Author：Michael Richardson（美國獨立撰稿人）
※ Excerpt aus：https://richardsonreports.wordpress.com/author/richardsonreports/
—（January
7, 2025）The University of London brags it is a “World Class” school yet
Board of Trustees Chairman Mark Lowcock has taken a third-world
approach to university governance by keeping a complaint from
consideration by the Board. Lowcock's unilateral refusal to correct an
erroneous “paradoxical speculation” made to the United Kingdom
Information Commissioner over missing PhD examination regulations will
now not be debated or discussed by the UL's 18 member Board of
Trustees.……（Information Review Tribunal Judge） Kennedy ruled in a
Freedom of Information appeal that he lacked authority to correct the
University of London for erroneously telling （Information Commissioner）
Edwards that the university probably did not conduct its own
examinations in the 1980s as the reason UL exam regulations were
missing. Judge Kennedy advised making a complaint to the school or an
ombudsman.……（Director of Compliance）Grigson wrote,……“As has been
previously stated and having again considered your complaint we
reiterate the points made previously which are still the case and these
are: 1. The conclusions of the Information Tribunal are clear and there
is no further requirement for us to provide any further information to
the ICO as they will be aware of that judgement. 2. There is also no
regulatory or other requirement or obligation that requires us to
provide any further statement.” “On that basis and as previously stated
we do not intend and are not obligated to take any further action in
relation to your complaint and consider it closed.” The rejected
complaint explained the UL told the ICO: “We can find no evidence that
the University of London produced guidance relating to the nomination of
examiners 1982-1984. We now believe that the individual colleges may
have been responsible for assigning the examiners and so any Regulations
or guidance relating to this would have been issued by those individual
colleges.”…… The false speculation that the University did not develop
viva regulations has been definitively disproved by the discovery of the
missing regulations found in a 1983 bound PhD thesis. The false
speculation is also contradicted by the LSE minutes of the Graduate
School Committee in October 1980, an undated LSE publication entitled
Thesis Titles and University Boards of Study from that era, and LSE
Graduate School correspondence of February 1983. The false speculation
also contradicts the UL 1982-83 Calendar “Boards of Studies” section and
the “Examinations” section. The false speculation contradicts the UL
General Instructions for Appointment of Examiners, dated January 1982,
and the UL General Regulations concerning PhD examination fee schedules
and provisions for examinations. The false speculation contradicts UL
Examination Division correspondence to the Board of Studies in Law,
dated May 1983. Moreover, the false speculation contradicts UL Academic
Registrar correspondence to an examiner, dated June 1983.……Lockcock's
maneuver to keep the matter from the Board of Trustees is a breach of
the Higher Education Code of Governance.
大意：針對當年倫大/LSE考試規則的問題，雖然英國行政法庭建議向校方投訴，倫大董事會主席卻拒絕審議，不願提供進一步的說明。目前已經有大量資料可證明，博士論文的口試規範並非由個別學院制定。
—（January
13, 2025）Princess Anne has been the UL Chancellor since
1981.……Chancellor Anne has been the figurehead of the University of
London during Tsai Ing-wen's entire academic career in London all the
way through the thesis scandal that has dogged the UL for the past five
years.……Anne is the patron or president of over 300 organizations,
including the University of London.……As Deputy Chancellor, (Wendy)
Thompson gets paid to do Anne's work as head of the University of
London. While Thompson's tenure at the UL is not as lengthy as the
Princess Royal, the Tsai Ing-wen thesis controversy played out during
her time in charge, although subordinates did the heavy lifting.
