The news of a protest against National Taiwan University (NTU) is both hopeful and heartbreaking. The hope comes from seeing students stand up against a strong institution that has the ability to make a very impressive response. These kids are brave and highly principled. The disappointment stems from the conservative reaction that followed this experience of democratic principles in action.

The protest took place on Tuesday, November 15 (2011), during the university's anniversary celebration ceremony. As NTU president Lee Si-chen was offering his opening address, some 30 students rushed the stage to raise banners protesting the school's decision to force the removal of a residential community (Shao-hsing Community: 紹興社區) based on land owned by the school. The school has the right to remove the residents, but the students were protesting the university's unilateral decision to do so without the courtesy of first negotiating with the residents. The news report suggests that students had been protesting what they see as a the heavy-handedness of yet another bureaucracy supported by tax payer funds.

Disappointing is the NTU president's response, which may be entirely necessary to satisfy the bureaucratic culture's sense of self-importance, but nevertheless suggests a lack of respect for the principles of free speech and civil disobedience in a mature democracy. The university president called the protest "disrespectful" to the university and inappropriately timed. But when can a protest be more effective if not at an important public event? (I remember the English-language China Post which in an editorial and other reportage gleefully encouraged heckling at then-President Chen Shui-bian's public speeches.) The president did have the good grace to note that the student protesters had "good intentions." Perhaps he should praise the protesters for demonstrating a mature understanding of democratic ideals.

It is heartening to see that the protest had some effect, for it brought to public attention an issue that would otherwise have remained private. Three cynical cheers to the NTU bureaucrat (quoted in the China Post report) who managed to blame the government for the school's ruthlessness in sending out eviction notices, while simultaneously making a call for more money from the government. Does this kind of "mei ban fa" (沒辦法) reaction suggest that the student protesters really would have had no option other than to stage a protest that would have the potential of embarrassing the bureaucratic machine into human action?

We in the academic community need to learn a deep respect for protest, knowing that if a large number of intelligent and rational individuals are willing to undertake such a major public action they must be doing so for reasons that far outweigh the ceremonial, symbolic and personal significations of the disrupted public events. Only in a democratic society can David take on Goliath through the exercise of free political speech. How sad that civil society is still so uncivilly skewered that anybody would be forced to resort to these measures.
Source: The China Post (read the full article at The China Post)

Chomsky's Challenge: Multicultural or Monocultural?

Noam Chomsky was in Taiwan for a speaking engagement at Academia Sinica. (Who else has such money to host a big name like Chomsky?) At a news conference after his talk, a local reporter questioned Chomsky about the acceptable age at which children can learn another language.

"It's not a question of linguistics," Chomsky said. "For a young child, language learning is kind of like breathing.

When it was pointed out that some politicians and bureaucrats believed it is harmful for a child to learn English at a young age (does anybody remember then-mayor Ma's opening address to the ETA-ROC conference audience?), Chomsky replied that the question is not one of language, but of social policy. "What kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a multicultural society or a culturally uniform society?"

Read more about Chomsky's speech at the Taipei Times website.

Research & Teaching: For the Public Good

Research is selfish and leads to a monopolizing of intellectual property by the researcher and the financial backer. Monopolies do not serve society, so they need to be broken. In the world of academia, the monopoly buster is the classroom, where the results of the research effort are distributed for free to the public through students.

This is the key argument of Professor Steve Fuller's opinion piece, "Is Academic Freedom Worth the Price?" (available online at the Taipei Times). And once the original findings of one's research are disseminated to the public through the classroom, the researcher and the financial backer are forced to engage in more research, an effort to keep the selfish monopoly alive.

For universities, therefore, this means "allowing access to knowledge to students who lack the intellectual, political, or financial resources that might have enabled them to produce it for themselves."

Of great relevance to too many professors in Taiwan is Professor Fuller's admonishment that universities can only perform as they were naturally intended to do when academics "speak and write plainly, demystify jargon, present their ideas in alternative media and stress applications to domains that do not concern the academics themselves."

It is a lesson we all need to learn and remember.

China's Blog Censorship is Severe

Censors Delete 95 Percent of Blogs a Day

This item from journalist Amy Nip appeared in the South China Morning Post (June 20, 2010; page 3). It is available online at the RFA blog.

Mainland censors are estimated to delete up to 95 per cent of blog entries posted on the internet every day, according to an academic and veteran blogger.The source? Official data on internet usage released this week.

There are about 220 million bloggers in China, according to a white paper on the internet published by the State Council.

And more than 66 per cent of internet users frequently post, with over 3 million messages posted via BBS, news commentary sites and blogs every day, the paper said.

But Isaac Mao Xianghui, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, told the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum in the city on Thursday that the official number of postings fell far short of what it should be.

