Bulletin No. 1, 2024

Professor King was one of the younger members elected by teachers to serve on the working party, which 18 months later produced a report. A key recommendation was to consolidate those departments belonging to the same discipline under one departmental roof. As he set out explaining the working party’s recommendations to colleagues at New Asia, Professor King recalls being met by objections and fierce resistance. Matters were eventually resolved in 1976, when the University adopted the recommendations of the government-appointed Second Fulton Commission, integrating academic departments while leaving the Colleges to take care of student development matters. Professor King notes that the college system has remained a robust feature of CUHK education. “Many of our working group’s recommendations were adopted and, 40 years on, they proved to be good for CUHK, which continues to achieve great success.” After Professor King became head of New Asia College in 1977, he took great pains to strengthen the College and raise its profile as a stronghold of Chinese studies. Among many initiatives, he set up the Ch’ien Mu Lecture in History and Culture to have distinguished scholars from around the world deliver public lectures at CUHK, including New Asia founder Ch’ien Mu, the renowned ancient Chinese science and technology scholar Joseph Needham, American sinologist William Theodore de Bary and Japanese sinologist Tamaki Ogawa. Despite a heavy load of administrative duties, Professor King never abandoned teaching and research. A paper he published at the University of California in 1975, entitled “Administrative In the late 1970s, as China launched its policy of reform and opening up to the rest of the world, an initiative was launched to rejuvenate the study of sociology on mainland China. It was led jointly by Yang Ching-kun, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and Fei Xiaotong, a distinguished anthropologist on the mainland. Supported by Professor King, teachers from CUHK’s Sociology Department contributed, delivering lectures at different places on the mainland. As part of these efforts, CUHK convened a social sciences forum in 1983, inviting scholars from both sides of the Taiwan Strait for the first time. It was a historic initiative. Professor King and Professor Rance Lee Pui-leung organised one particularly successful seminar and, later, launched an exchange platform on Chinese culture and its modernisation. Over the next two decades, the platform hosted many important academic seminars and forged collaborations. Professor King was also at the centre of other major developments of CUHK. In 1974, the University set up a working party to review its own governance structure. CUHK had been founded as a federal-type university, with each of the three constituent colleges managing their own academic departments—often with overlapping disciplines—and enjoying high autonomy over such matters as admissions and curriculum design. Shortly after joining CUHK, Professor King came to the view that the system had created problems in resource allocation and division of responsibilities between the Colleges and the University. He felt that organisational reforms were essential for the further development of the University as a whole. 2 Fortyyears on, many of ourworking group’s recommendations proved to be good for CUHK. 24   Chinese University Bulletin | Ambrose King Yeo-chi