316-068 JANUARY 11, 2016
WILLIAM C. KIRBY
JOYCELYN W. EBY University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
With our fabulous students, our fabulous staff, and our wonderful facilities, we have great opportunities in the world. What we must not do is squander those by worrying about firefighting or short-term considerations.
— Peter Mathieson, Presidenta of the University of Hong Kong (HKU)
Peter Mathieson stared in disbelief at reports that the latest focal point of student discussion at HKU was not the recent shift from a three- to four-year curriculum, nor the Occupy Central movement that had taken up much of his students’ energy during fall 2014. Rather, it was his own recent consumption of a Subway sandwich as he sat alone on a campus bench. Mathieson sighed as he read the many comments guessing the subtext and implications of his lonely, public lunch (in truth, nothing more than a quick, impromptu meal). Attention of key stakeholders at HKU too often failed to focus on the most pressing business at hand. Less than two years into his tenure as President, Mathieson already recognized that uniting the many interests at HKU to focus on a substantive, long-term agenda would be his greatest challenge.
For much of its institutional history, HKU was the only university in Hong Kong. Although HKU now competed against seven other higher education institutions in Hong Kong for government funding and support, many at HKU remained stuck in monopolistic mindset of the mid-20th century. HKU needed a strategy to ensure its continued leadership in higher education in Hong Kong in a sector increasingly crowded with high quality institutions.
Historically, HKU's unique value proposition included not just its monopoly on higher education in Hong Kong, but also its role as a bridge between an inaccessible Mainland China and the rest of the world. As Mainland Chinese universities gained a global presence, the need for HKU's role as a connector was also under threat. Mathieson knew that HKU could still play an important part in
a Following British custom, the top administrative position at HKU was that of the Vice-Chancellor (VC), with the Chief Executive (formerly the Governor) serving as the Chancellor. In order to clarify administrative roles for a global audience, Mathieson instituted a change in nomenclature, after which his title became “President and Vice Chancellor,” or, more commonly, simply “President.” Pro-Vice-Chancellors (PVCs) were more commonly referred to as Vice Presidents. This case uses the titles “President” and “Vice-President” in reference to the 2015 HKU leadership, while previous generations of administrators are referred to as “Vice-Chancellor” and “Pro-Vice-Chancellor”, the titles in use during their tenure.
Professor William C. Kirby and Research Associate Joycelyn W. Eby prepared this case. This case was developed from published sources. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School. 316-068 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
China's relationship to the world, but saw that the dynamics of HKU's involvement would have to change given China's renewed global presence and, particularly, the growing influence of its well- funded top-tier universities.
Mathieson needed to break through institutional complacency and unite the oft-divided students, faculty, and administration behind a plan that would allow HKU to thrive in a landscape in which it competed not only with other institutions in Hong Kong, but also with the increasingly strong key universities in China, and with leading institutions around the world. Would HKU be able to maintain its position as a top institution linking East and West in an increasingly connected and complex global society?
An Imperial Project: the History of HKU
Early Supporters
What England has done for India and Egypt in mitigation of famine...what she has done in arresting germ- borne disease (plague, malaria, cholera, and small-pox) by medical science, she can help China to do for herself; and she can mitigate her poverty by teaching her how to develop her unrivalled mineral and agricultural resources. And by doing so she will strengthen the bonds of friendship both now and hereafter, and reap a material reward in the development of the future....It is better to help than to stand by as an apathetic spectator.
— Frederick Lugard, Governor of Hong Kong1
From its inception, HKU was an institution with many goals. It was intended to link Great Britain with Mainland China, provide high-quality, local educational opportunities for the young men of the British colonies in Southeast Asia, and strengthen key capacities of Hong Kong citizens. Its greatest early champion, Fredrick Lugard, Governor of Hong Kong from 1907 to 1912, envisioned HKU as a key establishment in and accomplishment of the British Empire.2 A long-time diplomat, Lugard did not have extensive experience in the field of education, but nonetheless believed in the economic and moral merit of establishing a local university.
The sense of competition among imperial powers was also an impetus for the founding of HKU. Already by 1905, newspapers warned that British influence in China was being surpassed by Japan, particularly in terms of education.3 The British eyed with envy the progress made by Americans, particularly American missionaries, in developing higher education in Mainland China. The German plans to develop a research university in Kiaochow (Qingdao) in 1908 further encouraged the British to develop an institution of their own. Indeed, it was the news of the founding of the German school that led Hormusjee Nowrojee Mody, a prominent Parsee merchant who became one of the most prominent donors to HKU, to ask Governor Lugard and his wife, "...why cannot we get ahead of them?"4
Vocal about the important role the university could play in empire building, Lugard was still unable to gather significant financial support from the British government. Most of the early funding for the University came from the private sector, although the government maintained a high level of involvement in administrative decisions. Mody was an early supporter, sponsoring the construction of HKU’s iconic Main Building, with donations ultimately valued at HK$365,000 (approximately £36,500).5 More early support was received in May 1909, when the John Swire group announced the
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donation of £40,000 to the university endowment.6b Each of these major donors may have had ulterior motives: Mody, having made some of his fortune in the opium trade, perhaps sought to create a more proper legacy, while the Swire group, fraught with difficulties after a scandal and boycott in Canton, may have wanted to rehabilitate its corporate image.7 Whatever their motivation, these gifts initiated enough fundraising from individuals in Hong Kong, mainland China, and overseas Chinese communities in Australia, Malaya, and French Saigon8 as well as the governments in Beijing and Guangdong—after their fears of a new university as a revolutionary hotbed were assuaged—to build the skeleton of a university just before the end of Lugard’s tenure as Governor of Hong Kong in 1912.
A University, Launched!
The first university to be founded in Hong Kong, HKU was preceded by a number of technical and ecclesiastical colleges. One, the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, founded in 1887, became HKU’s School of Medicine. When the university opened its doors to its first cohort of 75 students in the autumn of 1912,9 it offered courses at its School of Medicine as well as its School of Engineering, joined by the School of the Arts in 1913. The University Ordinance of 1911 established HKU's tripartite governance structure of Court (for government and societal oversight), Council (for administrative matters), and Senate (for academic matters). While responsibilities and power of the three groups shifted over time and the Court grew increasingly ceremonial, the basic structure remained almost unchanged into the 21st century.
The Ordinance also laid out a non-discrimination policy, stating, “No distinction of race or nationality shall be permitted, and no test of religious belief or profession shall be imposed, in order to entitle any person to be admitted as a member, professor, reader, lecturer, teacher, or student of the University or to hold office therein or to graduate thereof or to hold any advantage or privilege thereof.”10 Initially, this ethos was applied much more readily to students than to faculty. Founders of HKU felt that having well-qualified, British lecturers was necessary to bolster the fledgling institution's reputation.11 This preferential policy was challenged by some of the university administration in 1919 when HKU sought to fill the newly-created Chair of Pathology, and was torn between a Senate- supported British candidate and the Council-supported Dr. Wang Chung Yik, a graduate of the Hong Kong College of Medicine and Edinburgh University. The withdrawal of the Senate-supported candidate led to the appointment of Dr. Wang, HKU’s first ethnic Chinese academic.12
During its first decade, the university struggled to remain financially solvent. By 1919, the Colonial Government finally agreed to help pull HKU out of debt, but only with the expansion of government oversight of the university. Throughout the next few decades, up to and beyond World War II, the university continued to toe a delicate line with the government, gradually gaining more public financial support, but also subjecting itself to increasing government inquiries and reports.
The university’s small initial budget limited its research agenda; it was ultimately the provision of sufficient resources—and donor preferences—that transformed HKU into a more research-oriented institution. In 1922, the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported medical education around the world and at several institutions in Mainland China, endowed two chairs at the School of Medicine, followed by a third chair less than two years later. This funding allowed the medical school to expand its
b MeasuringWorth estimates that a £40,000 project in 1911 represents an economic value (i.e. a relative share of the total output of an economy) of £35,070,000 in 2014 GBP. This is equivalent to approximately $55 million 2015 USD. For more information on MeasuringWorth’s methodology, see Lawrence H. Officer & Samuel H. Williamson, "Measures of Worth," MeasuringWorth, 2010, www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.php.
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professoriate and gave the school a stronger research orientation. By 1929, endowment income accounted for 62% of HKU's operating funds.
The founding of HKU had been predicated on its ability to keep young men out of radical politics. One major test of politicization on campus came in 1925 when a general strike and boycott on British goods spread from Guangzhou on the Mainland to Hong Kong. University administrators were relieved to discover that HKU students generally sided with the British, going so far as to step in as assistant caretakers at an insane asylum when workers went on strike.13 Chinese staff members also supported British interests. From that point forward, there was growing acceptance of HKU students as loyal citizens of the Empire.
Stability—then War
By the 1930s, HKU was financially stable, helped first by the Rockefeller Foundation, then by funds from the British Boxer Indemnity, returned to the university in 1931.14 Yet, it still lacked a role in the educational landscape of Greater China. HKU had been founded at the beginning of a wave of the establishment of Western-style higher education institutions in China. By the 1930s, Mainland China offered a variety of excellent higher education opportunities, many of which were connected with institutions in America, Europe, or Japan. HKU had the tenuous position of offering a more expensive, less convenient education that still lacked the professional and social cache of a Western degree.15
In response to this questionable positioning, a commission of colonial government and business representatives was tasked with examining the university’s role in society and future development in 1937. Their subsequent report drew the ire of many faculty for its suggestions—such as the lack of necessity for HKU faculty to hold high-level research degrees—that relegated the university to second- class status. Heated debate over the implementation of the report’s recommendations raged in the HKU Senate as well as the colonial government, and led the HKU Senate to issue a response stating that it was of the “unanimous opinion that research is a necessary and integral function of every university.”