Information managers Kit Good and Suzy Mereweather were tasked with
dealing with the Information Commissioner's Office. The Senate House
Library staff knew since 2015 that the UL library never received Tsai's
doctoral thesis after a search was conducted and the old card catalog in
a storeroom was consulted. However, that knowledge was not enough to
prevent Kit Good from telling the ICO that the thesis was received but
lost by librarians during restructuring. Suzy Mereweather corrected
Good's statement, after he departed the school, on the What Do They Know
website. Mereweather wrote that the UL never received the thesis from
Tsai or her examiners, but Mereweather never bothered to inform the ICO,
leaving the regulatory agency record inaccurate. The ICO subsequently
refused Freedom of Information requests about the thesis as vexatious on
the strength of Good's false statement.……The missing regulations that
Mereweather thought never existed were found by a diligent Taiwanese
researcher in a bound thesis proving their authenticity. Even after
being confronted with the missing exam regulations, Matthew Grigson,
Director of Compliance and Mereweather's boss, refused to make a
correction to the ICO.……A complaint about the paradoxical speculation
falsity to Wendy Thomspon addressed to the UL Academic Board was
derailed by Grigson who decided the matter was outside the scope of the
member professors. A second complaint was then made to Sir Mark Lowcock.
Lowcock, the recently installed Chairman of the Board of Directors, is a
Knight Commander in the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Knighthood
seems to please Sir Lowcock, who promptly proceeded to dismiss the
complaint without taking it to the Board, or Commander Thompson, or the
Princess Royal.……While the integrity of the UL reputation may not be
important to Anne, giving Camilla an unearned PhD award was definitely a
priority. The funny costumes and fancy titles and all the royal
rigmarole cannot disguise the sad fact that there has been an ethical
breach within the leadership of the United Kingdom's flagship school
that compromises the integrity of the university. They seem to think it
is okay to tell the Information Commissioner something that is not true
and then refuse to correct the falsehood when proven wrong
大意：安妮公主自1981年就擔任倫敦大學校長的榮譽職，卻從未重視過蔡英文論文門一案；對於校方人員曾向ICO提供虛假陳述，其他領導者也是放任不管，拒絕加以糾正。此種缺乏誠信的作風有損世界級大學的聲譽。
—（January
15, 2025）Information Review Tribunal Judge Stephen Cragg removed from
case for three errors of law, Tsai Ing-wen's controversial PhD thesis,
and Upper Tribunal Judge Edward Jacobs.……Information Commissioner John
Edwards branded the FOIA request to the British Library as “vexatious”
and sought to have the matter dismissed. Information Review Tribunal
Judge Sophie Buckley overruled Edwards and said the case should proceed.
Judge Cragg was then assigned, along with associate Kerry Pepperell,
and promptly dismissed the case as vexatious. Upper Tribunal Judge
Edward Jacobs took up the appeal and concluded that Jacobs had committed
three errors of law.……“This case is related to the interest that has
been generated in Dr Tsai's PhD degree. The interest is not surprising
given the state of the records kept by the institutions involved and
their inability to produce the original copy of the thesis.” “The
tribunal accepted that [Appellant] was not part of 'a concerted campaign
to undermine Dr Tsai'. Despite that, the tribunal found that
[Appellant] 's purpose is to establish that the thesis does not exist’. I
do not understand how that could be.”…… “The tribunal mentioned the
provision of the thesis, almost in passing,…It proceeded immediately to
demonstrate that the request ‘has very little value’. It related this to
the tribunal decisions relating to the award of the degree and the
records to confirm this, before saying: ‘the fact that an original copy
of the thesis cannot be found, does not mean that it did not exist.
”……“If the request is taken as asking information about the Library's
records and processes, it had a purpose, or at least a consequence.”
“The tribunal went on to consider the breadth of the request and
[Appellant] 's persistence and intransigence given that other
institutions have confirmed the award of the degree.” “I take the
breadth of the request first. The focus of this ground is on the
‘burden’ and the breadth of the request. I consider that this criticism
was unrealistic. Most requesters do not know what information is held by
the public authority. Most do not know where it is held. I read
[Appellant] 's request as covering all bases to ensure that the Library
checked all possible locations. That was sensible in order to avoid the
need for further requests and the risk of those requests being treated
as vexatious.” “Not only is the criticism unrealistic, it also confuses
(a) the information sought, (b) its possible location, and (c) the
effort needed to search for it. If the request required a manual search
in each possible location, the tribunal's criticism would make sense.
