A race of one: HKU student with pro-Occupy movement past in line to lead university union
Althea Suen tells in exclusive interview that, like the incumbent, she would ignore university’s confidentiality rules if public interest at stake
A 20-year-old who is set to become the University of Hong Kong’s next student body leader has vowed to ignore the university’s confidentiality rules if the public interest is at stake.
Speaking exclusively to the Post in her first interview yesterday, year-three student Althea Suen, the only candidate for the HKU student union presidency, also proposed revamping the university’s governing council by allowing councillors to elect their own chairman.
HKU’s governance crisis worsened last month after Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying appointed former education minister Professor Arthur Li Kwok-cheung as the council’s chairman. Li was regarded by critics as a heavy-handed agent tasked to bring HKU under Leung’s control.
READ MORE: Surrounded: University of Hong Kong students besiege governing council meeting, demand talks with Arthur Li
Last week, hundreds of students besieged the council’s meeting as it failed to specify when it would initiate a review of the council’s structure.
Li later accused student union president Billy Fung Jing-en, also a member of the council, of violating the council’s confidentiality rule and lying by telling protesters that the council refused to start a review.
Suen said if she became president, she would follow Fung’s example as a whistle-blower.
“The principle of justice and the public’s right to know override the so-called confidentiality agreement when the council makes decisions that hurt public interest,” she said.
Suen also said Fung was not a liar, as he told students that “the review panel would not be set up immediately”.
Last year Li criticised Fung for disclosing councillors’ remarks after they declined to explain why liberal legal scholar Professor Johannes Chan Man-mun was denied promotion to a key managerial post at the university.
READ MORE: University of Hong Kong staff fail to turn up for vote on whether to back student class boycott
Prior to enrolling at HKU in 2013, Suen, now studying social work, served as Wa Ying College’s student union president and was actively involved the Youth Leaders Development Association’s Model Legislative Council programme.
Suen said she used to prefer not to speak up on issues, even those that she felt strongly about, such as the national education curriculum controversy in 2012. But her thinking changed two years ago.
On July 2, 2014, Suen was among 511 people arrested after an overnight sit-in on Chater Road, an event that was considered a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the pro-democracy Occupy movement that broke out in September that year.
The experience was thought-provoking. “The arrest made me reflect,” Suen said. “As a student who cares about society, am I unwilling to pay any price at all?
“There were medical students around me who were arrested,” she added. “The arrest could affect their job prospects, yet they were willing to bear the cost.”
Suen would win the five-day election if at least 1,600 students – or one-tenth of the union’s members – vote by Friday and a majority support her.
