Long-awaited schedule to address issue revealed by chairman of university’s governing council Arthur Li Kwok-cheung
SHIRLEY.ZHAO@SCMP.COM
UPDATED : Thursday, 24 March, 2016, 11:13pm
Professor Arthur Li Kwok-cheung. Photo: Edward Wong
A special panel to be appointed by the University of Hong Kong to look into reforming the institution’s governance structure will start meeting students and staff members as soon as late June.
The long-awaited schedule was revealed by the chairman of the university’s governing council, Professor Arthur Li Kwok-cheung, who treated 10 of the university’s top students to dinner at a five-star hotel yesterday.
Outside the restaurant before the dinner, a group of student activists handed Li a petition letter, demanding a prompt review of the university’s governance structure, which they claimed, in the present form, would allow easy political interference by the government.
Li told the student activists the review panel would meet all stakeholders around the end of June.
He asked the students to submit a paper to the panel stating why they wanted to change the council’s composition and how they would like it to be formed.
“I have told the panel they can discuss anything openly,” said Li, promising that the panel would proceed with its work independently without interference.
The dinner was meant to be a goodwill gesture by Li, who had promised to step up communication with students, but the occasion was not without controversy.
Student associations criticised Li for not having consulted them about the dinner and called on those invited to boycott the event. They called on Li to talk to students publicly.
At least one of the invited students, from the dentistry faculty, declined the invitation, according to the faculty’s student association. The student was unhappy that there was no agenda and the nature of the event was unclear.
The faculty then nominated another student to attend.
The three-hour dinner ended at about 9.45pm, when Li and HKU president Peter Mathieson remained in the restaurant while students left first.
A top student from the university’s law school said the students in attendance had not questioned whether the meeting was sufficiently representative of the institution’s students because they were not democratically elected student representatives.
He said Li told them he understood the need to meet with other student representatives and that he had been arranging different meetings at the same time.
The student said Li had expressed willingness to communicate.
He said the meeting had no set agenda and they had discussed various topics.
Li, when asked why he only met top students, said he had been told that HKU students were good but “I didn’t feel the students I had contact with were very good”. He said that was why he had asked the vice-chancellor to let him meet students recommended by different deans.
Mathieson said the council was in the process of setting up the review panel. He said panel members had been identified but the membership, terms and schedule could be approved by the council next month at the earliest, because the council meeting this month had been cancelled.
“I know there was some controversy about why it was happening or how they were selected, but from my point of view, I enjoyed meeting 10 of my HKU students,” Mathieson said.
Li, also an Executive Council member, was appointed by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying last December to chair the university council, despite strong opposition from pan-democrats and some alumni, who saw him as high-handed and unfit for the role.
In a council meeting in January, chaos erupted and students besieged the meeting venue, demanding an immediate change to the institution’s governance structure to strip Leung of his power to appoint his aides to oversee the publicly funded university.
The mayhem prompted the council to move the venue for its meetings to the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai last month.
Meanwhile, a joint referendum among staff members from eight publicly funded universities and institutions found 92 per cent opted for abolishing the chief executive’s powers to appoint members to university governing councils.
And 95 per cent wanted more elected representatives of academic and administrative staff members as well as students on the councils.
The three-day referendum, which closed on Wednesday, saw some 4,520 teaching and administrative staff take part, representing a turnout rate of 17.2 per cent.
But the Education Bureau said it would not recognise the results. “There is neither any legal basis nor legal binding effect for any form of so-called referendum in Hong Kong and it will not be recognised,” said the bureau.
Additional reporting by Ng Kang-chung
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/article/1930476/panel-reform-university-hong-kongs-governance