But it is surely possible nowadays for electronic searches to avoid the
need for intensive manual searches. And if the time required was
excessive, the Library was not without recourse. It could have relied on
FOIA section 12.”……“What I have said so far is sufficient to deal with
the first three grounds of appeal and to show that the First-tier
Tribunal made an error of law in applying FOIA section 14. That alone
justifies and requires a rehearing before the tribunal.” At the new
hearing, before a new judge, the only issue will be the size of the
burden on the British Library to respond to the FOIA request. It is not
likely the burden will be so onerous as to prevent the library from
providing the requested information about how it was able to catalog
Tsai's thesis four years before it was placed on a library shelf and why
it would do so. One of the mysteries about Tsai's phantom thesis may
finally be solved.
大意：英國高等行政法院法官基於大英圖書館一案的上訴人並未蓄意詆毀蔡英文，僅是詢問相關記錄與流程，圖書館回應的負擔也不會太大，認為一審有所混淆，要求退回重審，並且更換法官、召開新的聽證會。
—（July
29, 2025）Tribunal Judge Sophie Buckley has ordered the British Library
to respond to a Freedom of Information request about the 2015 cataloging
of former Republic of China in-exile President Tsai Ing-wen's 1983 PhD
thesis.……The controversy over Tsai's thesis has been fed by
contradictory statements by the London School of Economics, where Tsai
attended school, and the University of London, which awarded Tsai her
PhD degree. False statements about the thesis by British Library CEO
Roly Keating only added fuel to the blaze.……The British Library heated
up the thesis inferno when Roly Keating conducted an “internal review”
of the matter to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and falsely
stated that the LSE had published the thesis, which it hadn't. Keating
then claimed his library had a copy of the thesis, which it didn't. The
library has declined comment on Keating's falsehoods other than to say
they were in error.……The thesis controversy broke during President
Tsai's re-election campaign and generated numerous Freedom of
Information requests from Taiwanese researchers which began
bottlenecking at the Information Commissioner's Office. Inundated with
information requests, the two schools began refusing requests as
vexatious, a strategy adopted by the Information Commissioner and the
British Library. A FOI website “What Do They Know” began closing
accounts and censoring posts using the vexatious mantra. Eventually the
Information Review Tribunal had to take up appeals over vexatious
refusals.……Several Upper Tribunal decisions against the vexatious
refusals have sent cases back for further consideration and the British
Library case may be a smoking gun and now offers the most hope to learn
what was really going on behind closed doors.……the British Library entry
into the controversy came abruptly in June 2015……Suddenly, and contrary
to its own catalog protocols, an entry was made into EThOS, verifying
the thesis existence despite the fact that no library had any copy of
the dissertation.……After the controversy broke a diligent researcher
asked the library how and why was the EThOS entry made and instead of an
answer was branded as being vexatious. Judge Buckley, and two panel
members, Marion Saunders and Susan Wolf, pick up the story in the recent
decision.……“The tribunal has been provided with copies of email
correspondence in 2015 and in 2019 between the LSE, the British Library
and the University of London. It appears from that correspondence that
in 2015 no physical copies of Tsai Ing-Wen's thesis were held by any of
those institutions or by IALS library.”…… “The British Library stated in
an email in November 2019 as follows: When a record of a UK Doctoral
thesis is loaded on EThOS we allocate a running number to each thesis.
