LettersUniversity of Hong Kong feud: good governance requires power to follow where accountability leads
- Readers discuss the escalating row between the council chair and the president of the University of Hong Kong over senior management appointments
Professor Robert Tricker, whom Adrian Cadbury called the “father of corporate governance”, and who was an eminent professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), once told me that “power is the basis of governance”. He said he’d been working on a definition of corporate governance and that the issue of power was hard for outsiders to grasp. This element has often been overlooked and escaped academic recognition because it is “soft” and “difficult to measure”.
After 30 years of teaching this subject since it became a hot topic in Hong Kong during the 1990s, and having performed remedial operations on dysfunctional boards, including school boards, I can see the irony and truth in his teaching.
Take, for example, the impact on just one little department, the Lab for Space Research (LSR), where I am a member of the advisory board. According to a senior executive, all critical strategic and financial distribution decisions have come to a halt. Essential resources that should have gone towards funding research associates, new interns and space research (previously approved) are now suspended. With clarity of command under threat, simple decisions become wicked problems to overcome.
Clarity of command, reinforced through a documented and functional set of approval authority, is critical to effective governance. This practice holds for an NGO, a listed company, or a university. Imagine a parent thinking he would be in the perfect position to remove a teacher because he’s a stakeholder. We know this is illogical because the parent is not held to account for the teacher’s performance; the principal would be.
Accountability comes with power. By extension, a vice-chancellor should be held accountable for the performance of those who report directly to him and be able to appoint and remove such a person. That is his accountability. Accountability is sacrosanct in modern governance if governance is to be given its chance to perform.