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

100. The proposals we have put forward are a great challenge to the University. How it responds will decide its character for a long time ahead. But we do no more than make explicit a challenge that has confronted the University since it was born as the offspring of the post-secondary Colleges. 101. It may well be asked whether, if there had been no Colleges in The Chinese University of Hong Kong, we would have presented our challenge on undergraduate teaching as we have done. The answer is certainly ‘yes' . But we have to add that our confidence in the outcome would have been a great deal less. For if small-scale teaching is securely anchored in the institution of the Colleges, the ‘thrust' and staying-power of the Colleges will add immeasurably to the prospects of success. 102. If we have given the impression of prescribing clear-cut practices of small-scale teaching we have been in error. There is only one certainty — good education must provide for a two-way exchange between the teacher and the taught. Everywhere universities are seeking for the means to preserve or recreate the reality of such an exchange against the encroachments of size. Men are promised that scientific advances in the understanding of the human brain will alter profoundly the process of learning. However that may be, we can be confident that no such change will make superfluous the role of the College as we have discussed it. Nothing will take away from the young the excitement or the exhilaration that comes from a great scholar thinking aloud in open university lectures and illuminating for his hearers the secrets of a distinguished mind. Nor, conversely, can there be a more momentous experience for a young student than to submit a piece of his own work to an accomplished tutor: to be both chastened by the realisation of how far he has to travel to make it really good and yet to be encoura to undergo the labours of the journey by seeing through a scholar's eyes the prospects of achievement. 103. If the University takes up the challenge of education as we have attempted to present it, there will be difficult adjustments. There will be new professional dimensions for the teachers of either kind. There will be new dimensions and new enriching relationships for the undergraduates. 104. But, no less important, there will be new challenges for the University as a whole and for those who have to guide its future and administer its working. We have explained that the new arts of teaching will have to be undertaken by a re-alignment of teaching responsibilities without extra staff. We have proposed that the Colleges should be enlarged in conception and scope while losing the apparatus of administration which has grown up with them during the last decade and a half. 105. If this is to work, the University administration will have a great deal of heart-searching to do. For, if the Colleges are each to retain the characteristic spontaneity which will diversify (and thereby strengthen) what they have to contribute to the University as a whole, the University in serving their administrative needs will have to learn how to give them scope to maintain their individuality. Tempting as it may be to place them in a single mould and defend such a practice in the name of economy or “good administration", to succumb to that temptation would be a confessio of failure to meet the supreme challenge of academic administration of our times — how to administer the work of creative men and women without freezing and quenching the creative spirit itself.