tim's experiment

Curious piece in Pravda the other day by Prof Sun Kwok, who is the Dean of Science at the University of Hong Kong. Much of this was about matters so specialised to university teaching that you wondered why the editors had been willing to run it. The headline provided, “Teachers shouldn’t strive to be their students’ best friends”, offered a whiff of illicit erotica which was not present in the article, which actually was a sustained attack on the teaching evaluation system whereby students are invited at the end of the course to give some formal feedback on what they thought of it.

Prof Sun’s approach to this matter illustrated two permanent features of university life: the complete indifference of academics to academic research about their own activities, and their total failure to apply to the day-to-day management of their activities the sort of intellectual rigour which one hopes they apply to their scholarly activities. Teaching evaluations by students are well-known to have some features which call for care and sophistication when they are being interpreted as a sign of teaching quality. Nobody, one hopes, is dumb enough simply to take an average score as the end of the matter. Indeed having vented his prejudices about bribery and students preferring the easy and familiar Prof Sun indicates some willingness to look at the scores and their distribution for a more complex picture. He is also, like most of us, interested in the comments which are provided along with the scores. Still it is a bit disturbing that someone in his senior position is basically disposed to dismiss his only source of student feedback as the product of corruption and idleness. Compared with other sources of information the students have one unique advantage: they have been in the classroom while the teaching was going on. The alternatives to formal feedback are informal feedback and informal feedback relayed by third parties. Or to put it shortly, gossip.

Prof Sun disputes this. He says he can tell which teachers are good and which are not. He looks at contributions to curriculum development, suggestions for teaching methods, developing demonstrations and participating in student academic activities. These are all activities outside the classroom. They do not necessarily indicate a talent for teaching. Prof Sun is dallying with a well-known psychological quirk, the illusion that people’s qualities are more consistent and congruent than they really are. There also seems to be a risk that ambitious faculty members will be more assiduous in activities which are clearly visible to their Dean than in those which are only visible to their students. He says that “peer observations” are a better way to judge teaching quality than “numerical schemes”. But there are no peer observations inside Hong Kong classrooms. University teachers never watch each other’s work. Peer observation is a euphemism for gossip, or good performance in the committee room.

I have collected a lot of teaching evaluations in my time. Some of them were very nice. I once had to tell a class that they should not put things like “we all love Tim” in the comments sections because this might be misinterpreted. I also have occasionally had comments which were so cutting that they caused me acute anxiety for months about whether I was doing the right thing. But on the whole I find people who complain about the system are those who consistently get low scores, and I do wonder if perhaps Prof Sun is reacting to criticism, or the fear of criticism, of the sort of scores people are getting in his faculty. If so, the remedy is not to abolish the scoring system but to improve the teaching. This might start with recruitment. I suppose that Hong Kong U, like most local universities, usually hires people on the basis of their record and potential in research. Clearly if you are looking mainly at other matters you will occasionally recruit poor teachers. Why should this be surprising?

Hong Kong U students have been a turbulent lot lately. Science students are usually docile but if the degree of contempt for their opinions exhibited by Prof Sun is widespread then the turbulence may also be unsurprising.

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The French government which seized power in 1848 became notorious for paying people to dig holes, and paying other people to fill them in. This was considered a controversial way of reducing unemployment even then, and the government concerned was soon overthrown by Napoleon III. However its spirit lives on in Frederick Ma Si-hang, the chairman of the MTR Corporation. Mr Ma has been campaigning for the Legislative Council to fund the cost over-runs of the MTR’s baby, the Express Rail Link. You might have thought that Mr Ma would have devoted some attention to the alleged merits of the project: its important role as a link, a tourist attraction, an architectural ornament, or whatever. But, at least according to the items in last week’s newspapers, Mr Ma did not take this course. Instead he warned that up to 7,000 people in the construction industry would lose their jobs if the project was aborted.

This struck me as a rather odd use of language. It is a commonplace in the construction industry that workers are taken on for a project, with no guarantee of continued employment after the work on the project stops. Whether the project is finished or cancelled does not make any difference; when work stops you’re on the street. So these 7,000 people for whose prosperity Mr Ma expresses such concern are the people who would have been sacked without apology or compunction last year if the project had finished on time. They are still working because it is running late. It is not necessarily their fault that it is running late, but the fact that they are still working on it is in a sense an unexpected bonus. The question is whether they get an extra two or so years added to the expected contract period or only one. This is no doubt a matter of considerable importance to the people concerned but it hardly seems to merit the “jobs at stake” headlines which Mr Ma was angling for.

Mr Ma’s other original contribution to the argument was the suggestion that if the project were cancelled then international contractors might “give Hong Kong a bad name.” I can believe that. International contractors would no doubt like to believe that Hong Kong people are a bunch of gullible suckers who will continue to pour money into a hole in the ground however late or over budget the hole may be. Does having a bad name means having a reputation for axing projects which are missing the date and price promised? Bring it on.

