My Take | Hong Kong students are there to learn not administer

Concerns about academic freedom and university autonomy are again in the news. This is because two of Hong Kong’s oldest universities will have new vice chancellors. These days, virtually any senior appointment at a public university can cause a furore for the sole reason that a small but vocal group of radical localist students will always make a fuss, regardless of the merit of the appointment.

Predictably, student union leaders have protested all three appointments. The common complaint is that they were not consulted, or at least not adequately so. It has always puzzled me why such students think they should be consulted when they are there to study at taxpayers’ expense, not to help administer the school.

Well, both HKU and Chinese University allowed student representatives to attend such meetings and that didn’t stop them from complaining about the appointments. There is a simple reason: no amount of consultation will satisfy such students short of letting them appoint their own professors. But for that, we will need a 1960s-style cultural revolution.