Ultimately, Duncan Sloss, the newly appointed vice-chancellor of HKU, used the controversy over the 1937 report to broaden the sense of purpose of HKU and elevate its standards. After arguing for the need to make HKU "a University in the British sense" rather than "a much more modest institution, a superior technical college," 16 Sloss arranged for the establishment of a committee to draft the University Development Report of 1939, which laid out an ambitious plan for improved recruitment of students from Mainland China as well as reforms in curriculum and upgrades to the physical plant.17
Unfortunately, Sloss built his strategy for growth when China was already two years into a war with Japan. Just two years later in 1941, all his plans came to an abrupt halt when Japan invaded Hong Kong. HKU students, faculty, and staff had been involved with the war effort as fundraisers, volunteer medics, and more since the Japanese attacks on Beijing and Shanghai in 1937.18 When the Japanese invaded, HKU faculty and students dispersed and Japanese troops transformed the campus into an army base, requisitioning many of the medical and scientific supplies and equipment for Japanese use. Many of the European faculty members spent the war in internment camps, where they quietly attempted to continue research and plan for the return of the university under desperate and often horrific conditions. Other staff, students, and alumni fled to Free China. Many students continued their studies at the top Mainland universities, such as National Central University. Students and staff from all backgrounds participated in the war effort, solidifying HKU’s reputation for nurturing civic- minded citizens.
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A New Spin on an Old Role
We shall work together to get a University going of which we can all be proud and which, turned towards a new China, shall be a perpetually open line of communication between China and England and equally between England and China. We base our efforts on a realisation of what China can do for Western civilization no less than what Western ideas and standards can do for China.
— Duncan Sloss, Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University19
By the end of World War II, the buildings of HKU were in ruins, its supplies lacking, students scattered, and faculty largely gone. The government of Hong Kong, along with remaining university administration, went through a period of soul-searching before deciding in 1948 to reopen the university.20 This decision turned out to be a prescient one, as the landscape of higher education in Greater China was soon to be rocked by the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Many mainland Chinese scholars fled to Hong Kong, while many local Hong Kong students who in the past would have gone to China for university studies found that was no longer an option. This excess of both qualified teachers and students led to the founding of several Chinese-language post-secondary colleges, and eventually fundamentally transformed the higher education sector in Hong Kong.
In the 1950s and 1960s, HKU expanded as quickly as its limited finances and physical plant would allow to meet a rapidly growing Hong Kong’s need for qualified professionals. In 1963, three post- secondary colleges combined to establish the second public university in Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).21 In 1965, responding to the increased complexity of the higher education sector, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council established a University Grants Committee (UGC), along a British model, to coordinate tertiary education financing in the colony and broker communication between the government and universities.22
In the late 1960s, as the Cultural Revolution wreaked havoc on the social order in Mainland China, protests began to leak over the border to Hong Kong. Unlike the Mainland, however, where some university campuses became physical battlegrounds and education ground to a halt, HKU remained relatively apolitical. The HKU Students’ Union decided not to participate in the riots around the city. Then Students' Union President Tsim Tak-Lung reflected in 2014, "We were not as politically active as students today." 23 Students became more politically active in the 1970s, participating in different political movements, such as the 1974 protests that led to the establishment of Chinese as an official language.24
Emigration and Fear: Tiananmen, the Handover, and the Asian Financial Crisis
With the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration confirming the return of the Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, and then the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, there was increasing concern for the future of HKU and Hong Kong as a whole. This anxiety inspired rapid change in the 1990s in preparation for the handover from the British to the Chinese government. Public education enrollment at all levels expanded. From 1989 and 1994, higher education enrollment grew from less than 3% to 18% of graduating secondary school students. Several colleges were promoted to full university status to absorb this enrollment increase (See Exhibit 1 for a timeline of the development of the higher education sector in Hong Kong).25 As the primary body overseeing publicly-funded universities, the UGC maintained cohesion and coordination among the public universities. Government funding was allocated through block grants, allowing each university to maintain a high degree of academic and administrative autonomy. HKU would continue its role as the flagship
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institution of Hong Kong higher education, but in a much more crowded and competitive sector (See Exhibit 2 for HKU’s role in the UGC sector).
Tensions over the handover affected the HKU campus specifically in several ways. Some well- known professors, fearing a change in the academic environment, left Hong Kong for work in Great Britain or Australia.c Students at HKU and other universities also feared a loss of freedom and therefore tested the political waters in June 1997 by attempting to display Pillar of Shame, a pro-democracy statue by Danish artist Jens Galschiot, on the HKU campus (See Exhibit 3 for a photo of the Pillar of Shame displayed outside the HKU Student Union in 2015). Administrators refused to allow the display because of safety concerns, but many students believed that the true reason behind the school’s disapproval of the statue was fear of upsetting Beijing. After students moved the statue on campus anyway, the university agreed to allow its display.26 The incident, however, highlighted continuing tensions as the university struggled to balance its role as a public institution under a complex governing regime with its history of academic freedom and autonomy. It also highlighted two common tropes in HKU's approach to subsequent politically-charged issues: concern with student safety and reactive rather than proactive response.
A New, Global Vision
Facing an increasingly crowded local higher education sector in the second half of the 20th century, HKU had become a domestically-focused institution. In contrast with its original roots as the premier institution in British colonial Asia serving a diverse student body, it was an institution primarily concerned with besting its local competitors and educating an almost entirely local student body.
This relatively narrow vision was challenged and then greatly broadened by the prominent Hong Kong businessman and former Harvard Business School Professor Victor Fung, who served as a transformative Chairman of the HKU Council from 2003 to 2009. During this time, Fung spearheaded the re-envisioning of HKU as not just the flagship institution of higher education in Hong Kong, but also as a leading university in Asia and the world. This new vision was supported by a wide range of major reforms in university governance that promoted modern, streamlined administrative practices. With the support of Vice Chancellor Lap-Chee Tsui and a reorganized and reinvigorated Council, Fung built faculty and student consensus around this new vision of the university and established the foundation for HKU’s continued pursuit of global excellence in the 21st century.
HKU in the 21st Century
By 2015, HKU was at the apex of eight publicly-funded higher education institutions in Hong Kong. As the system's flagship English-language research institution, HKU was expected to offer internationally competitive teaching in all fields, as well as internationally competitive research in select areas. 27 HKU was home to over 15,000 undergraduate students and 11,800 postgraduate students. From its inception, HKU had attracted an ethnically diverse population, but its original mission to serve Mainland Chinese students was almost better served in the early 21st century than it was in the early 20th. In 2014, more than 10,000 students from Mainland China applied for undergraduate positions at HKU, and HKU had more non-local students than at any other UGC- funded institution.28 In the 2014-2015 school year, 23.7% of undergraduate students and 34.8% of students overall held international passports.29
c Of these, many ultimately returned to Hong Kong after the stability of the political and academic environment seemed assured.
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HKU’s diverse student population studied under an academic staff of over 1,600 grouped into ten faculties (its original faculties of Medicine, Engineering, and the Arts plus Architecture, Business and Economics, Dentistry, Education, Law, Science, and Social Sciences) and a Graduate School.d30 Its programs in medicine, as well as the humanities, social sciences, and business and management, were among its stronger programs. Across all programs, the employment rate of graduates six months after graduation was 99.8%. Overall in 2014, HKU was ranked 28th in the world in the QS ranking, 43rd in the Times Higher Education World University Ranking, and in the 151st-200th bracket in the Shanghai ranking (see Exhibit 4 for a table of HKU’s recent rankings in these systems).e The lower ranking in this final system was perhaps due to that ranking’s methodological emphasis on the hard sciences, in which HKU was traditionally weaker. While HKU often ranked as the top university in Asia, in 2012 it began to cede this status to the National University of Singapore and occasionally the University of Tokyo. Mathieson was not overly concerned with this recent drop. "My attitude toward rankings is publicly expressed: I will never set institutional strategy in order to satisfy any particular league table."
Curricular Extension and Institutional Expansion
One reason for the (potentially short-term) drop in the rankings was Hong Kong’s recent comprehensive secondary and tertiary education reform. In 2005, the UGC mandated the expansion of undergraduate education at Hong Kong’s eight public universities from three to four years. This reform was intended to create more space in the university curriculum for general education courses and to align secondary and tertiary education institutions in Hong Kong with the most common global practices. After the reform, students in Hong Kong received six years of secondary education (equivalent to junior and senior high school in the American system), and then, optionally, attended a four-year university program, earning the reform the moniker "3+3+4". Planning for this large-scale change commenced immediately, and HKU began to implement some elements of the new general education program as early as 2009.31 In 2012, HKU welcomed both its first cohort of students in its newly designed four-year program and its last cohort of three-year students.
In the four-year curriculum, HKU undergraduates completed core curriculum course work in addition to specialized studies (see Exhibit 5 for the undergraduate curriculum). The required 36 core curriculum credits were usually satisfied through six Common Core classes, spread across four Areas of Inquiry—Scientific and Technological Literacy; Humanities; Global Issues; and China: Culture, State and Society. Core curriculum courses were designed to be interdisciplinary and pedagogically creative.
