Bulletin No. 1, 2024

of research funding as they may do now—the government-funded Research Grants Council was not set up until 1991. “My first pay cheque was a bit more than HK$3,000. It sounds like a meagre sum today, but at that time there was no pressure on research KPIs. Research was purely driven by interest.” Promotion was based mainly on seniority and subject to a strict quota, he says, taking the Physics Department as an example: only one out of 16 teachers could hold a professorship and another a senior lecturership in the 1970s. Having taught generations of students over his 50 years at CUHK, Professor Young does not agree that the expansion of university education has caused student standards to drop. “It’s easier 1 A teaching laboratory of the Department of Physics in the 1980s 2 ProfessorYoung (2 nd right) in a football match of the 1983 Vice-Chancellor’s Cup 3 Professor Young teaches a postgraduate class in physics in spring 2024 3 to compare students from different times in my classical physics class because the material hasn’t changed in the past few hundred years,” he notes. Students nowadays do as well as those in the 1970s and 1980s, he says, except that young people back then would not argue over marks. “These days, every now and then, you have students wrangling over one or two marks, saying ‘I need an A’. This did not happen in the old days so you could say students were in a way ‘better- behaved’,” he smiles. Humble beginnings   29