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

that its academic thrust is in harmony with the objectives and needs of the wider society: and the university's constitutional arrangements should be such as to up-hold him as the guardian of the corporate responsibility of the university. 28. In this connection the financial arrangements under which a university receives government support are of the greatest importance. The one by which we can best illustrate the principles involved is that in force in Hong Kong. There is a University (and Polytechnic) Grants Committee and a quadrennial grant. The role of the Committee as mediator between government and university and the device of the periodic grant are together intended to encourage within the university the fullest possible exercise of its corporate responsibility. Th re are clear advantages in the system for both government and university. For government two considerations in particular are decisively important — (i) the long-term character and high cost of higher education and (ii) the need to co-ordinate the supply of high-level manpower e.g. with the development of general governmental policies in education, health or other forms of social welfare and with the needs of private industry. 29. For the government the specific advantages of the system are these. A university is constrained to show its hand. A 4 or 5 year forward projection cannot fail to reveal a university's response (in terms e.g. of the balance of disciplines and the proposed relative development of Arts, Science, the Applied Sciences and the Social Sciences) to the challenge of the government's claims for highly educated manpower and its research needs. A single year's projection would be too small to illuminate the difference between, on the one hand, a programme which merely refleced the haphazard results of an academic tug-of-war in which the victors were the strongest personalities in the university arena and, on the other, a programme which was a genuine response, in a university's scholarly terms, to social needs, problems and aspirations. Only a programme of some 4 or 5 years' duration can provide the magnifying glass through which the true shape of a university's future becomes discernible. 30. For the university on its part ， the advantages are substantial and lie deep in its nature as a home of scholarship. Far more important than any merely legal conception of non-interference or autonomy, the system offers it a real initiative: to diagnose from its own vantage point the condition of the society's health, to measure its needs on a university's scales of depth and of time; and to offer a programme of teaching and research adapted to the ends described. Successfully to use such a system is the nearest that a university can hope to come to genuine freedom. Success is of paramount importance to it, for on this depends its integrity and wholeness as an institution, i.e. its capacity to remain as a self-directing corporation against such pressures as may be exerted upon it from many points, from within and without, from well-meaning friends (and sometimes benefactors) to distort its growth in a particular direction at the cost of overall balance and cohesion. 31. A system which offers such prizes to a university is not then an imposition of government in its own interest. It is the handiwork of those who are true friends of the university. For it gives the university, as we have seen, a special procedure, quite apart from the ordinary machinery of administration, both for planning its own future, and for ensuring its relevance for society at large. The system provides a recurring occasion for a university willing to take advantage of it to re-define its long-range strategic priorities and, in the process, to resolve the internal clash of claim and counter-claim. The wise vice-chancellor, in his role as mediator in such conflicts, will not willingly dispense with this system: for it is his duty