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Posts Tagged ‘universities’

Hong Kong’s universities: number going up, quality?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 16, 2024| 1 Comment »

An amusing coincidence last week. A kind friend sent me an interesting op ed piece from the China Daily about recent events at Harvard University, where the president recently resigned under pressure from major donors.

The writer of this piece mentioned, in passing, how lucky we were that such a thing could not happen in Hong Kong, because our universities enjoyed autonomy and were immune to interference from the government.

I proceeded to breakfast and the morning paper, which announced that the Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong had resigned a few days into what was supposed to be a three-year contract.

The resigning V.C., Rocky Tuan, made all the usual polite noises: honour to serve… time is ripe… grateful to all concerned for their support. The chairman of the university council also made the usual polite noises: university is grateful … outstanding leadership, etc, etc, etc.

And behind all this, as the local media reported with varying degrees of candour, was a four-year campaign by the pro-government camp to get rid of Prof Tuan, who had, in 2019, not found the safe course for university leaders in a time of crisis, which was to hide in the office and say nothing.

It is not entirely clear which of Prof Tuan’s indiscretions was unforgivable. Was it an expression of sympathy for his rebellious students? Or was it his statement in an open letter of a fact then widely acknowledged but now almost unspeakable: that some of the policing of protests had entailed more than a smidgeon of gratuitous violence from the forces of order?

Unlike the other local universities Chinese University was difficult for the government to pressure, because a majority of its council members were actually staff of the university itself, a legacy of its origins as a refuge for academics fleeing the liberation of the mainland.

This was changed by getting the Legislative Council to amend its governing ordinance, reducing the proportion of staff and increasing the proportion of outsiders, most of whom are government appointees. A similar change was reported last week in the ordinance governing the Baptist University. This was explained as providing “accountability to the public”, as if the public were going to appoint anyone to anything.

Defenders of the government will say that this does not amount to government intervention. The change to the Chinese U constitution was proposed by three members of the University Council. This will not wash. The three members are also members of the parties acceptable to the government: one DAB, one FTU, one Liberal.

In any case it does not matter whose idea it was. Having reformed Legco so that it is full of government supporters the government cannot escape responsibility for what happens in it. Nothing passes in Legco without the government’s approval.

It appears to be our leaders’ wish that nothing should happen in local universities without their approval either. This objective is to be achieved by appointing to university councils people who are willing to abuse their position.

It is an error to suppose, as a writer for the Standard did recently, that all changes in a university require the “approval of the university’s governing council”. Universities are supposed to be governed on a joint basis. Academic matters are to be decided by the Senate, financial and real estate ones by the council.

As teaching and research are the main functions expected of a university this should mean that most of the governing is actually done by the Senate. It is a long time since I was a member of a university council but I do not think this has changed, in other places. Certainly we did not aspire to fire the University Secretary, as the “reformed” Chinese U council did, or to veto a candidate for a deanship, as the University of Hong Kong council did.

It is difficult to feel optimistic about the future of Hong Kong universities generally if they are to be the playthings of political appointees who are unwilling or unable to respect the limits of their powers and rights.

We are, it seems, going to stress quantity. Another private university was recently born, so little Hong Kong now has 12 universities. On current trends it will soon be easier to find a university here than a branch of the Hong Kong Bank.

Quality may be another matter. The occasional publicised incidents in which some luckless academic is fired, refused admission to Hong Kong or chased out by a wave of ominous publicity on the front pages of the pro-government press are just the tip of a large iceberg, comprising people who have been made to feel uncomfortable and unwanted because their opinions, or research activities, are not in tune with the new reformed times.

They leave. The idea that eager replacements will appear is perhaps a bit optimistic. News travels slowly in academic circles but it travels eventually. Many overseas universities now have at least one staff member who worked in Hong Kong for a while … and has the scars to show for it.

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The international obvious

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on October 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes you read something in the newspapers which leaves you wondering where reporters have been for the last ten years. Good example in the Post last week: lead story on front of City section, 62 pt all caps headline, and what were they announcing? That most of the nominally  “international” people at Hong Kong universities are actually from the mainland. No shit, Sherlock! This is not news to anyone who has been around local universities recently. Indeed as several local universities have large and prosperous jounalism teaching departments it is likely that the only reason this has not been reported before is that it seems so obvious. Next week’s shock revelation: most Hong Kong students are between the ages of 18 and 21. The flexible use of the term “international’ may be news in Hong Kong but it has already reached London. The people who compile the Financial Times league tables, in which many local institutions are proud to feature, have announced that “international” will in future exclude people who hold a passport of the country in which their university sits. I don’t know who that is aimed at but forthcoming editions of the league tables will be perused with unusual interest round here.