Such a large-scale shift in undergraduate education presented significant administrative, financial, and academic challenges and opportunities to HKU. First, HKU needed to recruit for and fund a 20% increase in faculty positions in order to have enough capacity to provide classes for students for four years. Provost Paul Tam reflected that this was largely a positive occurrence for HKU, as it was a chance to recruit young faculty with a strong research-orientation. These new faculty members could counterbalance older faculty who had been recruited by and tenured at a teaching-, not research- intensive, HKU. Funding the expansion had proven more of a burden than recruitment, as the government only provided 60% of the cost of the extra year. In 2014, HKU continued to increase its
d The biggest units within the university were referred to as Faculties. Each Faculty was further subdivided into Schools or Centers. Schools were further subdivided into departments. For example, the Department of History was housed within the School of Humanities within the Faculty of the Arts. eFor more on international higher education ranking systems, see: William C. Kirby and Joycelyn W. Eby, “’World-Class’ Universities: Rankings and Reputation in Global Higher Education,” HBS No. 316-065 (Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing, 2015).
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emphasis on fundraising and transformed the previous Pro-Vice-Chancellorship in University relations into a newly titled position, Vice-President for Institutional Advancement.
Each program had to rethink its individual major requirements and create new course offerings. Such a major restructuring of the curriculum proved to be less of a challenge for faculty members—by 2015, the Common Core already boasted 175 course offerings—than for the students. Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Ian Holliday noted that while program implementation had largely been successful, there was still a “mismatch of expectations,” with students not understanding the reasoning behind a transition that asked them to delay courses in their major until later in their studies.
Finally, there was the physical challenge of providing classroom and living space to more students. While the physical campus of HKU had long been circumscribed by the steep hillside surrounding it, the opening of an MTR station at the HKU campus in December 2014 made public transportation from the campus to the rest of Hong Kong significantly easier. This presented the possibility of housing students on other parts of the island. HKU had already started to expand its student housing options, opening new facilities like the Jockey Club Student Village III in Kennedy Town in 2015 (See Exhibit 6 for a map of some of the HKU facilities and vicinity). Moreover, after advancements in engineering allowed HKU to expand over the reservoir abutting the campus on the East, HKU established the Centennial Campus as part of the school’s 100th anniversary celebration, to provide classroom space for the 4-year undergraduate degree program.
HKU had not only expanded its traditional undergraduate degree program, but had also strengthened its affiliated institutions. In 2012, HKU established the Centennial College, which offered, self-financed, four-year undergraduate degrees in a number of fields.f The Centennial College was part of the HKU Group, which included other self-financed initiatives such as the colleges, community college, and executive education programs of the HKU School of Professional and Continuing Education (HKU SPACE). HKU SPACE reflected a broader trend across Hong Kong, in which government and institutions worked to expand access to diversified higher education opportunities.
Faculty and Research
One of the greatest challenges that HKU faced in 2015 was how to address the antiquated personnel policies that limited its ability to recruit world-leading scholars. With the onset of formal government subsidies for HKU in 1952, professors’ pay scale and retirement policy were linked to those of civil servants. In the early 2000s, salaries were delinked from the civil service pay scale, allowing HKU to make more competitive offers when recruiting faculty. While this improved HKU’s recruiting power, the institution was still hampered by the civil service-influenced retirement age of 60, which made it nearly impossible for HKU to recruit scholars at the height of their academic careers. Exceptions to the mandatory retirement age were considered on an ad-hoc basis, but rarely made.
The other universities in Hong Kong had abolished the retirement age, but such a repeal had yet to gain traction at HKU. This lag was, in part, a function of HKU’s history. For many years, HKU was a teaching institution, with intensity of research highly dependent on individual faculty members. However, with the establishment of Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council in 1991 and the increasingly competitive higher education sector, by the mid-1990s, HKU began to place more emphasis on research. Some faculty members, who had built their careers on teaching, were less able or inclined to assume more research responsibilities. Therefore, some departments, with high ratios of teaching-
f In higher education in Hong Kong, “self-financed” described programs for which funding primarily came from student tuition payments, rather than government subsidy.
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oriented, older faculty tended to favor keeping the retirement age intact, in order to encourage turnover in their departments. Other departments, particularly those in fields like the humanities in which scholars tended to produce their best work later in their careers, were eager to change the policy to aid in recruiting.
Although some faculty members still retained the ethos of HKU's teaching-oriented days, the institution was working to expand faculty research opportunities beyond the HKU campus. HKU experimented with a variety of ways to increase its engagement with Mainland China. One program was the Zhejiang Institute for Research and Innovation, a wholly HKU-owned, 30,000 square meter research facility in the Yangtze River Delta. The initial labs located at the facility were all established by professors from the HKU Faculty of Engineering. HKU also partnered with the Shenzhen municipal government to establish the HKU-Shenzhen Hospital, a medical facility run and staffed by professors from the HKU Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. The project was intended to serve as an experiment in modernizing health care in China, leveraging HKU's medical expertise while also giving its professors an expanded platform for teaching and research.
Retirement age and engagement in research were not the only sources of tension related to faculty; another concern was demographic distribution. The demographic makeup of the professoriate did not reflect that of the students. Whereas 54% of undergraduate students at HKU in 2014 were female, females made up only 29% of the professoriate and 18% of full professors. Undergraduates were predominantly local (76%), but only 40% of all university faculty were local. There was only one female member of the Senior Management Team—a key leadership group comprised of the most senior administrators—and only one of 12 Deans was female. Hiring processes did not include consideration of gender or ethnic balance. Some female faculty members had begun to draw attention to the gender imbalance, and the administration was beginning to address diversity issues among university staff. For example, in April 2015, after Mathieson was invited to be one of 10 university Presidents worldwide to become impact champions for the United Nations Women initiative HeForShe (reference http://www.heforshe.org/impact/), HKU was the first university in the world to launch on campus its commitment to addressing issues of gender equity under this banner.32
“Fit for Purpose”: Governance and its Reform
Governance Structures The university administration was led formally by the Chancellor, the chief officer of the University, a position reserved for the Chief Executive (CE) of Hong Kong (formerly the Governor). The CE served as Chancellor at each of Hong Kong's eight public universities. In reality, most administrative control at each university lay in the hands of its President (formerly, its Vice- Chancellor). The President was "the principal academic and administrative officer of the University,” supported by a Provost, an Executive Vice-President (Administration) and the team of Vice-Presidents, who together with the Registrar and Director of Finance comprised the Senior Management Team and reported to the University Council.
The University Council was the chief governing body. It managed financial and human resources as well as strategic planning. (See Exhibit 7 for a full list of the powers of the Council). The Council was comprised of non-university affiliates, HKU Administrators, faculty, staff, and students who, by the turn of the 21st century, numbered over 50. (See Exhibit 8 for full Council membership in 2014). This changed during the Council chairmanship of Victor Fung, who engaged a blue ribbon panel of three experts—Neil Rudenstine, a recently retired president of Harvard University; Andrew Li, a former Chairman of the UGC and head of Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal; and John Nyland, former president of the University of New South Wales—to review the governance and management structures of the university. The panel reported their recommendations in the 2003 Fit for Purpose
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report, which put forth seventeen recommendations for good governance, the majority of which focused on the role of the Council. The report recommended the transformation of the Council from an unwieldy, large group into a body of 18 to 24 members and reaffirmed the Council as the “de facto supreme governing body of the University.” 33 The panel also recommended changes to the membership of the reformed Council, which, under Fung, came to include a greater number of student representatives and, for the first time, included union representatives of senior and junior faculty, as well as of staff.
While the Council dealt primarily with administration, political matters, and budgeting, the Senate was responsible for academics and all matters related to education. As such, the Senate was heavily engaged in managing the shift from the three- to four-year curriculum. Its membership consisted of professors, deans, and several student representatives.34 This body did provide a forum for debate of policy, but did not enact any itself. The third central administrative body was the University Court, which met once a year, and served a largely ceremonial purpose. It was led by the Chancellor with a membership of elected representatives from various political and educational bodies.35
Strategy and Vision In the late 1990s, VC Patrick Cheng created a strategic advisory working group of half a dozen senior academic staff to discuss the big issues facing the university, including its international and local positioning as well as how to maintain its leadership role. This set in motion a series of changes in the administrative and financial organization of HKU, and laid the groundwork for a blue ribbon commission of leading scholars and businessmen to develop HKU's first modern strategic plan in 2003, under the tenure of VC Lap-Chee Tsui and Council Chairman Victor Fung.
The first major challenge Cheng began to address was the highly compartmentalized academic and financial structure of HKU. Traditionally, the key unit of management was the Department, with HKU's over 80 departments each reporting to the central administration. Faculties had neither an organizational mandate nor any incentive to work together. Funding was disbursed to departments based on number of undergraduates taught by that department, leading to redundancies in teaching as each department fought to maintain the highest possible student numbers. For example, the civil engineering department hired a mathematics professor to teach that subject to their students, rather than working with the existing capacity of the mathematics department to meet students' needs.
In order to encourage cooperation among the departments and to streamline management, Cheng established a new policy of “top-slicing”: the majority of funding would continue to be disbursed as it had been in the past, but 10-15% would be held by the central administration to support special initiatives. This incentivized departments to be less concerned about their individual numbers and to work together as schools and faculties to plan projects.
The administrative capacity of faculties were further strengthened by the reforms during Victor Fung’s Council Chairmanship with the introduction of the appointment of deans by the central administration based on an international search. Previously, deans had been elected by their colleagues, leaving them less accountable to the central administration and less likely to implement significant but necessary changes that might upset their lifelong colleagues. This was just one of the 17 administrative changes recommended in the Fit for Purpose Report and approved for subsequent implementation after wide consultation throughout the university community. In another move toward international standard practice under Fung’s leadership, faculty and staff salaries were delinked from the civil service pay scale, affording the university more flexibility in faculty and staff recruitment.
