43
6.
7.
8.
Suggested paragraphs 6, 7 & 8, in Part 11.
The Committee was thus of opinion that it was not essential to maintain a University in Hongkong merely to meet the educational needs of the Colony. Nor dia the Committee feel that the future requirements of other British Territories in the Far Last, even if added to the needs of Hongkong, woula justify the meavy burden on local resources and on the Colonial Welfare and Development Fund entailed in the establishment and maintenance of a full scale Colonial University. They then considered whether they should recommend that as a University was still formally in existence, it should only be restorea on the small and inadequate scale it nad reached before the Japanese occupation. With more nesitation, and in spite of the fact that the death of a British University has no precedent, they decided not to recommend restoration on that inaaequate scale. In so deciding they had to recognise that the death of the University as such, and its replacement by institutions of lower status, would be a severe shock to the Colony, to China, and to other sections of opinion in China and the Far East, besides having embarrassing political implications.
Such a decision was naturally painful to those of the Committee who nave been associated with the University, and it requires strong justification. The information at the aisposal of the Committee leads it to believe that though the University up to the Japanese occupation dia succeed in maintaining British University standards in its actual examinations, it was in chronic difficulties. University standards in research were always beyond its powers, and the width and extent of the undergraduate studies it offered were in some respects less than the minimum required of a University. To restore the University of Hongkong on this scale when the standards of all its Chinese competitors are rapiuly rising would be to invite the criticism that we were maintaining an inferior institution with the title and merely superficial attributes of a University. The Committee thought that would be in the end even more damaging to Britisn prestige than a frank confession of failure, bitter ana numiliating as the latter must be.
Therefore unless some reasons coula be aduuced aaaitional to the bare needs of the Colony and other Britisn Territories in the Far East, the Committee would not feel able to recommend the restoration of the University of Hongkong. But in the view of the Committee such additional and overwhelmingly strong reasons do exist.