tim's experiment

Goodness I did not expect this. The students are on holiday, the staff are attending to their research or conferencing (which is what we call being on holiday in academic circles) political punch-ups continue at their usual level but somehow the question of who should be the next president of Lingnan University is still filling columns. Some of them quite interesting and some of them not.

Let us start with a piece by one Ronald Teng, who, we are told, is the founder of MEA, a promoter of liberal art education. Readers who wish to know more about MEA should not waste their time Googling it. Having sorted out a way of eliminating Middle East Airlines and the Ministry of External Affairs (India) I still could not find any web presence with these initials except the Medical Education Association, which doesn’t sound like liberal arts to me.

Anyway, to business. Let us start with the bad news. Mr Teng may know a lot, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. So we were treated to this “If you look at how other (that is, foreign) universities select their president, you will  find that representatives of the student union are not allowed in the board of governors’ or trustees’ meeting. Even when they are they have no say in the selecting of the president, or any official.” The nice thing about sweeping statements of this kind is that they can be falsified by the production of one counter-example. This one will do: when I was the President of the Student Union of the University of Lancaster in 1970-71 I did in fact sit ex officio on the University Council and I was a member of the committee which selected the next Chancellor of the University.

Slightly less erroneously, but not much, Mr Teng also devoted a good deal of space to the demolition of the view that Presidents, or Professors, should be elected by the students. Nobody is asking for that. Mr Teng says that students are “stakeholders” but not all stakeholders are created equal. A fair point. But stakeholders come in different guises. The students are not just the stakeholders of the university, they are its clients. Their wishes are important and should be considered. A university ignores their preferences at its peril. There are, after all, other universities.

Having said which Mr Teng was spot-on in his main point, which was that it was extremely ill-judged of the new president to refer in his opening speech to the Chairman of the University Council as “his boss”. This betrays such a serious misunderstanding of the way the system is supposed to work as to suggest that the new Pres, Professor Leonard Cheng, was not such a good choice after all. Universities are supposed to be autonomous organisations pursuing academic ideals. Their government is divided between a Senate, which represents the academic side, and a Council, whose responsibilities are purely practical. The purpose of the Council is to provide expertise in such matters as personnel, finance and construction, about which academics are generally uninformed. The Council should have nothing to say about teaching or research – in other words the important outputs of the university. It is a servant, not a master. It is true I suppose that institutions which used to be private colleges or polytechnics may not be quite up to speed on this point. They should be working on it.

And so onwards and upwards to the Post’s editorial writing department, where odd things were going on this morning. The Post’s person with a pen thought that Prof Cheng was well known in academic circles. This was “probably why (CY) Leung sought his advice when drafting his campaign platforms…” But nobody can be criticised for having his advice sought. The complaint is not that Prof Cheng was asked but that when he was asked he said yes. Being on a campaign team is not like being on a government advisory body. It is not public service. It is a personal help to the person who is trying to get elected. People are entitled to suppose that if Prof Cheng agreed to be on Mr Leung’s advisory team it was because he approves of Mr Leung and what he stands for. After all I am also quite well known in local academic circles. If Mr Leung had invited me to join his team I would have told him to … well, I would have refused.

The Post then opines that “the truth is that Cheng … has gone through a well-established selection mechanism,. which takes in to account academic excellence and leadership rather than political considerations. There is no evidence to suggest that due process has not been followed. To suggest otherwise does not do justice to those who played a part…” This may be the truth, but for less gullible observers the question has to be “how do we know?” We do not see the process. We do not meet the people. We are not told who was considered or who was rejected or why. We are simply presented with the result. And the result looks suspicious.

I fear that the Post and its people have not yet got the full measure of what is bothering local university students, which is the growing suspicion that the government is filling top university posts with its friends, supporters and fellow travellers. In the long run this will pave the way for the emasculation of those parts of the universities which deal with controversial current issues and the expulsion of academics whose views do not fit in with the Leung worldview. The new OU chief is a member of the NPC, the Post notes. So, oddly enough, is Prof Cheng’s “boss” the Chairman of the Lingnan University Council. Are we beginning to see a trend here?