In addition to implementing the administrative reforms recommended in the Fit for Purpose report, Fung and Tsui spearheaded the creation of HKU’s first strategic plan. The 2003-2008 strategic plan
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prioritized four particular areas: enhancing academic excellence, raising global presence and visibility, partnering with society and serving the community, and developing and supporting "the university family." Bolstered by a newly modernized governance system and a university brought together under a comprehensive strategy, Fung set a new goal for HKU—to make it into the top 25 of the Times Higher Education global university rankings. To gain support for this explicit, internationally-oriented vision for HKU, he took an unprecedented step and visited each of the HKU faculties in person, meeting with senior faculty at each school and discussing their plans for external benchmarking.
Fung’s goal, which initially seemed like a stretch for the well-regarded but not globally-leading institution, was achieved in 2007, when HKU jumped from 33rd in the 2006 rankings to 18th, one position above the 19th-ranked Stanford University.36 The jump in rankings was just one positive reflection of the success of the governance reform and strategic planning efforts of this period. Beginning in 2007, HKU began to prepare its second strategic plan, which was announced in 2009. Praising the achievements made under the auspices of the first strategic plan, the 2009-2014 plan identified three new strategic themes: enhancing the student learning experience, advancing research and innovation, and promoting knowledge exchange and demonstrating leadership in communities across the region. The plan also laid out profile indicators to evaluate progress made on each of these themes. In 2009, HKU also reviewed the implementation of the Fit for Purpose recommendations. The review found that 11 recommendations had been fully implemented, three had been achieved through other means, and two were in progress, with just one recommendation remaining to be acted upon.
While faculty and administrators generally agreed on the lasting effects of the governance and management reforms laid out in the Fit for Purpose Report, their feelings were more equivocal on the continued role of strategic planning at the school. One former administrator felt that long-term change had been achieved in the promotion of performance-based evaluation, noting, “The culture of the institution accepted the fact that it was appropriate to measure performance, it was appropriate to reward good performance." At the same time, he noted his amusement at "how [the strategic plans] were, I use the term 'shelved.' The plan was put on the shelf and life went on as normal." Another former administrator asserted that "There's not too much steering...there's really no strategic planning, brainstorming, ‘what should we do or not.’ It's reactive, more than planning." Another professor described HKU as "opportunist."
Funding
The HKU Group—including HKU, Centennial College, and HKU SPACE—ended the 2013-2014 academic year with a budget surplus of over HK$2.5 billion (See Exhibit 9 for the Comprehensive Consolidated Income Statement of the university and the HKU group in 2014 and Exhibit 10 for a detailed breakdown of the sources of income for the university). Its finance department attributed this surplus primarily to excellent returns on investments, which averaged at 7.2% for the 2013-2014 academic year.37 Funding for the university came from four major sources: government funds, tuition and fees, donations, and investment returns.
As one of the eight publicly-funded higher education institutions in Hong Kong, a large part of HKU's operating budget came from the UGC, in the form of triennial block grants, allowing for stability and predictability in financial planning, as well as funding for specific capital projects, research initiatives, or other specific purposes. For example, in 2014, HKU received a new type of funding from the UGC specifically for internationalization and engagement of Mainland China.
Tuition and fees were the second largest source of income for HKU. The University offered different tuition scales for local and foreign students. In 2014, one year of tuition for a local undergraduate student was around US$5,400, while all non-local students, including those from Mainland China, paid
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nearly US$19,000 per year.38 Attending Centennial College cost much more for local students (around US$12,000 per year) but less for international students (around US$16,000 per year).39 Self-financed programs like Centennial College brought in nearly 40% of the group’s total tuition and fee income, despite being responsible for less than 15% of the group's total expenditures.
Donations and investment returns made up most of the rest of the HKU revenue. Donations included funds dedicated to research, scholarships and capital expansion. In addition to returns on invested endowment funds, the HKU group also owned a 35% stake in Enzymes Technology Limited, and a 20% stake in Blue Care JV (BVI) Holdings Limited.40
With its significant budget surplus in 2014, HKU had progressed well beyond its financially strained early years. However, looking into the future, HKU’s financial situation was less certain. One professor recalled a conversation with a politically-connected university administrator who said, "We have no friends [in the government]. The left wing politicians hate universities in general because we're not patriotic enough. The democratic ones think we take too many mainland students.” High-level administrators expected that funding provided by the government to drop well below 50% of the university's operating budget in the future. To make up the difference, HKU planned to increase fundraising and development efforts. This would be the task of Douglas So, Vice-President of Institutional Advancement. One of So’s projects was to increase the percentage of alumni donors, which in 2015 stood at just 2% of alumni.g
Unique Factors and Ongoing Tensions
A Public, Autonomous Institution?
We’re not an autonomous organization, and we cannot be, whilst we are publicly-funded. [But] I don’t feel that because the government appoints the Council chairman and several members of our Council that that in itself means I can't have institutional autonomy or academic freedom.
— Peter Mathieson
Since 1997, there had been a gradual increase in conflicts at HKU over engagement with China. In 2000, VC Cheng and his deputy stepped down amid accusations that they had pressured a university researcher to stop his opinion polling, which had showed declining support for the Beijing-picked Chief Executive.41 Because the issue was framed by some as one in of academic freedom, it put much academic and emotional stress on the university. In 2011, when VC Tsui Lap-Chee announced his decision to not seek a third term in his role, many speculated that it was related to the accusations of overly harsh treatment of student protestors during the visit of Chinese Vice-Premier Li Keqiang.42 None of these incidents, however, compared to the scale and influence of Occupy Central.
Occupy Central In 2007, a decision issued by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee in Beijing suggested that the 2017 election for Hong Kong's CE might be carried out with universal suffrage. On August 31, 2014, the National People’s Congress issued a further decision announcing the mechanics of the 2017 CE election: the CE would indeed be elected by universal
g From 2000 to 2010, the average level of alumni giving among private institutions in the Association of American Universities was 21%. The average rate of alumni giving at University of California-Berkeley, a premiere public institution, over the same period was approximately 9% (see Alex Berryhill, “UC Berkeley Looks to Philanthropy in Place of State Funding,” Daily Californian, February 21, 2013, http://www.dailycal.org/2013/02/20/uc-berkeley-looks-to-philanthropy/ accessed September 24, 2015).
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suffrage, but the populace would only be allowed to vote for one candidate among several nominees chosen by what many believed was a committee loyal to Beijing.
These decisions had been followed closely by a group called Occupy Central with Love and Peace, led by HKU Faculty of Law Associate Professor Benny Tai. The group, along with many university and even high school students, launched a civil disobedience campaign in late September 2014, occupying some of Hong Kong's commercial center's busiest streets and demanding full universal suffrage. This movement was galvanized on September 28, 2014, when police used tear gas on demonstrators. This drew attention and sympathy to the demonstrators, whose ranks were ultimately swelled by citizens opposed to the police's use of force (See Exhibit 11 for a photograph of the protests on September 29, 2014). The movement, which came to be known as the Umbrella Movement in reference to the umbrellas carried by protestors to protect themselves from tear gas, continued to occupy the streets of Hong Kong for 79 days. Ultimately, the election format endorsed by the National People’s Congress was rejected by the Hong Kong Legislative Council—a dubious victory for the Occupy Central movement, as it left citizens of Hong Kong with no form of popular participation in the 2017 election.
Occupy Central remained a divisive topic in Hong Kong with many fierce proponents and opponents. Because of the high profile involvement of HKU faculty like Benny Tai as well as heavy participation of HKU students in Occupy Central, the university seemed inextricably tied with the extended but notably restrained protest movement—in all 79 days of protest and dispersal, no students were injured. Government relations with HKU became increasingly tense at a time when the Central Government of China was already tightening its ideological control over Mainland universities.h
Reverberations of Occupy in the Council One of the earliest indications of the deteriorating relationship between the Hong Kong and Chinese Central government and HKU was the controversy over Professor Johannes Chan. The public conflict over the delayed confirmation of Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Law Johannes Chan as Vice-President of Academic Staffing and Resources lent a concrete form to abstract fears of government interference in university affairs and called into question the role of the CE in university administration. In December 2014, a selection committee nominated Chan for the Vice-President position, which had been vacant for five years.43 Chan then needed to be approved for the position by the HKU Council, which delayed responding to the nomination on grounds of waiting until HKU first filled the position of Provost, and could then allow the new administrator to weigh in on the decision. However, many suspected that the delay was due to Chan's connection with Occupy Central—Benny Tai had served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law from 2000 to 2008, overlapping with Chan's deanship for six years.
Seven months later, there was still no response to the selection committee's recommendation. In July 2015, a group of students stormed a meeting of the Council in protest of the delay on the appointment. In response, over 1,000 HKU alumni and over 3,000 others signed an online petition condemning the actions of the students. 44 On the other hand, with the issue still unresolved on September 1, 2015, 9,300 HKU staff and alumni voted on the issuance of a non-binding motion calling on the Council to confirm Chan within 30 days. The issuance was confirmed by over 7,000 votes.45 On September 29, 2015, the Council voted 12-8 against Chan's nomination. 46 One of the student representatives on Council broke confidentiality and published his summary of the meeting following the vote. His report indicated that the vote had largely been split between the university-based members of the Council, who voted in favor of Chan's appointment, and the government-appointed members, who had carried the vote against.47 While some members of Council maintained that Chan
h For more information on Mainland Chinese universities, see William C. Kirby and Joycelyn W. Eby, “Higher Education in China: Internationalization in Turbulent Times,” HBS No. 316-066 (Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing, 2015).