Assuming bloggers who post frequently add 0.5 items per day, there should be 72.6 million entries posted daily – not 3 million, he said. “The difference between the two [72.6 million and 3 million] reveals that 95.9 per cent of comments could be deleted during the censorship process,” Mao said.

The surging number of internet users on the mainland is creating a big headache for authorities.

When Mao began blogging in 2002, there were fewer than 1,000 bloggers on the mainland. A year later that number had surged to 100,000.

Content in simplified Chinese characters increased by 124 times between 2002 and 2008, according to a study conducted by Mao.

“Internet users are like rats and the censorship mechanism is a cat. There are too many mice and the cat does not know which one to go after,” Mao said.

Beijing shifted its strategy in 2008 to handle the growing volume of content on the internet. Instead of screening website content, it now blocks sites completely, he said.

About 70,000 sub-domain names – major sessions of a website – are blocked on the mainland, including YouTube, Facebook and Picasa. Several new sites are added to the list every day. But internet users are becoming increasingly familiar with ways to access blocked sites. Savvy bloggers also create duplicates to ensure their writing evades censorship.

Mao said the flood of internet content will likely overwhelm Beijing’s censors by 2014. But he said instead of devoting resources to censorship, the authorities should turn their attention to cyber crime. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s director for Asia-Pacific internet policy, John Galligan, urged governments worldwide to update copyright and privacy protection laws as cross-border data storage gained popularity.

Cloud computing, which lets companies subscribe to software that is accessible through a Web browser, has developed rapidly in recent years. But who owns the information in the cloud – the subscriber or the service provider – has yet to be clearly defined in the international community, said Galligan, who was at the Internet Governance Forum, which was also held in the city. There are still “lots and lots of gaps” as Asian countries move into the digital era, he said.

The Classroom Curmudgeon: Xenophobia in the System

My thanks to Prof. Peter Osborne of Donghua University for his opinion piece, "Internationalizing Higher Education," which was published in the Taipei Times, July 24 (2010) edition. While I cannot agree with or support everything Prof. Osborne stated regarding the inadequacy of Taiwan's university system regarding "internationalization of education," there is one item that I am in total agreement with:

"At meetings I see some foreign professors proficient in Chinese, English and their subject of expertise who perform the same job with equal competency as their Taiwanese counterparts, yet these same foreign professors are not legally entitled to the pensions their Taiwanese colleagues are, despite making equal contributions to government taxes, health and pension schemes. Where is the internationalism in exploiting a worker based on their nationality?"

Prof. Osborne has pointed out legalized discrimination, but unfortunately too few of our Taiwanese colleagues--those who have the real power to rectify this gross injustice--either don't know about this or don't care. They don't realize that when they retire after full time service in national universities, they are entitled to monthly pension payments that I as a permanent resident am not entitled to.

With this sort of injustice built into the system, I wonder that Taiwan's universities are able to attract intelligent candidates from overseas at all. this is a wrong that must be put right, not only for the benefit of our international scholars, but for the benefit of Taiwan's academia as well.

There is Hope

There is some hope for peace, and it may begin with just a handful of individuals. Palestinian youths (encouraged by grassroots groups) visiting Israel's official Holocaust memorial are deeply moved by what they see. They return to their communities with a new openness toward seeing their neighbors across the border as human. "If we say that the Holocaust happened, if we accept it, then we accept that Israelis are human just like us and I think that here is the twist: we do not want to consider Jews as humans because of all the suffering that we go through we cannot believe that human beings can do such a thing."

Access the full article: Palestinians go to Israel to Learn about Holocaust

The Internet and Social Activism

In an interview available online, Charles Leadbeater spoke about the use of new online apps, devices and social networks as a site for social activism. Here are some excerpts/quotes of importance for the teaching community:

"One of the joys of the Internet is finding and reading something you think is wonderful that you'd never have found without it."

"...You have to hope that in 10 years, when digital technology is all-pervasive and meets both the huge need in the developing world and a body of social entrepreneurs, we will witness some flowering of social innovation to, for instance, provide education in new ways, to mobilize people to critical action in new ways, or allow poor people access to markets."

"It's all about access... Ten-year-olds are alike wherever you go: they just gobble this stuff up. I went to a school in a village three hours outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, 20 kilometers down a mud track. The parents of half of the kids in the school were illiterate, but watched the kids make videos for YouTube. It's waiting to explode, but if it arrives pre-packaged or tied up or fenced off, then you won't get that."

"You can go online now, and find really thoughtful, in-depth, considered, well-informed communities around virtually any issue. If it's your issue, there are now new ways of mobilizing knowledge that weren't there before. There are real bodies of significant knowledge on the Web that are valuable that we haven't done nearly enough with."

Read the full interview online at the Taipei Times newspaper. See:
"The untapped power of the Internet to foment social change"