The final vote for the 12th Chair and Deputy Chair of the Student Association was cast last Thursday, May 18. The results were announced in the same evening at 11:30 on Five-Tiger Hill with He Jun-horng, a sophomore of the Department of Economics, and Hsu Chu-hang, a sophomore of the Chinese Department coming out as the winners who received 3,375 votes. They beat their opponents, Lin Zhi-yu, a junior of the Department of International Trade and Lian Shi-han, a sophomore of the Spanish Department by 1,704 votes. The voting rate was 20%, 2% higher than last year—an encouraging sign for student self-governing at TKU. Just image, the turn-out rate could have been better had it not been for the Typhoon Pearl on that day. The new Chair and his partner will swear in today, May 22.

Both He and Hsu are veteran members of the Student Association to begin with, so their new roles will not pose too much of a problem to them. They are familiar with organizing big scale events and understand very well what issues are close to students’ heart. Hence, they want to see more events organized in their term that students have genuine desire of getting involved in. Their immediate task for the future; however, will be designing a system that provides proper channels for students to communicate effectively with various related university authorities.

In parallel, the election for members of the Student Congress also took place on May 18. All 10 candidates who ran for the office got elected, with Lee Ming-chan, a junior of the Department of Electronic Engineering who ran his first campaign ever, winning 1,086 votes, the highest among all the candidates. He wishes to listen to every voice of the students, be it positive or negative. The turn-out rate of this year was 14.75%—although on the low side, still a considerable improvement from previous year.

However, higher it may be than before, the turn-out rate was far from ideal. If TKU students are serious about self-governing, more efforts should be put in informing the students. According to Chen Yu-wen, a sophomore of the Spanish Department, who was an independent observer at the ballot, many students had had no information regarding the time and place of the election until it was over. She put this ignorance down to lack of publicity. Her criticism was not taken lightly as the Chair of the Congress, Lin Jia-jun, a Sophomore of the Department of Physics, required the Campaign Committee to re-think its strategies. He, of course, also reminds students to pay more attention to bulletin boards both on line and in buildings.

Sometimes the information is out there—easily accessible and available. Yet, Yuan Chu-ping, a freshmen of the Department of Public Administration, who was the Chief Executive of the Election Committee, added that most students did not seem to care about their own affairs until someone told them so. Even that, it is still hard to get students motivated to be involved in safeguarding their own interests! Overcoming this lackluster attitude will be urgent, he points out. (~ Ying-hsueh Hu )