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

39. At this juncture we would do well to remind ourselves of the lessons of the past four decades ； during that time pressure for educational expansion (not least in higher education) has mounted in every part of the world: the cost of this, as of every other public service, has risen high enough to be a heavy burden even to the richest nations. It is now manifest that, without the fullest support of the state, universities (except for a few fortunately placed private institutions, almost all in North America), cannot carry out their tasks ； and must compete with the other expensive social services for the support they seek from the public treasury. They must therefore be deeply concerned to ensure that their constitutional arrangements are as smooth and as well-adapted as possible for producing the most cogent list of priorities to present to the University Grants Committee and thence to the government. It would, as we think, be to take an unjustifiable risk with the future of the University to allow separate power-centres to co-exist within one and the same area of responsibility. Potential stalemates have no place in a satisfactory constitution for a university. 40. Thus we are convinced that The Chinese University of Hong Kong must have, no less than unitary universities, the most effective constitutional arrangements to enable it to meet both successive quadrennial challenges and the legitimate claims of potential private donors. In brief, the requirements are that the distribution of power within the University and the rules governing its exercise should be such as to make it possible to declare unequivocally, within the limit of time prescribed, what the University's agreed proposals are: and to guarantee that, following the acceptance (after any necessary modification) of its proposals, the University can deliver on its undertakings. ( I I I) The Future Role of the Colleges within the University 41. Having dealt with the two major principles enunciated by the Working Party (see paragraph 7), we now turn to a third issue which seemed to us to figure prominently in the minds of many of those who gave evidence to us. This was their concern about the quality of undergraduate education, particularly in respect of what was variously called "general education" or "liberal arts education". 42. We share this concern and believe that it raises profoundly important matters of principle. Behind it there seems to us to lie the conviction that a university education is not just a matter of the transmission of knowledge but is also a process of self-discovery by each participant. The instrument of the former (the transmission of knowledge) is structured teaching 一 lectures, seminars, demonstrations and other formal class-work. This we propose to describe as "subject-orientated" teaching. The latter (the process of self-discovery) depends on personal exchanges between students, singly or in groups, and their teachers. This we shall refer to as ''student- orientated" teaching. 43. Teaching, however, is only one part of a university's function. A university is also a place of scholarship and research and it would, we believe, be widely accepted in academic circles that of the two chief functions of a university 一 research and teaching — the former has over-shadowed the latter during the past half century. The traditional equilibrium between teaching and research has been disturbed to the disadvantage of the teaching role and, when the balance of gains and losses is struck, it must be conceded that the chief sufferers may well have been the students.