What does a university owe its students? This question attracts a surprising range of answers. Idealists regard the institution as in loco parentis, and infer that it should treat students as it would wish its own children to be treated. The ultra-realists say that the sole obligation of a university to its undergraduates is to teach what is on the syllabus, test the results and certify them for potential employers.
There is much variation in this matter, between teachers and between institutions. Hong Kong universities generally now seem to be abandoning any notion of care for their students.
When I joined the then Baptist College in 1988 it was a post-secondary college. In the ensuing years it turned into a university. In many ways this was an improvement: more money, better pay, housing allowances, nicer titles, less pressure on potential students to go to a “real university”.
But there are no benefits without costs, and one cost in this case was a change in the sort of people who wanted to work at BU. When it was a college doing nothing much besides teaching, the staff were people who enjoyed working with youngsters. As time went by and the institution moved up the academic food chain they were gradually replaced by people who were willing to seek wealth and fame by conforming to the management’s desire to see us all devote most of our attention to research.
I recall a staff training session in which the youngest member present asked the oldest one how much time should be devoted to teaching and how much to research. The answer was that you should spend the least amount of time you could get away with on teaching and the most you could spare on research.
Where this was leading became clear much later, when a discussion of a student with a personal problem led one colleague to opine that such things were none of our business and should be referred to the Student Advice Service when first noticed.
These were extreme positions and in my time BU remained generally a humane and thoughtful environment where young people were not just taught but also cared for. This may have owed something to its religious origins.
Anyway this gradual change of focus pales into insignificance compared with the state of near-open warfare which local universities now wage against some of their students. No university now tolerates a student union. Many student publications have closed. And now we have the case of Chinese U student Miles Kwan.
After the Wang Fuk Court fire Mr Kwan organised an on-line petition calling for an investigation of the fire, accountability for those responsible, resettlement for the residents and a review of construction supervision.
You would think this was harmless enough. All the things Mr Kwan had suggested were promised by the Chief Executive a day or two later. Can it be an offence to agree with the CE too early?
Well apparently yes. Mr Kwan was arrested by the national security police on, we were told, “suspicion of subversive intent.” This does not make a lot of legal sense. “Intent” itself is not an offence; there must be an action with it. So it may be that the matter will not be continued. It may also be that the police proceed to a formal prosecution and Mr Kwan is acquitted.
This does not look much like the majestic machinery of the law rolling on its impervious and impersonal way; it looks more like a deliberate act of intimidation by a regime which cannot tolerate any spontaneous expression of opinion not controlled by itself.
You might also think that all this had nothing to so with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Mr Kwan was a student. What students get up to in their off-duty hours is generally nothing to do with their university authorities. While we can all think of scenarios when we might not wish to follow this rule, launching an on-line petition is hardly one of them.
In any case, if a student is arrested, prudent universities stand back to await the result of the proper prosecution. The police case should go first. This sensible policy is in fact enshrined in the CUHK’s published procedures for handling student discipline cases.
Nevertheless Mr Kwan was invited to meet a disciplinary panel on January 7. The panel meeting seems to have been a stormy occasion. Mr Kwan’s inquiry about the offences with which he was charged was rejected with “we ask the questions here”. He did not conceal his misgivings about the procedural fairness of the whole affair.
The panel’s conclusion was odd. It decided to take no action over the arrest, but to expel Mr Kwan from the university for his “impolite and disrespectful attitude” during the hearing and the conclusion that it was “more likely than not” that he had breached confidentiality rules, presumably by telling people about the up-coming hearing.
This is legally dubious and also cruel. Mr Kwan will now not be able to graduate, after six years of study at CUHK. Preventing people from graduating as a disciplinary move is the capital punishment of university discipline. It is and should be the last resort.
When I was a member of a university disciplinary committee we spent a lot of time explaining to people who had incurred fines – usually from the library – that in the last resort they would not be allowed to graduate without clearing up their debts. We were very anxious not to carry out this threat. In cases involving small sums and genuine poverty we sometimes had a quick whip-round and paid the debt ourselves.
We would not have conjured up two new offences during the hearing of another matter and I can see no satisfactory explanation for what happened to Mr Kwan. Another petition has now been raised (daring stuff) asking the university to over-rule the committee’s decision as being unjust and procedurally improper.
But in a sense the damage has already been done. I do not know if the committee went off-piste because it felt pressured to display a becoming level of zeal for national security. But who would willingly attend an institution where students are so eagerly sacrificed to the gods of political correctness?
tim's experiment 