Singapore — Ngee Ann Polytechnic said on Thursday (June 17) that after looking into the incident, it has decided to terminate the service of the lecturer who was filmed making racist comments to an interracial couple.
Tan Boon Lee was filmed earlier in the month telling an interracial couple that it was racist that Indians marry Chinese because it is predatory. Shortly after, a former student of his spoke up saying that he had also made Islamophobic remarks in class.
The school has officially charged Tan, a senior lecturer at the polytechnic’s School of Engineering, with serious breach of its staff code of conduct and is “proceeding to terminate his service”.
In the video that went viral, sparking the entire chain of events, Tan was seen berating an Indian man for being in a relationship with a Chinese woman. The nine-minute video, taken by the woman herself and posted on the Indian man, Dave Parkash’s Facebook page, showed a Chinese man who said: “This has nothing to do with nationalism, it has all to do with race”.
Throughout the video, Tan kept insisting that Dave, a Singaporean who is half-Indian and half-Filipino, should date an Indian, instead of his girlfriend who is half-Chinese and half-Thai.
On June 9, one of Tan’s former students, Ms Nurul Fatimah Iskandar, 22, said in an Instagram post and Facebook post that Tan had initiated an offensive discussion about Islam during lesson time, where he singled her out for being Muslim.
Ms Nurul wrote that Tan had a “full-on discourse about Islam” on July 28, 2017.
”I was the only Muslim in class. He opened websites on the projector, pointing out things he didn’t agree with about the Quran and Prophet Muhammad s.a.w to the class”, she wrote.
Ms Nurul added that at one point Tan pointed to her and asked if she agreed with what he was saying. Ms Nurul and a friend of hers, Merick, walked out of the class and sat outside on the floor of the corridor.
The polytechnic said that it immediately offered counselling support to Ms Nurul once it heard of the allegations and met her to get more details about her experience with the lecturer. It also added that police investigations are also under way.
The polytechnic also said that it also sought to understand why Ms Nurul’s feedback had not been acted upon when she submitted it to the school in 2017.
Ngee Ann Polytechnic said in a TODAY Online report that it has plans to advise its staff members on how to manage and report feedback that they may receive outside the official channels.
It also added that it would make all feedback channels more accessible and visible on its website, and publicise them on its campus digital screens. /TISG
Read related: Ngee Ann Poly lecturer who said that Indians marrying Chinese is a racist act also made comments against Islam in class