A complaint has been made to the University of London Academic Board seeking correction of a UL false speculation to the Information Commissioner’s Office about missing viva examination regulations. The convoluted story arises out of an academic fraud investigation concerning Republic of China in-exile President Tsai Ing-wen over her 1984 UL award of a PhD degree. Tsai submitted her PhD thesis, entitled Unfair Trade Practices and Safeguard Actions, to the library at the London School of Economics and Political Science in June 2019, thirty-five years late.
President Tsai refuses to release her oral examination viva report which purportedly passed her thesis, while the UL refuses to even name the thesis examiners. The LSE, where Tsai attended school, says it does not know who the viva examiners were. The combination of secrecy and a tardy thesis raised significant public interest in Tsai’s viva examination, said to have been held on a Sunday, October 16, 1983. Allegations of academic fraud still dog Tsai four years after the thesis was finally submitted to a library.
Since there are questions about President Tsai’s viva panel, interest in the viva regulations came to a head when the UL reported the viva rules were missing. Unable to explain what happened to the viva regulations, the UL concocted a false statement, one that Information Review Tribunal Judge Brian Kennedy has called a “paradoxical speculation.”
The UL told the ICO that subordinate affiliated schools, like the LSE, were most likely to have promulgated viva regulations instead. The false claim arose from a speculation of the Transcripts and Student Records office at the UL and then was adopted by Information Manager Suzie Mereweather and Director of Compliance Matthew Grigson and passed on to the ICO which accepted the speculation as fact.
Both Mereweather and Grigson have refused to correct the erroneous statement to the ICO, leaving the regulatory agency misinformed about whose responsibility it was to test PhD candidates in the 1980s.
The UL Academic Board is tasked with oversight of the UL responses to regulatory agencies and is chaired by Vice-Chancellor Wendy Thomson, who actually is in charge of the UL. Princess Anne has been the Chancellor since 1981, although she limits herself to ceremonial activity. If a UL event doesn’t require fancy clothes or funny hats, Her Royal Highness is not likely to be there. As if to prove she sticks to ceremonial duties only, Anne has ignored two registered letters from Yungtai Hsu, an Oxford-educated PhD, who has urged Anne to get involved in the Tsai Ing-wen controversy to avoid damage to the UL’s reputation.
The complaint explains 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.”
However, the “paradoxical speculation” misinformed the ICO and contradicts a considerable body of evidence that the UL, and not schools like the LSE, conducted the thesis viva exams in the 1980s.
The false speculation that the University did not develop viva regulations has been definitively disproved by the discovery I reported of the missing viva regulations found in a 1983 bound PhD thesis. I provided the University with the missing viva regulations on December 22, 2023.
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 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.
The false speculation contradicts UL Academic Registrar correspondence to an examiner, dated June 1983.
The complaint to the Academic Board concludes: “Therefore, I hereby complain to the Academic Board seeking a remedial communication to the ICO informing the regulatory agency of the falsity of the University speculation about the missing viva regulations and accepting responsibility for the conduct of PhD viva examinations, rather than individual colleges as was asserted.”
The “paradoxical speculation” is not the first time the UL has made a false statement to the ICO. In an ICO case involving President Tsai’s missing PhD thesis, the UL made an incorrect statement blaming Senate House librarians for losing the thesis during library reconstruction. Information Manager Suzie Mereweather finally corrected that falsehood on the What Do They Know website explaining the library never received Tsai’s thesis, however the UL did not bother to correct their error with the ICO, keeping the false lost-by-librarian claim part of the official ICO record.
If the University of London is interested in keeping its credibility intact, the Academic Board should tell the ICO that both stories, one about the missing thesis and the other about missing regulations, were false. The University insists that no bad faith was involved in the mistakes. If so, now is the time for the Academic Board to own up to the incorrect statements and tell the ICO the truth.
Richardson Reports 