My Take | Arthur Li using hardball tactics at the University of Hong Kong

His new seat at the council of the University of Hong Kong is barely warmed, yet Arthur Li Kwok-cheung has already started attacking its professors for falling academic standards.

As a new council member, that is hardly the way to endear oneself to academic staff. And if the rumour is true that Li's council appointment is to pave the way for him to become its chairman, his heavy-handed criticism now promises a very rocky road ahead full of mutual contempt and recrimination.

But that has always been Li's leadership style. Sometimes it works; often it inflicts terrible and lasting damage.

When he was education and manpower minister under our first chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, he arguably did what was necessary to force the English Schools Foundation out of its fossilised colonial management style of total unaccountability. But his "hardball" politics was so extreme it eventually forced the ESF to try to wean itself off public subsidies. Now it's on its way to becoming just another fancy and expensive group of private international schools. That surely runs counter to its original mandate and reason for being.

Meanwhile, his threatened "rape" of the Institute of Education if it didn't merge with the Chinese University, his old haunt, completely failed while breaching mutual trust between the government and local tertiary institutions that has lasted to this day.

His latest spat with HKU academic staff has already led to a threatened lawsuit from the head of the HKU Academic Staff Association.