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was rejected because his academic publication record had been found lacking, many members of the public believed that his rejection was attributable to political pressure from outside the university’s walls.
Beyond the confirmation of Chan's nomination, the Council drew other kinds of political fire as well. As political stratification and rancor in Hong Kong grew, so did criticism of the Council member nomination process. In particular, many criticized the right of the CE to appoint members of the Council, often claimed to be his political allies. Only at HKU was the CE entitled to appoint the Chair and other members of the Council without consultation with the President. Tensions over this power of the CE came to a head with the 2015 appointment of Arthur Li as Council Chairman. Li was the former Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and former Secretary for Education and Manpower, and was known for a strong leadership style. Despite protests in early 2016,48 Li's position and the CE's right to appoint the council chair both remained intact.
Multicultural Environment
HKU had a long history as a diverse campus, and this remained true in the 21st century. Since Rayson Huang’s appointment as the first ethnic Chinese VC in 1972, that position had been held by a mix of ethnic Chinese and Anglo administrators. 49 The faculty remained majority foreign, although there had been an increase in the hiring of local scholars after 1997. Even with more balance overall, faculty members from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and other countries had differing perceptions of and experiences in HKU. One Chinese faculty member noted the constant need to juggle two systems of behavior, the formal use of the Western system and the informal use of the Chinese one: "Most people will clearly feel the tensions between what I call the formal and informal systems…In my life, I constantly need to adjust myself. In this situation I need to be Chinese, and in this situation, quickly, sometimes, and very dramatically, I need to be a Westerner.”
Academic freedom was one issue that could drive a wedge between Chinese and non-Chinese faculty members. The academic environment at HKU was very open; Roland Chin noted that Chinese Communist Party communiqués limiting acceptable topics of discussioni “don’t apply now. You can argue that there’s some self-restrain, but it’s not apparent. But, by 2047, this might change.” Thinking about potential future flashpoints at HKU, an American professor noted, “I guess there’s the academic freedom issue, which I don’t really see as much of an issue. Although, even there, there's a dividing line between foreigners and Chinese." As the HKU campus became increasingly involved in politics, the division between 'protected' foreign staff and the more vulnerable local or ethnic Chinese faculty had the potential to become more acute.
While there were certain liabilities in a professoriate with deep cultural and ethnic divides, the cosmopolitan and international atmosphere of HKU was still one of its distinct strengths. Chin noted that in recent years, other universities in Hong Kong had tended to become more Chinese and less international. HKU, on the other hand, had worked hard to retain its internationalism. In Chin's eyes, Hong Kong’s institutional autonomy was very different from that of the higher education system being practiced in the Mainland. "In addition, if a university is local and isolated, its value and influence to
i One document that affected discourse on the Mainland was “Document 9,” a communiqué issued to Chinese Communist Party Members in spring 2013. It called for stricter purity in ideology of Party Members and enumerated the “Seven Do Not Discusses” (七不讲): Western Constitutional Democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism, freedom of the press, historical nihilism, and questioning of the Reform and Opening policies. Document 9 was seen as a harbinger of the subsequent crackdown on academic freedom and more under President Xi Jinping. For more information and a full English translation of Document 9, see “Document 9: A ChinaFile Translation, How Much Is a Hardline Party Directive Shaping China’s Current Political Climate?” ChinaFile, November 8, 2013, http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation accessed September 1, 2015.
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the world is small. The support from the society and the government would very much depend on the economic and political situation at that time. If it is international and connected, the society would value its existence and diversity.”
Growing Competition, Combatting Complacency
There’s a real danger of complacency in what, in this part of the world, is a relatively old university. We can’t say that because we’re 104 years old and we had a good reputation in the past therefore that's fine and we just need to carry on doing what we're doing.
— Peter Mathieson
Not only did HKU face the challenges of negotiating complicated political and race relations within its own campus, it also had to contend with an increasingly competitive local, regional, and global higher education landscape. The rapid expansion of higher education in Hong Kong in the early 1990s gave students many more options for advanced study. While none of the English-medium universities established in recent years were as comprehensive as HKU, some, like the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, were strong competitors in certain disciplines.
HKU found itself competing not just for human, but also financial resources. Government funding for public institutions was increasingly distributed through competitive, project-based grants from the Research Grants Committee, stiffening the competition between local universities for faculty and the funding they might attract. For many years, HKU had been the primary beneficiary of the largess of Hong Kong businesspeople, many of whom were not alumni but appreciated the university's contribution to society, particularly to healthcare and governance. “For 60 years or so, leaders in Hong Kong were all HKU graduates, and this will change," noted Chin. "10…20 years from now, most of these people will retire, and then the younger generation [will come to power], and they are from [other universities]." HKU was no longer the only respectable, local alma mater for mature professionals and could expect to lose some of its dominance in private funding.
Meanwhile, the Mainland Chinese government had begun a concerted effort to nurture world-class universities. Leading institutions on the Mainland, such as Peking and Tsinghua Universities, were armed with increased funding, more flexible faculty recruiting policies, and low tuition fees to attract the best students. For example, annual tuition for most undergraduate programs at Tsinghua for a Mainland Chinese student would be no more than US$1,000. Even for students who would not be considered local at either Tsinghua or HKU, the tuition difference was striking. International undergraduates at Tsinghua could expect to pay annual tuition of around US$4,000 per year, less than 25% of the cost of a year of study at HKU.50
HKU's tradition of English instruction remained a major differentiating factor between it and the top mainland universities. However, programs like Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management (SEM) were beginning to incorporate more English-taught courses and degrees. This not only was attractive to students interested in English fluency, it also widened the pool of faculty from which schools like the Tsinghua SEM could recruit. Just as in the 1930s, HKU was faced with the difficult task of attracting students for a more expensive, and, from the perspective of Mainland Chinese students, less convenient degree. While many top students from the Mainland still sought admission to HKU, the steady rise of Mainland universities meant that HKU would have to work harder to attract students and faculty in the future.
Competition for HKU was not limited to Mainland China. In 2012, the National University of Singapore (NUS) overtook HKU in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the
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first time, becoming the second ranked institution in Asia after University of Tokyo. In subsequent years, HKU remained relegated to third place in Asia. NUS in particular was increasingly known for its experimentation with internationalization, including its partnership with Yale University to develop a new liberal arts college. Moreover, whereas the Hong Kong government was committed to funding Hong Kong's eight higher education institutions equitably, the Singaporean government had decided to focus its support on a few, elite institutions, including NUS; in 2014, NUS received 60% more funding from the Singaporean government than HKU did from its government.
Finally, HKU’s position in international league tables was never far from its mind. Its recent drop in ratings had not escaped the eyes of the media and public,51 and the university itself noted that rankings “are now a permanent part of the higher education landscape and cannot be disregarded in setting institutional strategies.” 52 Peter Mathieson noted more general public awareness of international rankings, but added that the public’s chief interest in such rankings was still the relative position of Hong Kong’s universities to each other. Victor Fung recalled a similar dynamic during the initial period of his Council tenure: “The University was beset by rivalry between HKU and Chinese U. This rivalry had no reference, however, to absolute standards of excellence. Should not these schools instead be benchmarked against the top universities in the world?” In the world of higher education in 2015, there were competitors everywhere, but HKU had yet to truly recognize those beyond Hong Kong’s borders.
Facing the Future
I consider it a major responsibility of mine to do everything that I can to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech. I think it is complicated, but Hong Kong is still a very free place…At the moment, there is manifestly freedom of speech and freedom of association being practiced in the streets of Hong Kong. I think people worry about academic freedom wherever they are in the world. When you have a situation where things are changing so fast, people do become very uncertain. But I regard Hong Kong as a place where free speech is alive and well. And my job and the job of people like me is to make sure that we protect that into the future.
— Peter Mathieson53
When HKU was founded, its obstacles to fulfilling its role as a flagship higher education institution had been primarily internal—disagreements over the balance of teaching and research, constant dearth of funding, and wavering political support for the institution from a distant ruling power. By 2015, it faced a different set of challenges. Not only did it have to compete with a host of excellent higher education institutions within Hong Kong, it also faced stiff competition in an increasingly globalized sector of high quality institutions in Mainland China, Asia, and the world. As more higher education institutions expanded international cooperation, built campuses abroad, and exchanged faculty and students, would the positioning of HKU as an institution bridging East and West remain relevant?
Having smoothly managed the dramatic transition to a four-year undergraduate program, HKU had demonstrated its ability to implement a large-scale change in vision. Still, Mathieson faced the difficult task of uniting the many disparate interests of students, faculty, and Council behind a single vision for the future of HKU, all while maintaining public confidence in the institution’s quality and independence. What long-term vision might appeal to, or at least appease, such varied stakeholders?
While it tried to articulate a vision for the future, HKU, like Hong Kong itself, faced the growing influence of the Mainland Chinese government. Rumors abounded of the government’s intention of strengthening its hold on Hong Kong’s universities. Moreover, the political activism of HKU students (and some faculty) in September 2014 had strained the relationship between the institution and the
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Mainland. Hong Kong as a whole was entering a period of soul-searching as it felt its way through a changing relationship with a China growing in economic strength and global influence. Was the political relationship between Hong Kong and Mainland China going to be the deciding factor in the future of HKU? Would the involvement of HKU staff and students in political protest become a distraction from core academic work? Would political concerns keep the institution from focusing on its strategy to achieve global academic leadership?