Also weighing in on the construction industry’s employment needs last week was the president of the Hong Kong Construction Subcontractors Alliance, Lawrence Ng San-wa. Mr Ng picked up a broader brush, complaining that the Legco log-jam was threatening the approval of a large number of government projects. If these were cancelled the Construction Industry Alliance had estimated that 20 per cent of the 400,000 people who work in the sector could be thrown out of work. Picking up this point Mr Ng asserted that “taking into account the family members of those affected employees, the affected people would be as much as 1.4 million”. This casts an interesting light on family sizes in the construction sector. One fifth, or 20 per cent, of 400,000 people is 80,000. If we divide Mr Ng’s 1.4 million affected family members by 80,000 we come to an average size per worker of 17.5. This is not terribly convincing. Even if we assume that every construction worker is married and supports both his and his wife’s parents we are still asked to believe that the average number of kids in construction families is 11.5, compared with 1.5 for the population generally. Are people in the construction industry breeding like rabbits? Or does Mr Ng need a new calculator?

Together with the talk we also had some figures. The upshot of these is that we can still save something over $10 billion by cancelling the rail link. And that disregards the possibility that the vacant hole in West Kowloon can be turned into something that makes better economic sense than a loss-making railway line. So the question before Legco is quite simple. Do we want to blow another 10 billion on a political gesture masquerading as an infrastructure or can we think of something else to do with the money? I fear we all know what the eventual answer will be.

Meantime Messrs Ma and Ng need to get their heads round the point that the purpose of government infrastructure projects is not to provide employment to workers in the construction industry. If the nicest thing you can think of about a project is that large numbers of people are employed building it, many of us will suspect that its other merits are imaginary.

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While you were paying attention to the Policy Speech and other trivia, the government slipped an interesting announcement past the public nose. Or at least I think it did. The Post managed a confusing paragraph which started: “The government has proposed increasing the electoral expenses limit for the 2017 Chief Executive election from HK$13 million from the previous HK$16.3 million because of rising costs.” I suppose that what the paper intended to say was that the proposal was to lift the limit from $13 million to $16,3 million. Do they still have sub-editors? The second half of the paragraph recorded Emily Lau’s opposition to the move. And that was it.

Now, let us look at the election. There are and must only be (see Basic Law) 1,200 electors. This suggests that the candidate, assuming he has $16 million to waste, can donate, or treat, each voter with $13,583. This is surely grotesquely excessive. And actually the situation is worse than that. Only 601 votes are needed to win, so a candidate who is careful to identify voters who are persuadable and disregard the others can increase his spending per vote to $27,000. An interesting pastime offers itself here: how many CE electors can you think of who would vote for Pol Pot if they would be paid $27,000 for doing so.

I do not suppose there is any danger of the election being corrupted. We all remember that in the closing stages of the last campaign some electors complained that they had not been told who to vote for. This deficiency was swiftly remedied and that was how we got Lufsig. The fact is that a large group of electors — whether they are actually a majority is immaterial — will vote according to instructions from the Liaison Office. Without support from this quarter no candidate stands a chance. With it, no candidate can lose.

So why does the government want to encourage, or at least allow, candidates to spend pots of money on campaigning? Clearly, this is an effort to deceive the public as to what is going on. There will be meetings, there will be manifestos, there will be speeches, there will be leaflets. Candidates will tour the territory explaining to people who have no vote what they will do if elected. Pollsters will assess the public’s view of the candidates. Pundits and bloggers will comment on their rival attractions. And all this is a smokescreen behind which the Liaison Office will make its choice, as it has always done since the job was taken from the Queen of England. If you want to be elected you have to put up a show, to perpetrate the delusion that this is a real election in which the public view of the candidates has a role. It doesn’t.

You may say, I suppose, that if rich idiots want to spend pots of money on a political pantomime that is their business. The government is merely allowing nature to take its course. But I think raising the limit sends an important message: this is a job for which only millionaires or the friends of millionaires can apply. The advantage of having a small electorate should be precisely that it is easy for any candidate to address the voters. He only has to communicate with 1,200 people. If rival candidates are going to be allowed to shower the electorate with money, though, he is going to be at a considerable disadvantage. Our Marxist masters are curiously fond of rich people.

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Some weeks ago we were regaled with a warning from the World Health Organisation. The WHO is a worthy body whose proper role is to coordinate the response to international epidemics like SARS or Ebola. This leaves it with a problem commonly found in armed forces in peacetime – how to look busy when there’s no business. The WHO’s solution to this is effectively to invent epidemics. It picks on some health threat which national governments could easily spot without assistance — medical research is published, like the other scientific stuff — and issues a global warning. The last but one concerned bacon and other preserved meat dishes like sausages. They were, we were warned, carcinogenic. That is to say consumption of large quantities would increase your chance of getting cancer. This was greeted in the press with predictable headlines along the lines of “sausages in same category as smoking”.

