International Higher Education, Fall 1999

Higher Education in Hong Kong: Two Years Later

Higher education in Hong Kong has undergone two major phases of change in recent years. The first started in the mid- to late 1980s, spurred on by the drive for efficiency and the expansion of a previously elitist system; the second was marked by the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty to China in 1997. This article describes higher education in Hong Kong two years on. The current situation is a convergence of internal systemic development, the China factor, and the recent economic downturn.

Academic Freedom
Prior to the handover there was much anxiety about academic freedom in Hong Kong under China. As it turned out, there has been little significant change in autonomy in university governance and research. The tension between pro-Beijing and pro-West sentiments in society created by the political transition and the incidents that indicate Beijing's increasing influence over Hong Kong affairs has not been as apparent in academe, although this may change. Self-censorship may be found on an individual basis but is not a general collective phenomenon.

The relative calm over the issue of academic freedom may be due in part to Beijing's effort to honor Hong Kong's autonomy and in part to the eclipse by more pressing demands from micro-level developments. The efficiency drive that is an international trend reached Hong Kong in the late 1980s and now has a tight grip on institutional life. Institutional productivity is under close scrutiny. For the faculty this means high expectations for teaching and research, winning grants, and professional and community service. Of these, research output is of primary importance.

Publication in international scholarly journals is generally assigned greater weight than publication in local ones. This has posed a dilemma for academics in culturally oriented fields in the social sciences and humanities. One criterion for awarding research grants is local relevance, yet the distribution of research output in nonlocal channels is more favorably rated. For academics in culturally bound fields these criteria are at times hard to reconcile. The overriding importance of research, despite the rhetoric about equal importance of teaching, has left teaching faculty torn between the two roles. Although equal attention should be devoted to the two roles, many cope by attending to research, often at the expense of teaching. While there is general agreement on the value of course evaluations in monitoring teaching, their side effects are also noted. Anxiety over evaluations has led some faculty members to appease students.

Tensions
This new emphasis on research and publication has created tensions between faculty and administrators. The tensions stem from the differential expectations for the university between two different types of academics--cultural professionals and corporatist administrators. Some academics are still ill adjusted to the research university in this age of pragmatism, especially those who studied or taught in Hong Kong's universities in the more relaxed, idiosyncratic era prior to 1980, when the institutions were teaching universities. Also, academics who view the university as performing broader cultural and social missions lament its increasingly narrow vocational function.

Higher education institutions must now prove their worth to the public. The new accountability challenge, together with the growth in size of the sector, has changed the relationship between the institutions and the community. Once few in number and esoteric, institutions of higher education are now very much a part of the community. The presence of education pages as a regular feature in each major local newspaper indicates the extent of general public interest in education. The press has also become a forum for news and views on higher education.

The recent economic gloom has intensified the stress within higher education. Funding for higher education has declined by 10 percent for 1998?2001, and a further cutback is under discussion. Public funding for higher education relative to expenditures in education has changed too. The public funding for higher education institutions under the aegis of the University Grants Committee has increased in absolute terms, from H.K.$8,157 million in 1992-1993 to H.K.$14,001 million in 1998?99, but has declined as a percentage of total expenditure in education from 36.9 percent to 27.5 percent during the same years. Academic salaries are linked to those of civil servants. There is much discussion about, and apparently support for, pay cuts for civil servants. Pay cuts for university staff look imminent as well. Another way to cope with a precarious budget is to hire new staff on contract terms. Thus, the security that used to be associated with academic work is gradually eroding. It appears that the issues facing Hong Kong higher education are part of a broader worldwide transformation of higher education, despite local and cultural variations.

The content of internationalism has also changed since the 1980s. Before, internationalism meant a heavy Western orientation, especially toward the major English-speaking countries. The boom in the economy in the 1980s and a collective awareness of an Asian identity fostered regional cooperation. Exchanges among Asian countries have flourished over the years. Common intellectual roots in graduate studies in the West provided an impetus for such exchanges, which have extended to academics who are wholly trained in indigenous institutions. Hong Kong academics' knowledge of English has facilitated such exchanges. Exchanges with the Chinese mainland are also thriving. At any one time there are dozens of visiting academics from mainland institutions in each institution in Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong academics conduct research related to China. The mainland has a solid tradition in science and technology and in some areas of the humanities. In comparison, the mainland is relatively unfamiliar with Western social science. Western-educated Hong Kong academics have a significant role to play in this phase of knowledge exchange between the two places. Linking the mainland and the outside world, a bridging role Hong Kong has tried to fulfill since its early colonial days, is an on-going mission in the new era.