Doo
high standard of study and discipline is being steadily maintained and in some respects enhanced. Moreover the leading commercial houses of Hong Kong are now anxious to secure University graduates and to give them responsible work and good openings. At the moment this demand exceeds the supply. Through all the recent years of financial stress the University has done more than its for in addition to meeting all its current expenses it has pay had to set aside every year considerable sums against bad investment debts, to say nothing of the payments due to the University from Chinese Governments whose students the University taught, housed, fed and in some cases clothed but on whose account an amount of well over a lakh of dollars is still outstanding. The charge of financial mismanagement which
was
way,
once brought against the University can not in fact be maintained. At the moment the University can point to its latest income and expenditure account as showing a reasonable balance on the right side and, though the authorities had last year to increase the teaching staff, the Institution can claim that it is paying its way and that it owes not a cent to anyone.
But the University started its life on a financial basis which was impossibly inadequate, and it is now trying to carry on the work which the Hong Kong Legislature set it to do on Its staff the strength of funds which are wholly insufficient. is seriously underpaid; its accommodation is inadequate, its library poor and its equipment, especially in the Faculty of Arts, indifferent, Meanwhile the strain of poverty and anxiety is sapping the morale of those who are responsible for the University's working. For years the University has been looking for relief to the Boxer Indemnity. His Excellency the Governor, the University's ex-officio Chancellor, has been incessantly pressing the University's claims on His Majesty's Government. But the years pass. Conferences are held, an Act is passed, a statutory committee is appointed, a delegation comes to China perambulates, reports and disappears. Americans spend their Indemnity money on educating and training Chinese youths; the French start an Eastern language school in Paris which turns out first class sinologues and de- cide to spend the balance of the Indemnity on adding a Chinese Faculty to the Sorbonne. But the balances of the British share of the Indemnity pile up at the Bank and no one, except per- haps the Bank, is benefitted. A decision in London is
12
The
}
still awaited and there is still apparently another Act of Parliament, to be passed by a Government which has yet to be elected. Admittedly there are claims other than those of the Hong Kong University; political considerations perhaps of which the University knows nothing. The question whether the only British University in the Far East-a University established by Government of a British Colony with the approval and en- couragement of His Majesty's Government on endowments which the Government of Hong Kong asked the public of Hong Kong and elsewhere to subscribe-should continue to function or not may perhaps be regarded as not being without some real importance to British prestige generally. At any rate the interminable delays which seem always to be deferring the final decision as to what is to be done with the Indemnity, is affecting the University most adversely, for it is postponing the tackling of the inevitable problem of the University's continuance as an institution which, in the terms of the Hong Kong Ordinance which created it, is to exist for the promotion of arts, science and learning, the the formation of the provision of higher education, character of all races, nationalities and creeds, and the maintenance of good understanding with the neighbouring country of China."
W. W. HORNELL,
Vice-Chancellor,
"C
Dated 20th April, 1929.
13
+
201