This is nonsense, of course. It is like saying that because you need a Dangerous Goods Licence to transport diesel fuel then diesel is in the same category as nitroglycerine. This was a predictable error and you have to suspect that the WHO did not try very hard to prevent it, because if you want to look busy then press coverage helps. On the whole the local medical community was not terribly impressed by the idea of carcinogenic bacon. There are degrees of danger and it seems the danger from this item is quite low. As long as you’re not having smoked meat with every meal you can probably dismiss this one from your list of health worries.

A week or two later came another WHO warning. This one concerned not bacon, but booze. In other respects it was rather similar. The risk of cancer, even if you were a major consumer, was quite low. Oddly, though, the medical reaction was quite different. There ensued a press conference by the Hong Kong Medical Association which called for stern measures to reduce consumption of the new carcinogen. Health warnings should be printed on bottles. Punitive taxes should be introduced to curb consumption. And so on. One of the assembled medics made the hilarious suggestion that people who liked beer should try fruit juice or soda water instead. It is difficult to believe that people can make suggestions about public policy in a state of such complete ignorance. People do not drink beer because they like the fruity taste or the bubbles. They drink it because, in the words of an old Irish drinking song, “it makes me feel content and happy”. This does not happen with fruit juice or soda water because of the absence of alcohol.

I have been opposing the persecution of smokers for many years. This is not because I smoke or because I think smoking is good for you, but because the urge to regulate other people’s pleasures is at least as addictive as smoking and just as dangerous. The urge seems  to be an occupational disease in the medical profession. And when the smokers have been driven to extinction the funhunters will move on to other joys which can be banned, restricted, made expensive or discouraged in public places. Drink is a prime target because it is not just consumed, but enjoyed. Health fanatics are like Macaulay’s Puritans who opposed bear baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Bacon is boring. Booze on the other hand is a disreputable pleasure popular with proletarians.

People have been drinking alcoholic drinks for thousands of years. The perils of over-indulgence have been known for nearly as long. It is of course proper if some new danger is discovered that we should be warned of it. It is also desirable that drinkers should be treated to the occasional reminder of the tragic destinations to which chronic wallowing can lead. What is not desirable is that minor discoveries should be used as a pretext for tightening regulations which many of us find quite acceptable as they are. Well-intentioned recommendations are welcome. Coercion is not.

I also note that something between 50 and 70  per cent of all medical “discoveries” are revealed by further research to be fictitious. So if you want to continue to believe in red wine as the health drink of the 21st century there’s still hope.

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Well folks you may not be planning to move to the mainland but it seems the mainland is coming to you. There is an old saying in military circles that if something bad happens once it is luck, twice is a coincidence … and three times is enemy action. Now that five people in succession have disappeared from the same publishing company we can exclude coincidence and assume that our Red brothers have taken a hand in matters.

Even C.Y. Leung can see the appalling consequences of having mainland policemen grabbing people in Hong Kong and bundling them over the border (unless, presumably, they do it in the express rail station) but that is not the worst of it. After all one illegal arrest could be put down to the over-enthusiasm of an underling. Clearly all five people have been arrested – or if you prefer kidnapped – because of things they had done in Hong Kong. And this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. One country two systems, the Basic Law, and all that are meaningless if conduct which is not an offence in Hong Kong can lead to your arrest on the mainland … or of course in Thailand. It is no doubt very provocative and naughty that you can buy in Hong Kong books which would be banned on the mainland if someone tried to publish them there. But that is and must be a consequence of Hong Kong preserving its legal system and the rights which that system protects. If the mainland really wants to prevent its citizens getting a whiff of freedom it can stop them coming here. But if you walk into the sea you cannot avoid getting wet.

If anyone doubted that we were looking at a Communist Party operation they could draw confirmation from the amazing and disreputable performance in Legco of Mr Ng Leung-sing, Mr Ng is regarded as pro-China and we must suppose he needs to be because he is the chairman of an off-shoot of the Bank of China. He sits in Legco for the Financial functional constituency, who must I suspect find him faintly embarrassing. His main claim to fame recently was a request for a government scientific investigation into the possibility that lead in tap water was good for you. Mr Ng’s role in current events was to provide that indispensable ingredient in denunciations of counter-revolutionary intellectuals, a lurid allegation of sexual misconduct. A nameless business friend had apparently told Mr Ng that all the booksellers had been arrested because they were in the habit of taking clandestine boat trips to the mainland to visit prostitutes there.

The implausibility of this scurrilous tale is exceded only by its slanderous quality. Councillors are immune from defamation suits while speaking in the chamber. It is a gross abuse of this necessary right to use it to denigrate individuals on the basis of non-existent evidence. Mr Ng staggered on to equally disreputable argument that it might be an infringement of the victims’ privacy to investigate what had happened to them.

I suppose this sort of thing goes on on the mainland all the time. People disappear. Lurid stories of sexual misconduct are told about them. They confess, sometimes on television. There is a show trial. This has been happening n in China for 50 years. And we all thought that, for 50 years at least, it was not going to happen here. Is it time to think again?

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