【 Mingpao 】Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are two different, if related, ideas. Academic freedom is the bed-rock of university scholarship in an open society. I personally do not think that the appointment of a PVC for internal administrative affairs has a lot to do with academic freedom（unless the office has undue ideological or political influence on promotions, appeals etc., which is definitely not the case in HKU）. As far as I can see, HKU academics remain and will continue to remain, free to pursue intellectual lines of inquiry with the highest degree of academic freedom.
Institutional autonomy, on the other hand is about organisational freedom. That is not the same as academic freedom. Indeed, traditional university leadership has often confused the two at the expense of sound university management. For example, departments, faculties and other groupings have historically been led by academics untrained in senior management, led by ideals of academic freedom but unconstrained organisationally and leading to poor collective performance. Few departments and faculties in the world's universities have perfect organisational autonomy these days. Similarly, few if any universities have perfect institutional autonomy as a body of academics. The agenda of private universities are steered by their boards and funders. State universities the world over are governed by educational and other political agenda of national and state politicians. Religious universities are steered by beliefs and creeds. Regional universities in Spain are steered by a national government of very different persuasion in Madrid. University Human Resource procedures for hiring and firing across Europe are prescribed by EU bureaucrats in Brussels. Old established universities are heavily influenced by their alumni. Young universities are often strongly influenced by industry. Hong Kong is one part of a two-part system. That brings unavoidable challenges and complications in most corners of society and economy, and universities can be no exception. Academics have to work with such complications as a fact of life wherever they are in the world. In the UK, universities have lived with copious amounts of government intervention over the years, from labour-force planning, academic manpower planning（still the case in French universities）, student numbers planning, fee structures, ability to raise capital for investment, directive appointments of VCs at failing universities and so on. There is no such thing as a perfectly autonomous university. The pertinent question I would keep my eye on wherever I am is "is the institutional autonomy sufficient to support my job of delivering world-class education to clever students and pushing the boundaries of knowledge？" I do not think that I have heard an explicit allegation about HKU being compromised in this respect. I hope it is not and that it will not be. I have a personal（favourable）view about Professor Johannes Chan's qualification for the post, but that is irrelevant now since a decision has been made by a body of people better equipped than I to take the wider view and which I fully support.
This is a personal view and does not represent a collective view of the 10 Deans.
Chris Webster, Dean, Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong
http://news.mingpao.com/pns/chris%20webster%20%3a%20i%20support%20the%20council%27s%20decision/web_tc/article/20151002/s00012/1443722429941