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Exhibit 1 Timeline of University Development in Hong Kong
Year Event 1911 University of Hong Kong Founded 1937 Government Trade School founded 1947 Government Trade School becomes Hong Kong Technical College 1949 New Asia College founded 1951 Chung Chi College founded 1956 Hong Kong Baptist College founded United College founded 1963 Chinese University of Hong Kong established through the merger of New Asia College, Chung Chi College, and United College 1967 Lingnan College established in Hong Kong by alumni of the defunct, Guangzhou-based Lingnan University 1972 Hong Kong Technical College becomes Hong Kong Polytechnic 1976 CUHK enacted ordinance and formally established 1984 City Polytechnic of Hong Kong founded 1991 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology established 1994 City Polytechnic becomes City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Polytechnic University established on the basis of Hong Kong Polytechnic Hong Kong Baptist University established on the basis of Hong Kong Baptist College Hong Kong Institute of Education established 1999 Lingnan University gains full university status
Source: Compiled by Casewriter from Phoebe H. Stevenson, "Higher Education in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Universities Navigating through the Asian Economic Crisis," Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, “History,” Hong Kong Polytechnic University website, 2015, http://www.polyu.edu.hk/web/en/about_polyu/facts_figures_development/history/index.html accessed December 10, 2015; Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Milestones through the Decades,” Chinese University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ugallery/en/zone-a.html accessed December 9, 2015; Hong Kong Baptist University, “About HKBU: History,” Hong Kong Baptist University website, 2015, http://buwww.hkbu.edu.hk/eng/about_hkbu/history.jsp accessed December 10, 2015; Lingnan University, “History and Development,” Lingnan University website, July 2015, http://www.ln.edu.hk/info-about/history accessed December 10, 2015.
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Exhibit 2 Institutional Role of HKU as defined by UGC in 2004
The University of Hong Kong (HKU)
(a) offers a range of programmes leading to the award of first degrees and postgraduate qualifications in subject areas including Arts, Science, Social Sciences, and Business and Economics;
(b) incorporates professional schools such as Medicine, Dentistry, Architecture, Education, Engineering and Law;
(c) pursues the delivery of teaching at an internationally competitive level in all the taught programmes that it offers;
(d) offers research postgraduate programmes for a significant number of students in selected subject areas;
(e) aims at being internationally competitive in its areas of research strength;
(f) as an English-medium University, supports a knowledge-based society and economy through its engagement in cutting-edge research, pedagogical developments, and lifelong learning; in particular, emphasizes whole person education and interdisciplinarity;
(g) pursues actively deep collaboration in its areas of strength with other higher education institutions in Hong Kong or the region or more widely so as to enhance the Hong Kong higher education system;
(h) encourages academic staff to be engaged in public service, consultancy and collaborative work with the private sector in areas where they have special expertise, as part of the institution’s general collaboration with government, business and industry; and
(i) manages in the most effective and efficient way the public and private resources bestowed upon the institution, employing collaboration whenever it is of value.
Source: University Grants Committee, “Hong Kong Higher Education: To Make a Difference, to move with the Times,” January 2004, http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/doc/ugc/publication/report/policy_document_e.pdf accessed December 9, 2015.
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Exhibit 3 Pillar of Shame, on permanent display outside the HKU Student Union building
Source: Casewriter, May 14, 2015.
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Exhibit 4 Rankings of HKU in Major Ranking Systems
Year QS Shanghai Jiaotong Times Higher Education 2008 26 201-302 n/a 2009 24 201-302 n/a 2010 23 201-300 21 2011 22 201-300 34 2012 23 151-200 35 2013 26 201-300 43 2014 28 151-200 43
Source: Compiled by Casewriter from http://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings; http://www.shanghairanking.com/; http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/; http://content.qs.com/supplement2011/top500.pdf; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE%E2%80%93QS_World_University_Rankings,_2009;
Exhibit 5 Four-year Undergraduate Curriculum
Component Courses No. of Credits % of Total Credits Compulsory Courses Common Core 36 22.5% English 12 Chinese 6 Specialization Major 72-96 30%-40% Minor 36-48 15%-20% Electives Open electives Remainder to reach 240 17.52%-32.5% TOTAL 240 100%
Source: University of Hong Kong Teaching and Learning, “4-Year Undergraduate Curriculum,” University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://tl.hku.hk/reform/ accessed February 27, 2015.
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Exhibit 6 Map of HKU Campus and Vicinity, 2015
Source: Google Maps
University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West 316-068
Exhibit 7 Powers of the HKU Council
1. The Council may exercise all the powers and is to perform all the duties of the University other than those vested or imposed by the Ordinance or the statutes in some other authority of the University or in an officer.
2. Notwithstanding the generality of the powers vested in the Council by paragraph 1 and subject to the provisions of the Ordinance and the statutes, the Council shall have power —
a. to administer and manage the finances, accounts, investments, property, business, and all affairs whatsoever of the University, and for that purpose to appoint bankers, counsel, solicitors, and such officers or agents as it may be expedient to appoint;
b. [Repealed]
c. to invest the moneys of the University, including any unapplied income, in such stocks, funds, fully paid-up shares or securities, mortgages, or debentures or debenture stock as the Council shall think fit, whether such investments be authorized by the general law for the investment of trust moneys or not, and whether such investments be within Hong Kong or not, and to invest such moneys in the purchase of leasehold property in Hong Kong, and to vary any investments by sale and reinvestment or otherwise;
d. to purchase, grant, sell, convey, assign, surrender, and yield up, exchange, partition, mortgage, demise, reassign, transfer, and accept leases of real and personal property on behalf of the University;
e. to provide the buildings, premises, furniture, apparatus, and other means needed for the University;
f. to borrow money on behalf of the University and for that purpose to mortgage all or any part of the property of the University, whether real or personal, or give such other security, whether upon such real or personal property or otherwise, as it thinks fit: Provided that the moneys borrowed and owing by the University shall not at any time exceed in the whole the sum of $100,000 except with the sanction of a resolution passed at a meeting of the Council and confirmed by the vote of three-fourths of the members present and voting at a subsequent meeting of the Council specially convened for the purpose and held not less than 7 days after the former meeting;
i. to accept and execute, and to appoint any officer of the University or any trust company to accept and execute, the office of trustee, or other like office of a fiduciary nature, of any trust or unit trust in which the University, officers, teachers or other employees or students of the University have a beneficial interest whether directly or indirectly including any superannuation fund or pension scheme for the benefit of employees of the University;
ii. to incorporate a trust company to accept and execute the office of trustee, or other like office of a fiduciary nature, of any trust or unit trust in which the University, officers, teachers or other employees or students of the University have a beneficial interest whether directly or indirectly, and to act as investing or financial agent and receive money in trust for investment and to allow interest thereon until invested;
iii. to incorporate or set up a unit trust and appoint trustees thereof;
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g. to enter into, vary, carry out, and cancel contracts on behalf of the University;
h. to maintain a University printing press and publish books and other matter on behalf of the University;
i. to give directions to the Senate or to any officer or teacher of the University in any financial matter or any matter affecting the property of the University;
j. in consultation with the Senate to review the instruction and teaching of the University;
k. to co-operate with other Universities and authorities for the regulation and conduct of examinations, for the examination and inspection of schools and other academic institutions, for the extension of University teaching, and for other purposes;
l. to appoint any person or committee to entertain and, if appropriate, adjudicate upon, on its behalf, complaints from members of the University and persons employed in it and to redress their grievances: Provided that the Council shall not entertain or adjudicate upon any complaint which falls within the jurisdiction of the Disciplinary Committee; 20 CALENDAR
i. to allow or dismiss an appeal from the Disciplinary Committee and to vary any penalty imposed by the Disciplinary Committee, or to appoint any person or committee to discharge those duties;
m. to propose to the Court additions to, or the amendment or repeal of any of the statutes;
n. to draft statutes;
o. to prescribe fees;
p. to prescribe the duties of officers, teachers, and other employees whom it may appoint and to fix their remuneration and the terms and conditions of their appointments;
i. to grant loans, whether secured or unsecured and in such amounts and on such terms and conditions as it thinks fit, to officers, teachers and other employees whom it may appoint;
q. to appoint committees within or without Hong Kong to select candidates for any office to which the Council may appoint;
r. to delegate any of its powers to any member of the Council or to any committee thereof or to any officer or teacher;
s. to do all such acts and things and perform all such duties as may be necessary for or incidental to exercising the powers or performing the duties vested or imposed on the Council by the Ordinance or the statutes.
3. (1) The Council may by regulation provide for any of the following matters or for any of the following purposes —
a. the administration of the affairs of the University;
b. the form of contracts;
c. the University press and publications;
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d. fees;
e. the conduct of elections and the mode of appointments prescribed by the Ordinance and the statutes;
f. the prescribing of anything which is by the Ordinance or the statutes to be prescribed by regulations made by the Council; and
g. generally, all matters which by the Ordinance or the statutes it is empowered to regulate.
(2) All such regulations shall come into operation on the day on which they are made, unless otherwise provided by the Council.
Source: University of Hong Kong, “Calendar, 2015-2016: University Ordinance and Statutes,” University of Hong Kong website, http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/calendar/2015-2016/a/c/21-2015-2016/328-university-ordinance-statutes accessed December 10, 2015, pg. 19-20.