The thesis records you have listed, were all loaded on EthOS on
24/06/2015.” [Five days after the TIME magazine story was
published.]……“There is no evidence of any harassment or distress.”“There
is no evidence before us that would enable us to conclude that there is
any improper motive behind the request. There is nothing that would
enable us to link this appellant to any wider campaign relating to
Tsai-Ing Wen.”……“The correspondence also shows that: (a) On 24 June 2015
the LSE Theses online manager confirmed that ‘We unfortunately do not
have a record of this thesis in the library’ (b) On 24 June 2015 the
Senate House Library of the University of London stated in an email
that: I have done a bit of research for you and can confirm that we have
no record of the thesis in our on-line catalogue. However, we do have
an old card catalogue covering theses from the 1980s and there is a card
for this one which indicates we were to receive the thesis, but it
never arrived. The thesis does not appear to be on the British Library
Ethos service either. (c) In an email dated 10 August 2015 the IALS
library stated that ‘the thesis isn't on the IALS Library
Catalogue’.”……“The British Library has, after the event, clarified that
the EThOS record created in 2015 was a ‘metadata record’, but this
information was not available at the relevant time……”……“This is a very
broadly framed request, but there is no evidence or estimate from the
British Library as to how difficult it would be or how long it would
take to search for the requested information. Without this information
it is difficult to say how burdensome the request is likely to be. There
is no evidence before us of any other previous requests made to the
British Library with the same focus and therefore of the burden in a
wider sense.”……“Overall, we are not persuaded that this request is
vexatious in the sense of being a manifestly unjustified, inappropriate
or improper use of FOIA.”…… “The correct course of action is for the
British Library to issue a fresh response. In doing so the British
Library should comply with its duties to provide advice and assistance,
to confirm whether it holds the relevant information and to disclose the
information or claim any exemptions as appropriate.”The British Library
was given 35 days to comply with the order so by early September the
public will find out what was going on behind closed doors that led to
the creation of an EThOS record to cover for a phantom thesis.
大意：根據相關機構之間的通訊電郵，以及缺乏上訴者「無理取鬧」的證據，英國行政法院重審大英圖書館一案後，要求館方回應2015年是如何將當時並不存在的蔡英文論文加以編目。
—（September
2, 2025）After two years of stonewalling and litigation, and two false
statements by then-CEO Roly Keating, the British Library has admitted it
destroyed all information about a mysterious June 24, 2015 catalog
entry for the PhD thesis of former Republic of China in-exile President
Tsai Ing-wen.……Jonathan Fryer, head of Corporate Information Management
at the British Library, responded to a Freedom of Information request
about the mystery catalog entry with an admission any relevant records
had been destroyed. “I confirm that the British Library does not hold
any correspondence, notes, or similar documentation on this subject
dating from 2015. All of the documentation that the British Library
holds on this subject dates from 2019 or later…the creation of the
metadata record for the thesis in question was via a routine ingest of
metadata from LSE, and therefore no specific documentation or discussion
about it exists from that date.”……“I further confirm that no such
correspondence, notes, Freedom of Information requests or similar
documentation on this subject dating from 2015 was held by the British
Library at the time of your request. The Library sets a retention period
for routine correspondence of between twelve and thirty-six months
depending on the department in question, and a retention period of six
years for correspondence made in response to a Freedom of Information
request and/or for internal documentation relating to our routine
processes. After these periods all such documentation not specifically
selected for retention by the Library is deleted; if any such
documentation from 2015 had existed it would nonetheless have been
routinely disposed of during 2021 at the latest.” The “routine”
destruction of records follows a supposed “routine ingest of metadata”
from the London School of Economics. The problem with the “routine”
story is that in 2015 the LSE did not have Tsai's thesis to pull
metadata from. The LSE did not get a copy of the thesis until June 2019,
thirty-five years after it was due. The British Library has already
admitted the June 24, 2015 catalog entry was in response to a
“speculative” inquiry, The mystery catalog entry was made several days
after Tsai's campaign for the ROC presidency was featured in a TIME
magazine cover story.……Roly Keating resigned from the British Library at
the end of 2024 after taking criticism for a 2023 cyber attack on the
library.……Keating falsely claimed the LSE published the tardy thesis
entitled Unfair Trade Practices and Safeguard Actions in
2015.……Keating's second falsehood is even more unbelievable. Keating
claimed the British Library had a copy of the thesis supposedly
published by the LSE.……Fryer has now been asked to arrange a new
internal review based on his claim of a “routine ingest” of metadata.
However, if the 2015 records have been destroyed how would Fryer know
the catalog entry was routine? And what about the “speculative” inquiry
that prompted the EThOS entry back in 2015 in the first place?
大意：大英圖書館表示，除非特別選擇保留，否則通訊與內部文件會在1至6年後例行性刪除，因此館方目前並未持有2015年蔡英文論文的相關資訊。
—
（to be continued）