Lately I have been casting an editorial eye over a great deal of written material produced by my colleagues. The accumulated documents will shortly be exposed to the visiting eyes of a team who will assess our activities. So one wishes it to look good, or at least correct. One of the recurrent problems is the spelling of a few words, like programme, centre and colour, which have different spellings in the US from those used elsewhere. Now there is a school of thought which maintains that there is no such thing as correctness in these matters. As long as the reader knows what you mean the language works. I think this is lazy. The reader is entitled to expect that he or she will be spared gratuitous surprises. At least there should be consistency.
On the whole I think in academic contexts we should probably aim a bit higher. There is no such thing as a good spelling system or a bad spelling system. All of them are merely sets of arbitrary rules. What we expect of an educated writer is that he should use one recognisable set consistently. As a matter of courtesy this should be the set of rules with which most of his readers are familiar. Now the Hong Kong education system, for obvious historical reasons, has always used the non-US system, which for reasons of brevity is usually referred to as the British system, though it is used in plenty of other places, and indeed would hardly be worth taking seriously if it were not. I repeat that this is not because the Brit system is in any way better. There are no value judgments to be made between spelling systems. It is simply a useful convenience if we all use the same one.
As far as the local universities are concerned, on the whole we do. Taking the two easiest words to check up on, The University of Hong Kong offers programmes and supports centres. So do the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the former Polys, Baptist U and Ling Nan. Shue Yan University has programmes but does not yet seem to have sprouted centres. To this general consensus there is one spectacular exception: the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The HKUST does not have Programmes, and neither does it have Centres. Instead it has Programs and Centers.
As it happens I remember when this rot started. About ten years ago the then Vice Chancellor took exception to the fact that the university had both centres and centers, and decreed that in future all centers should be so spelled. Or as the Americans would say, spelt. I recall writing a piece at the time for one of the local newspapers pointing out firstly that the Hong Kong education system taught our students to write centre, and secondly that the university would look dangerously illiterate if it mixed up two different spelling systems. The university seems to have recognised this problem, and solved it in a perverse way. They have changed all the spellings to the American system. I expect there are some Britishisms lurking somewhere but all the things you can easily check on the university website have been Americanised, right down to the unnecessary full stops after abbreviations like Prof. They have even adopted “meter” (which has only been the legally endorsed US version since 2008) instead of the internationally agreed “metre”. This seems a rather controversial choice for a scientific establishment.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this a huge anguished effort to save the Vice Chancellor’s face by pretending that the “Center” order was merely the first step on a long march to a different spellling system? Or is the place just full of scientists and technologists who do not care? Having spent a certain amount of time with the website I conclude that if there is anyone in the university who can write good plain English free from jargon and academic fad words then he or she is kept well away from the internet spout. My bull shit detector was already muttering to itself when I found ” Transforming the UG Experience”, which starts with “The undergraduate academic program structure will be re-engineered to encourage students to become autonomous and life-long learners”. The detector was ringing merrily long before I got to the end, where we meet the aspiration to “develop an internationalised campus community that is fully integrated into the undergraduate learning experience”.
The losers in all this are the students. No doubt the ” undergraduate learning experience” includes some effort to introduce these scientific types to the consumption and production of good plain English. But it starts with a tacit announcement of the university’s contempt for their English studies so far, which did not take into account the university’s aspiration to have an international campus community with a foreign spelling system. Maybe in 50 years time the world will have adopted the US system throughout. In the meantime the UST sits on its hilltop like a sort of orthographic Alamo defying the surrounding hordes who like U in their humor. I do not say this is wrong. I do say that it’s rude. Using the same spelling system as everyone else is a useful courtesy, like driving on the right side of the road. Which is of course the left.
tim's experiment 
HKUST’s lexicon is likely to be highly influenced by those behind one of its greatest revenue streams: the MBA cult and the pseuds that induce faddish management speak on a regular basis.
But surely we have moved on. language has evolved. Do you write co-ordination or coordination? How do you pronounce kilometre and centimetre; and how do you spell them? For you, peppering documents with center and centre are an issue, for the next generation, it isn’t. Surely, if I was a carpenter, sorry, if I ‘were’ a carpenter I’d have it nailed.
Of course language has evolved. The point is that it has evolved in different ways in different places. If the Financial Secretary began his budget speech with “G’day Bruces and Sheilas …” we would thnk it inappropriate, even though it would no doubt be perfectly acceptable in Australia. I do not know what your qualifications are to speak for the next generation but my understanding is that Hong Kong schools are still sticking with the old system in that there is one way of spelling each word, and students who pepper their written work with programs and centers will lose marks. Actually all the unviersities agree that they should follow a set of rules. The thing that sets the UST apart is that it is the only one following a foreign set.
Perhaps I should have limited my comments to the current generation and the acceptable spelling conventions for the corpus I am working on instead of looking into a crystal ball. In the corpus, we can spell centre or center etc. I prefer to use theatre, centre and programme but I also appreciate the American versions. If we are an international city, perhaps we should adopt “World English”. After all, Hong Kong is no longer a British colony.
Locally produced news programs on ATV World and TVB Pearl use British and American English. A wikipedia article on TVB news shows a photograph of its news “center” in Tseung Kwan O. (From a geographical point of view, we could observe that American spelling occurs in the north east of Hong Kong)
Perhaps even more interesting is this: http://www.yanjing.com.cn/en/intro.asp
“The Yanjing Beer Group promotes self-development through technological progress, establishes a national-level scientific research center, introduces professional talents, and grasps market opportunities by reliance on science and technology.”
Hmmm. I do not seek to comment on the spelling of local news organisations, especially the TV stations, which seem to have great difficulty with news English. Yan Jing’s spelling is as good as its beer.
Institutes of higher education are another matter. They should at least pretend that they know what they are doing, and in publications in English they should follow local conventions. All of them bar one seem to agree with this point. There is as yet no such thing as “world English” outside the linguistics conference circuit.