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Exhibit 8 Membership of the HKU Council
Membership Category Member Membership Period
Chairman Professor the Hon. Arthur K.C. Li 01.01.2016 - 31.12.2018
6 persons, not being students or (1 Vacancy) employees of the University, appointed by Mr. Edward K.F. Chow 07.11.2015 - 06.11.2018 the Chancellor Ms. Leonie M.F. Ki 07.11.2015 - 06.11.2018 Professor the Hon. Arthur 20.03.2015 - 19.03.2018 K.C. Li Mr. Daryl W.K. Ng 07.11.2015 - 06.11.2018 Dr. Patrick S.C. Poon 07.11.2015 - 06.11.2018
6 persons, not being students or (1 Vacancy) employees of the University, appointed by Professor Edward K.Y. Chen 27.03.2013 - 26.02.2016 the Council The Hon. Abraham Shek Lai-him 23.11.2014 - 22.11.2017 Mr. Wong Kai-man 28.01.2014 - 27.01.2017 Dr. Peter. K.K. Wong 27.03.2013 - 26.03.2016 Professor Rosie T.T. Young 30.09.2015 - 29.09.2018
2 persons, not being students or Mr. Man Cheuk Fei 24.06.2013 - 23.06.2016 employees of the University, elected by the Dr. the Hon. Rosanna Y.M. 11.12.2012 - 10.12.2015 Court Wong
President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Mathieson 01.04.2014 - 31.03.2019
Treasurer Mrs. Margaret M.Y. Leung Ko 01.07.2014 - 30.06.2017
4 full-time teachers elected in accordance Professor Joseph C.W. Chan 20.11.2015 - 19.11.2018 with regulations Dr. K.C. Cheung 08.12.2012 - 08.12.2015 Professor S. Kwok 08.12.2012 - 08.12.2015 Professor C.M. Lo 18.04.2015 - 17.04.2018
1 full-time employee of the University, not being a teacher, elected in accordance Mr. Felix K.Y. Ng 09.01.2013 - 08.01.2016 with regulations
1 full-time undergraduate student elected Mr. J.E. Fung 03.05.2015 - 02.05.2016 in accordance with regulations
1 full-time postgraduate student elected in Mr. Ke Zhu 24.10.2015 - 23.10.2016 accordance with regulations
Source: “The Council (Membership)," HKU Website, http://www.hku.hk/about/governance/governance_structure/the- court/council_membership.html accessed January 11, 2016.
26 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West 316-068
Exhibit 9 2014 Statement of Income, University and Non-University, in USD
HKU HKU Group (University only)
Income Government Subvention 526,953,002.44 537,888,586.75 Tuition, Programmes and Other Fees 202,856,314.48 331,778,171.59 Donations and Benefactions 194,612,377.76 196,959,845.36 Auxiliary Services 39,533,356.36 38,728,119.63 Other Income 84,834,565.85 85,536,600.18 1,048,789,616.89 1,190,891,323.50 Expenditure Learning and Research Instruction and Research 590,843,286.22 642,628,573.50 Library 26,637,055.45 26,935,181.39 Central Computing Facilities 19,896,777.71 23,753,709.40 Other Academic Services 8,826,901.27 35,833,679.32 Institutional Support Management and General 36,489,788.58 66,844,323.48 Premises and Related Expenses 117,206,965.68 138,253,676.13 Student and General Education Services 46,119,604.52 46,845,762.41 Other Activities 31,530,397.25 35,263,873.07 877,550,776.68 1,016,358,778.70 Interest and Investment Gain 146,285,144.90 148,325,198.34 Surplus from Operations 317,523,985.11 322,857,743.15 Share of Surplus from Joint Ventures 0.00 4,219,043.12 Surplus for the Year 317,523,985.11 327,076,786.26 Other Comprehensive (Loss)/Income Exchange Differences 0.00 (105,008.44) Share of changes in fair value of Available-for-Sale investments of a Joint Venture 0.00 15,738.37 Re-measurement of defined benefit retirement scheme assets (765,761.81) (765,761.81) (765,761.81) (855,031.88)
Total Comprehensive Income for the Year 316,758,223.30 326,221,754.38
Note: Figures given for HKU Group include the University of Hong Kong and all its subsidiaries, such as Centennial College and HKU SPACE.
Source: Compiled by Casewriter from University of Hong Kong Financial Report, 2014, http://www.feo.hku.hk/finance/information/annualreport.html?v=1449761272864 accessed December 10, 2015.
27 316-068 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
Exhibit 10 2014 Detailed Income, HKU (University Only), in USD
Block Grants and Non-accountable supplementary grants 389,634,082.05 Adjustments and Other Grants 42,197,010.30 Earmarked Grants Early Admissions Scheme for Secondary Six Students 255,167.93 Funding Support to New Initiatives 539,619.55 Grant for Other Housing-related Expenses 391,653.11 Home Financing Scheme 1,275,710.67 Internationalization and Engagement of Mainland China 1,419.03 Government Joint University Research Archive 222,530.18 Subvention Knowledge Transfer 1,161.03 Language Immersion Programmes 1,721,287.03 New Undergraduate Programme under the "3+3+4" Academic Structure 1,120,391.06 Research 33,529,298.73 Rates and Government Rent Refund 9,866,665.45 Capital Grants and Alterations, Additions, and Improvements Block Allocation 21,039,228.27 Matching grants 4,712,479.59 Grants from Government Agencies and Related Organisations 20,445,298.46 Subtotal 526,953,002.44 UGC-funded programme tuition 118,832,919.49 UGC-funded programmes and Other Fees 3,794,107.23 Tuition Other tuition 75,607,110.26 Other programmes and Fees 4,622,177.49 Subtotal 202,856,314.48 Capital Projects 8,542,965.67 Donations and Scholarships, Prizes, and Bursaries 22,115,371.30 Benefactions Donations for Research Activities 95,929,597.87 Others 68,024,442.93 Subtotal 194,612,377.76 Contributions for Facilities Improvement 836,842.46 Graduate House 1,072,530.94 HKU Press 959,782.32 Madam S. H. Ho Residence for Medical Students 362,369.43 Rental Contribution from Staff 2,700,935.81 Auxiliary Rental Income 20,192,710.59 Services Residential Halls 11,079,680.66 Robert Black College 1,128,260.24 The Kadoorie Institute- Residential and Catering Unit 292,062.79 The Swire Institute of Marine Science- Residential Unit 65,404.52 Others 842,776.60 Subtotal 39,533,356.36 Contract Research 15,124,827.73 Service Income 45,164,466.31 Outside Practice 11,003,052.88 Share of Programmes' Surplus 335,149.79 Other Income Contribution from Subsidiaries 4,902,114.00 Gain on Disposal of a Subsidiary 12,900.30 Gain on Disposal of PP&E 220,982.14 Exchange Gain, Net 31,347.73 Miscellaneous 8,039,724.97 Subtotal 84,834,565.85 TOTAL INCOME 1,048,789,616.89
Source: Compiled by Casewriter from University of Hong Kong Financial Report, 2014, http://www.feo.hku.hk/finance/information/annualreport.html?v=1449761272864 accessed December 10, 2015.
28 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West 316-068
Exhibit 11 Protests in Hong Kong, September 29, 2014
Source: Carlos Barria, Reuters, September 29, 2014, http://pictures.reuters.com/archive/HONGKONG-CHINA-- GM1EA9T1Q6201.html accessed June 1, 2016.
29 316-068 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
List of Works Consulted
Chan Lau, Kit-Ching and Peter Cunich, eds. An Impossible Dream: Hong Kong University from Foundation to Re-establishment, 1910-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Cunich, Peter. A History of the University of Hong Kong, Volume 1: 1911-1945. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts, 2014. Growing with Hong Kong: The University and Its Graduates – the First 90 Years. Hong Kong; Hong Kong University Press, 2002. Harrison, Brian, ed. University of Hong Kong: The First 50 Years, 1911-1961. Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1963. Huang, Rayson. A Lifetime in Academia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000. Jaffee, David. “Building General Education with Hong Kong Characteristics,” International Education, 42, no. 2, 2013, pp. 40-57. Jaffee, David. “The General Education Initiative in Hong Kong: Organized contradictions and Emerging Tensions," Higher Education 64, 2012, pp. 193-206. Jennings, Sir Ivor, and D. W. Logan. A Report on the University of Hong Kong, September 1953. Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1953. Lee, Michael H. “Major Issues of University Education Policy in Hong Kong,” Asia Pacific Education Review 6, no. 2, 2005, pp. 103-112. Liu, Sandra S. “Into an Era of Autonomy for Universities in Hong Kong," Higher Education Policy 9, no. 4, 1996, pp. 325-328. Logan, Jerry and Janel Curry. “A Liberal Arts Education: Global Trends and Challenges,” Christian Higher Education 14:1-2, 2014, pp. 66-79. Matthews, Clifford and Oswald Cheung. Dispersal and Renewal: Hong Kong University during the War Years. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998. Mellor, Bernard. Lugard in Hong Kong: Empires, Education and a Governor at Work, 1907-1912. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992. Mellor, Bernard. The University of Hong Kong: An Informal History, volumes 1 and 2. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1980. Mok, Ka Ho and Anthony B. L. Cheung. “Global Aspirations and Strategising for World-Class Status: New Form of Politics in Higher Education Governance in Hong Kong,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 33 no. 3, June 2011, pp. 231-251. Nelson, Adam R. “Regionalisation and Internationalisation in Higher Education and Development: A Historical Perspective, c. 1950-1970,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 35, no. 3, 2013, pp. 238-248. Postiglione, Gerald A., ed. Education and Society in Hong Kong: Toward One Country and Two Systems. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991. Priestly, K. E. “The University of Hong Kong,” Civilisations 5, no. 3, 1955, pp. 353-362.
