The Making of a University President

      In his 2010 Inaugural Address, the Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong made us face squarely the facts almost unspoken of by our administrators.  The message in a nutshell is the following: it is resource (funding) and not our curiosity of knowledge that lures us to research.  It is institutional ranking they care about, not a mission to cultivate the young souls.  The rewards for professors are based on their ‘productivity’, not their scholarship.  For such trend to continue, we will only manufacture money-minded students, not responsible citizens who, whilst taking their own stance, are tolerant and open to others, with a sympathetic heart.  We will lose our imagination and creativity; our scientific research will not carry humanistic concerns; critical thinking will fade away.  Gradually we will lose sight of our educational values altogether.

    Such words of warning, coming as they are from a leader of a university, we have not heard for a very long time.  The fact that he could honestly preach them had, no doubt, a lot to do with his own long-time service and observations; but he gave special credit also to his reading habit, not as a professional, but as a person.  And he had revealed this in a recent interview.     

   As a young boy, he loved to read martial art fictions.  During high school, he read reference works; outside reading as we say.  Medical school was too heavy for him to do leisure reading.  However there was an episode that must have left him with an imprint for the rest of his life.  He was doing research in Canada.  Frequently he joined the classmates for coffee breaks.  From Astronomy to Zoology, he found them talking about a wide range of topics.  At one time these physicians were discussing about the French Revolution and he felt totally left out.  ‘The best part of the conversation is the dialogue after dessert,’ he said.  A clear lesson emerged: educated people should be knowledgeable people, not just specialists in their own narrow areas.

      People around him often talked about books, or themes around books, not money.  He observed people organising book clubs, not gambling groups, or stock-betting circles.  Looking back at life in Hong Kong, he said that was a ‘big contrast’.

      Then he developed an interest in reading biographies, especially in great orations by people like MLKing, JFKennedy, MGandhi, WChurchill, etc.  These were well-known heavy readers themselves.  He felt sad as he found from a survey that university students did not care about reading.  In the commencement speech last year, he emphasised broad reading, urging students to read books unrelated to their major fields, unrelated to their grades.  He wanted them to read about humanity, about civilisations, about history, about anything.  That was a way we could know more about the world around us, about ourselves.

      Regarding those parents who were too eager to exert pressure on their children to make money, he showed his misgivings.  Young people should have their own dreams, whatever those are.  Life begins when you go for your dream, not when you go after money.  He was not against making money; he just felt that young people should be allowed to shoot for their own goals first.

      What is an ideal university like, then?  He did not explicitly say.  What he did say was, an ideal university should give us young people who could really exercise their independent thinking as well as their critical judgement.  We may well ask ourselves whether our universities are successfully producing these, or even pursuing them.

      And we may well ask: How far are our higher learning institutions encouraging--not paying lip service--the students to read?