Actually there are two things which call for some explanation here. One is why are local universities are not too keen on “real” foreigners. The other is why they collect so many mainlanders.

Now I’m not sure about the foreigners. Clearly for some people the language is a problem. All the local universities — even Chinese U — officially use English. But many people come up with ingenious reasons why particular subjects need to be taught in Chinese. And of course if all the students in the class speak Cantonese then the proceedings naturally become a bit bilingual. These comfortable arrangements are disrupted if a foreigner appears. And some foreigners in the past were made to feel quite unwelcome. On the other hand mainland students present the same problem, because many of them do not speak Cantonese. English survives as the compromise between the mainlanders, who do not wish to be taught in Cantonese, and the locals, who do not wish to be taught in PTH.  The advantage of the mainlanders, from this point of view, is that they are unlikely to make a critical assessment of the teacher’s own English. Many local academics suspect that they don’t speak English too good, and some of them are right. Probably there is also a marketing problem. Hong Kong universities have little interest in recruiting students from Third World countries which are short of university places. They want outstanding students from respectable countries, who could go to Oxford or Harvard. And of course such people tend to get offers from Oxford or Harvard, and accept them.

The attraction of mainlanders is simple. Mainlanders mean money. Some years ago the University Grants people decided that what they really wanted was two research universities and six teaching ones. This plan might have been explicitly imposed on everyone, but for the difficulty of deciding between  the three possible research establishments which one should be reduced to the teaching ranks. So instead we have been subjected to a variety of financial wheezes designed to ensure that money is showered on the threesome with potential, at the expense of the designated also-rans. This led, for those in the less prestigeous parts of the tertiary sector, to predictions that there would be a shortage of money. In fact I remember a seminar at which we were presented with the End of the World on Powerpoint, complete with spread sheets and projections prepared by the Finance Office, indicating that in about three years time the sackings would start because there would be No Money.

This was presented at the time as a way of getting universities to raise funds more vigorously. But there is a limit to the number of millionaires willing to shovel money to get their names on a building. And in any case the people who were likely to be affected by the upcoming Armaggedon were not in the university fund-raising departments, they were in teaching units. So of course they set to selling what they had to sell. And there was a great proliferation of courses planned to be “self-financed”, which is what we call profit-making in academic circles. You do not get higher standards of honesty in universities, just a better class of euphemism. Over the years I have observed a continuing increase in the number of people allowed to dip their bread in the resulting pool of money, and the amounts they manage to extract from it. As a result the difference between the actual cost of putting on a course and the amount charged to students (what in more coarse circles they would call the gross profit) has ballooned. As a rough rule about half of what the student pays is now in this category. Courses have of course as a result got steadily more expensive. Indeed departments wishing to offer cheap courses are vigorously discouraged from doing so.

This suggests to economic theorists and cynics that we have here discovered a large group of consumers who are not bothered by price and may even find a high price more attractive. And we have. The group in question is mainland parents. Many mainland parents now have plenty of money to spend on their single permitted kid. Hong Kong, even when charging like a wounded bull, is cheaper and easier to reach than famous competitors in the US or Europe. And your kid can come home for the holidays.

There are other reasons. If you are considering from a purely practical point of view how to put bums on university seats, the mainland is the market to go for. It’s not only big, and close. It’s also unified. Go to four or five educational fairs, visit half a dozen front rank cities, haunt a few websites, and you can put yourself on the map for millions of potential consumers. It helps that a lot of mainland universities are not very good, and in some subjects they are all not very good for political reasons. Their student accommodation is primitive and overcrowded even by Hong Kong standards and their teaching rather old-fashioned. Also Hong Kong itself is a big attraction for mainland students. They can do what they like, say what they like, travel overseas as much as they can afford, read books which are not found in mainland libraries and surf the parts of the internet which Big Brother does not like.

In short, from a purely business point of view, the mainland market represents the low-hanging fruit. Getting students from other places is more troublesome, more expensive, more fiddly.  I hope we shall now see universities willing to take the trouble. The advantages of having a reasonable number of “real” international students are obvious and important. On the other hand it seems unfair to blame people for responding to the situation in whch they find themselves and the incentives unwittingly provided. In academic administration, just as in the public one, ingenious initiatives often have unintended consequences.

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