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SECRETARY:
MAURICE MEGRAH.
TELEPHONE:
UE 3531 (3 LINES).
Ruded a 25/1
Dear Mr. Cox,
THE INSTITUTE OF BANKERS,
II, BIRCHIN LANE,E.C.3.
Zzna January, 1946.
I wonder whether you would be interesteù to read a lecture on Hongkong and the University, delivered in 1941 before Pearl Harbour. As I have only two copies I should like to have the enclosed one back.
There is little that I would wish to change in the lecture, but I am now less confident than I was then that the island of Hongkong and the small peninsula at Kowloon will remain British territory when the lease of the new territory expires. If things go well for China all the Hongkong area may have to be returned to China within twenty years.
It might be thought that this prospect makes it unwise to re-establish the University, but I submit, on the contrary, that in that case it is all the more important for us to leave benind us, as we shall leave in India, social institutions embodying some of the essential values of our own variant of European civilisation. And among these institutions none is more certain to preserve such values than a good university, since universities are often more long-lived than the states in which they are founded. Sucu a university and its tradition would link us permanently, and to mutual advantage, with the Chinese.
Another point is not made strongly enough in this lecture. I submit that we should now concentrate on cultivating a few fields of advanced study since the basic "College of Liberal Arts and Sciences" can easily be rebuilt and strengthened on the foundations already laid. Among these advanced studies there will be at least one professional school, that in Medecine and, perhaps, one in Civil Engineering; both of these should be post-graduate in character. They too can be rebuilt from the existing foundations. But in addition there should be new organisation for post-graduate studies in Science, Letters and Philosophy, selected with due regard to local conditions, facilities elsewhere in the Far East, and a number of other considerations. For example, it might be found that studies in bio-chemistry, in marine biology, in English language and literature, with special reference to translation and
P.T.U.