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

95. Our endorsement of the Working Party's plea for the integration of disciplines does not lead us towards any of the proposals which were suggested in the Working Party's report for placing them within Colleges ； we see rather a need for drawing together the present fragmented range of studies within a strong University organisation: we have argued that, among a number of other cogent reasons, nothing less will place the University in a position to make the most convincing case, in successive quadrennial reviews, for transmission to the University and Polytechnic Grants Committee and thence to the government. We feel, further, that when giving effect to the consolidation, favourable consideration should be given to a form of academic organisation flexible enough to encourage new alliances between subjects now separated by departmental boundaries and the development of interdisciplinary studies ； in this way academic studies will be able to adjust to — and, in a measure, to guide — environmental and social change. 96. In our view the needs of the young Chinese of Hong Kong — needs which played a decisive part in bringing the University into being — will continue to press themselves with special force on the University through the next stage in its history. We believe, too, that the undergraduate age- range is of decisive importance in the formation of the fundamental principles and ideas that guide a whole lifetime. It thus follows that the University carries a heavy responsibility for the intellectual standards and capacities of each successive generation moving towards the summit of its influence in the larger society. Thus the main weight of our Report is directed towards the teaching of undergraduates. 97. We have distinguished in the education of the student between instruction in a subject or subjects ("subject-orientated") and the process of enabling the individual to develop, to the fullest level of his capacity, his distinctive talents, his judgement and his intellectual independence ("student- orientated" teaching). We believe that both these aspects are necessary and complement one another. Formal instruction reflects the fullness and the integrity of a field of rational enquiry ； it can build opportunities ； but it cannot be guaranteed to touch the mind of the individual student. To do that, some form of teaching directed at the individual alone or in the company of one, two or three well-chosen companions is needed. 98. In our opinion, formal instruction in its various forms, the lecture, the seminar, the laboratory is the province of the University. The University (subject driven as we have described it) is the author and guardian of "subject-orientated” teaching:—its scope, its comprehensiveness, its disinterestedness, its standards, its evaluation, its balance between opposed or different schools of thought. 99. The natural home of "student-orientated" teaching is the College. The College is an association of senior and junior members come together in pursuit of shared academic interests and aims. It aims also at a way of life in which the individual (whether teacher or student) is enabled to achieve and retain a sense of his or her personal significance and responsibility, and on that basis to enrich the common life. It is for these reasons that the College must, in the ordering of both its teaching and its community affairs, favour the kind of teaching that we have described at different times as "small-scale" and “student-orientated” ； and accept limits to its size beyond which the individual would be in danger of losing a conviction that he or she “counts” in the academic and human scheme of things. Of late it has been made a criticism of many universities, perhaps inevitably as they have greatly increased in size, that they have allowed the individual to lose his sense of belonging ； and with that loss has come a measure of disenchantment.