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Opinion | No place for ethnic profiling of academics, whether in Hong Kong or US universities

  • Talk of a ‘mainlandisation’ of academics in Hong Kong is baseless and only hurts the intellectual vitality and dedication of the research enterprise
  • Recent developments in the US should serve as a warning: government overreach can damage academic careers and the functioning of universities

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Illustration: Craig Stephens
The so-called mainlandisation of Hong Kong’s universities has become a topic of interest in international academic media. Recently, University World News, in noting that mainland academics in Hong Kong universities outnumbered local faculty this year for the first time, said it raised “fears” over “the international character of universities in Hong Kong, and their culture of open research”.
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It would be ironic if mainland Chinese scholars and scientists fleeing ethnic profiling in the US arrive here only to find themselves being profiled again in Hong Kong.
While the number of academic staff in the city born on the mainland has increased over the past five years, it has not affected the international rankings of Hong Kong’s universities. If anything, the rankings have improved, from just three local universities among the world’s top 100 in 2018, according to Times Higher Education, to five this year.

The simple reason is that academic appointments in Hong Kong are based on performance, and not ethnicity, nationality, gender or religion. Anyone who has served on a search and recruitment committee would confirm it, as I can. This is also backed up by data from an international study of the academic profession in 20 university systems, in which more Hong Kong academics agreed – more than those from other systems – that appointments and resources were made depending on performance.

The University of Hong Kong – the city’s premier higher education establishment – is ranked year after year as the most international university in the world, which some contend is because non-local academics from the Chinese mainland count as international. In fact, the vast majority of them earned their doctorates overseas. That adds to the kind of diversity that universities in Hong Kong are known for in their staffing profiles.

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My corridor of nine offices had notable academic staff with overseas degrees who were natives of Canada, Portugal, South Korea, Ukraine, India, Georgia, Hong Kong and the mainland, and there were other faculty colleagues from Finland, Honduras, Britain and the United States.

In short, the international character of Hong Kong’s universities is intact. While the Covid-19 pandemic and the national security law may have pushed some talent away, the Donald Trump administration in the US was an inflection point that induced paranoia, making American universities haemorrhage Chinese talent, some of whom were pushed to Hong Kong.
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