30 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West 316-068
Report: Seminar on University Organisation and Administration, January 20-24, 1964, University of Hong Kong. Bangkok: Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning, 1964. Sharif, Naubahar and Hei-Hang Hayes Tang. "New Trends in Innovation Strategy at Chinese Universities in Hong Kong and Shenzhen," International Journal of Technology Management 65, 2014, pp. 300-318. Soh, Kay Cheng and Kwok Keung Ho. “A Tale of Two Cities’ University Rankings: Comparing Hong Kong and Singapore,” Higher Education 68, 2014, pp. 773-787. Stevenson, Phoebe H. "Higher Education in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Universities Navigating through the Asian Economic Crisis." Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010. University Grants Committee, “Hong Kong Higher Education: To Make a Difference, To move with the Times,” January 2004, http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/doc/ugc/publication/report/policy_document_e.pdf accessed December 9, 2015. University of Hong Kong Calendar, 1955-1956. Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1955. University of Hong Kong Strategic Development, 2009-2014. Prepared by the Strategic Planning Unit, University of Hong Kong, 2009, hhtp://www.hku.hk/spuweb
31 316-068 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
Endnotes
1 From an article by Lugard published in the October 1910 issue of The Nineteenth Century and After, as quoted in Bernard Mellor, Lugard in Hong Kong: Empires, Education and a Governor at Work, 1907-1912, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992, p. 1-2.
2 London Gazette, no. 28024 pg. 3589, May 24, 1907, https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/28024/page/3589 accessed December 9, 2015; Peter Cunich, A History of the University of Hong Kong, Volume 1: 1911-1945, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), pg. 80.
3 Cunich, p. 82.
4 Bert Becker, “The ‘German Factor’ in the Founding of the University of Hong Kong,” in An Impossible Dream: Hong Kong University from Foundation to Re-establishment, 1910-1950, Lau Kit-Ching Chan and Peter Cunich, eds, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 29.
5 Cunich, p. 86.
6 Cunich, p. 120.
7 Cunich, p. 92, 120.
8 Mellor, p. 3.
9 Cunich, p. 185.
10 University of Hong Kong Calendar, 1955-1956. Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1955, p. 11.
11 Cunich, p. 169.
12 Cunich, p. 262.
13 Cunich, p. 301.
14 Cunich, p. 312.
15 Brian Harrison, “The Years of Growth,” in University of Hong Kong: The First 50 Years, 1911-1961, Brian Harrison, ed., (Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1963), p. 54-55.
16 Sloss, as quoted in Cunich, p. 335.
17 Cunich, p. 340.
18 Cunich, p. 388-9.
19 As quoted in Cunich, p. 433.
20 Francis Stock, “A New Beginning” in University of Hong Kong: The First 50 Years, 1911-1961, Brian Harrison, ed., (Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1963), p. 86.
21 Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Milestones through the Decades,” Chinese University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ugallery/en/zone-a.html accessed December 9, 2015.
22 University Grants Committee, “Brief History,” University Grants Committee website, April 3, 2007, http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/ugc/about/overview/history.htm accessed December 9, 2015.
23 Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images, (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts, 2014), p. 100.
24 Faculty of Arts, p. 33.
25 Phoebe H. Stevenson, "Higher Education in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Universities Navigating through the Asian Economic Crisis," Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010, p. 14-15.
26 “University Allows Display of Democracy Sculpture.” The Globe and Mail, June 7, 1997 http://search.proquest.com.ezp- prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/1140556689?accountid=11311 accessed September 24, 2015.
32 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West 316-068
27 University Grants Committee, “Hong Kong Higher Education: To Make a Difference, To move with the Times,” January 2004, http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/doc/ugc/publication/report/policy_document_e.pdf accessed December 9, 2015.
28 University of Hong Kong, “First and Foremost,” 2014, http://www.cpao.hku.hk/publications/firstandforemost/first-and- foremost/en/ accessed December 9, 2015.
29 University of Hong Kong, “Quick Stats,” http://www.cpao.hku.hk/qstats/ accessed October 28, 2015.
30 University of Hong Kong, “About the University of Hong Kong,” HKU Undergraduate Prospectus, 2015-2016, http://www.als.hku.hk/admission/prospectus/studying_about.html accessed December 9, 2015.
31 University of Hong Kong Strategic Planning Unit, “University of Hong Kong Strategic 2009-2014 Development,” November 2009, pg. 6. http://www.sppoweb.hku.hk/sdplan/eng/images/doc.pdf accessed December 9, 2015.
32 “Impact 10x10x10,” HeForShe website, 2014, http://www.heforshe.org/impact/ accessed December 9, 2015.
33 Fit for Purpose Report, 2003, http://www.hku.hk/about/governance/purpose_report.html accessed February 11, 2016.
34 University of Hong Kong, “The Senate (membership),” University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://www.hku.hk/about/governance/governance_structure/the-court/senate_membership.html accessed December 9, 2015.
35 University of Hong Kong, “The Court (membership),” University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://www.hku.hk/about/governance/governance_structure/the-court/court_membership.html accessed December 9, 2015.
36 Mimi Lau, “Global HKU is on Top of the World,” South China Morning Post, November 10, 2007, http://www.scmp.com/article/615037/global-hku-top-world accessed January 26, 2016.
37 University of Hong Kong Financial Report, 2014, http://www.feo.hku.hk/finance/information/annualreport.html?v=1449761272864 accessed December 10, 2015.
38 University of Hong Kong, “Undergraduate Admissions,” University of Hong Kong website, 2015, http://www.als.hku.hk/admission/applying-or-admission-info/hong-kong-students/direct-admissions-scheme/fees-and- finance and http://www.als.hku.hk/admission/mainland/admission/overview# accessed December 9, 2015.
39 University of Hong Kong, “Centennial College,” University of Hong Kong website, 2015, https://www.centennialcollege.hku.hk/en/admissions/tuition-fees accessed December 9, 2015.
40 University of Hong Kong Financial Report, 2014, http://www.feo.hku.hk/finance/information/annualreport.html?v=1449761272864 accessed December 10, 2015.
41 “Hong Kong Controversy Strikes University Officials,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2000, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/398878047?accountid=11311 accessed December 9, 2015.
42 Peter So, “University Chief Vows Truth on Police Action,” South China Morning Post, September 6, 2011, https://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=SCMCOM0020110906e7960000z&cat=a&ep=ASE accessed December 10, 2015; Dennis Chong and Tanna Chong, “Tsui Denies He was Forced to Quit University,” South China Morning Post, October 27, 2011, https://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=SCMP000020111026e7ar0000p&cat=a&ep=ASE accessed December 10, 2015.
43 Kris Cheng, “Explainer: The HKU Pro-Vice-Chancellor Debacle,” Hong Kong Free Press, September 30, 2015, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/09/30/explainer-hku-council-rejects-johannes-chan-appointment-to-pro-vice- chancellor/ accessed December 10, 2015.
44 “Thousands Sign Petition against HKU Students,” RTHK.com, August 5, 2015, http://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1203053-20150805.htm accessed December 10, 2015.
45 RTHK, “7,000 HKU Alumni Favor Johannes Chan,” The Standard, September 2, 2015, http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=66171&icid=3&d_str= accessed December 10, 2015.
46 Michael Forsythe, “Vote at Hong Kong University Stirs Concern over Beijing’s Influence,” New York Times, September 30, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/asia/hong-kong-university-votes-against-promoting-johannes-chan.html accessed December 10, 2015.
47 Billy Fung, “Zhuanzai: Feng Jing’en Jiu Jiuerjiu Xiaoweihui Huiyi zhi Geren Shengming Quanwen [Reprint: Billy Fung’s Personal Recollection of the September 29 University Council Meeting],” Post 852, September 29, 2015, 33 316-068 University of Hong Kong: Bridging East and West
http://www.post852.com/%E8%BD%89%E8%BC%89%E2%94%82%E9%A6%AE%E6%95%AC%E6%81%A9%E5%B0%B1%E4 %B9%9D%EF%BC%8E%E4%BA%8C%E4%B9%9D%E6%A0%A1%E5%A7%94%E6%9C%83%E6%9C%83%E8%AD%B0%E4%B 9%8B%E5%80%8B%E4%BA%BA%E8%81%B2%E6%98%8E%E5%85%A8/ accessed December 10, 2015.
48 Jeffie Lam, “More than 3,000 March against Arthur Li’s Appointment as Chairman of HKU Governing Council,” South China Morning Post, January 4, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/article/1897821/more-3000- march-against-arthur-lis-appointment accessed February 11, 2016.
49 Rayson Huang, A Lifetime in Academia, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000), p. 102.\
50 “Qinghua Daxue Jiaoyu Shoufei Gongshi [Tsinghua University Tuition Fee Publication],” Tsinghua University website, n.d., http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/newthu/openness/cwzcjsfxx/sfxm.html accessed December 10, 2015; University of Hong Kong, “Fees and Scholarships: Tuition Fee & Cost of Living Reference,” University of Hong Kong International Undergraduate Admissions website, 2015, http://www.aal.hku.hk/admissions/international/admissions- information?page=en/fees-and-scholarships accessed December 10, 2015.
51 Shirley Zhao, “Local Universities Lag in Global Ranking List; Shift from Three to Four-year Degree Programme Cited as Scores for Seven Hong Kong Universities Dipped across the Board,” South China Morning Post, September 17, 2014, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1594142/hong-kong-universities-decline-across-board-global-ranking- list?page=all accessed December 10, 2015.
52 University of Hong Kong Strategic Planning Unit, “University of Hong Kong Strategic 2009-2014 Development,” November 2009, pg. 6. http://www.sppoweb.hku.hk/sdplan/eng/images/doc.pdf accessed December 9, 2015.
53 Dennis Normile, “University of Hong Kong Head Ponders Impact of Protests,” Science News, October 9, 2014, http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2014/10/university-hong-kong-head-ponders-impact-protests accessed December 10, 2015.
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