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14.4
It would be possible for the staff to take positive steps to establish such a community by attempting to integrate all the full time, part-time staff and the demonstrators into some departmental activity related to the development of the subject of the course or of some professional activity; but this would invalve effort and time and may need additional payment for the part-time staff. Engagement by many of the staff on the materials testing programme is likely to encourage social cohesion but not the establishment of an academic ethos.
14.5 Most of the full-time staff are mainly interested in
subjects concerned with structural analysis and design, so that there is a serious deficiency of full-time staff concerned with the other very important Civil Engineering subject areas.
14.6 Dr. C.K. Chen has worked wonders in establishing the
department, in obtaining supporting finance and in establishing the present standard of work. Members cannot express too highly their admiration for his achievement. Dr. Chen retired from the HK University in 1968 and subsequently joined the College to develop the work in Civil Engineering there. He has attempted to retire on various occasions but the College has as frequently dissuaded him. Despite his eminence the long term future of the department must rely on the recruitment of a new Head of Department. The present Associate Head of Department, Dr. S.K. Yan, is a physicist who has spent four post doctoral years carrying out low temperature physics research in the USA up to 1975. Apart from the Head of Dept. he is the only member of staff with an overall grasp of the course. However because of his lack of experience as a Civil Engineer he is not in a position, despite his ability, to provide at this stage the leadership necessary for the coherence and development of the staff in the department, and for the formulation of the course aims.
14.7 The Baptist College senior departmental staff see the
need and would like to have one to two members of staff for each of the main areas within Civil Engineering so as to provide the right level of expertise from which to develop the course. In the absence of such staffing level it is disappointing that an attempt has been made to cover even as wide a syllabus as is included in the proposed course. However members are conscious of the dilemma facing the College: Either the course makes some attempt to cover a breadth appropriate to the professional needs for a Civil Engineer despite staff shortages or else it seeks to follow a more constricted syllabus appropriate to the staff expertise and therefore better, but which withdraws from any attempt to provide an adequate professional education. It does seem that the present proposals have some of the failings of both alternatives.
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