Bulletin Report of The Commission on The Chinese University of Hong Kong March 1976

within it staff and students engaged in a wide variety of disciplines. Undergraduate education flourishes in diversity and we do not think it would be wise purposely to segregate students in one branch of study from those in another. Undergraduates learn much from one another and any unnecessary division which frustrates easy academic intermingling would, we believe, be both retrograde and untimely. Where in other universities separation has occurred and has met with a measure of success, it has tended to be in highly vocational fields, such as technology and medicine. Even so, it has not failed to evoke criticism. 36. Secondly, we believe that the developing needs of Hong Kong may well call for men and women trained in diverse combinations of subjects which may not readily fit into conventional faculty or area of study patterns. Environmental studies, for example, may become increasingly important, requiring the combined expertise of the geographer, the biologist, the economist, the social worker, the psychologist, the industrial manager, the statistician and those concerned with different aspects of community health. Again, we believe that growth points tend to lie along the boundaries between subjects and it is undesirable therefore to create divisions which hinder the closest possible contact between subjects. For all these reasons a pattern which endangers flexibility of response and particularly the possibility of developing inter-disciplinary studies would, in our view, be regrettable. Further, it might well prove impossible to devise an acceptable academic distribution of subjects among Colleges. Nor can we overlook the disruptive effects which might result from any attempt to transfer departments or staff among Colleges. 37. Finally, and most important, it seems to us that, if groups of studies (whether determined by departmental, faculty or area lines of definition) are “assigned” to Colleges with power (real or implied) to act independently of the University of which they are constituent parts, either (i) the University is being asked to surrender responsibilities whose loss would be inimical to its own proper functioning as a university or (ii) merely the name of the College is being given, without accompanying real power, to specific areas of academic responsibility which are found in unitary universities elsewhere under a different and, perhaps, less romantic nomenclature. We find it impossible to escape the horns of the dilemma so stated. 38. Colleges which claim complete academic control over a limited range of academic territory are not colleges in any meaningful sense of the word but are claiming to be universities with a narrower than normal range. And to concede a monopoly of academic authority over a particular area of study to a college would concede to it university status in that field, because it is an attribute of a university to be the supreme authority in determining the range of studies to be offered; in setting the curricula appropriate to each level of study ； in providing teaching and facilities for research ； in appointing staff; in conducting examinations and awarding degrees ； in laying down conditions of entry and in admitting students. If colleges enjoy real power within the area of the university's proper jurisdiction as so described, here is bound to be a serious risk of a frustrating and wasteful — and perhaps unresolvable within the constitution — contest of wills. And in our view— unless our fears can be demonstrated to be without foundation 一 rather than accept such a prospect it would be better, in the context of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, to recognise without further delay that the conditions for a continuing role for the Colleges no longer exist. If this remark seems to the reader to be a foreboding of surrender to a unitary view of the University in defiance of the history of the past twelve years, let us make clear now that such is not our view or intention. We shall have more to say in due course about the role and responsibility of the Colleges within the University.