Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔/CNA file photo)

Taipei, Jan. 26 (CNA) National Taiwan University (NTU) has asked the Ministry of Education to certify the election of Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) as its new president after the school cleared him in a plagiarism case, NTU said in a statement late Friday.

The university said in the statement that Kuan's election had been handled according to regulations set by the ministry and that he should be approved as the school's president.

Earlier Friday, NTU Research Ethics Office head Lee Fang-jen (李芳仁) addressed allegations that a paper presented by Kuan at forum co-sponsored by NTU and Academia Sinica contained sentences and charts from another person's master's thesis.

He said the school collected information related to the charges, but at a meeting Friday determined that the case could not be upheld.

Lee said NTU's ethics committee found that the forum itself was not a formal academic gathering and that the paper presented was simply a summary of the results obtained in the research process to that time and not a finished or formal thesis as per the field's academic standards.

It therefore did not constitute a case that was covered by NTU's ethics rules, he said.

The NTU Presidential Search Committee elected Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔), a former head of the National Development Council (NDC), as the university's next president on Jan. 5, with plans to have him take the position in February.

But ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Chang Liao Wan-chien (張廖萬堅) on Thursday accused Kuan of plagiarism in a paper he jointly-authored, which if true would have been a violation of academic ethics.

(By Phoenix Hsu and William Yen)
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