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During the year the Athletic Club of the Union organised and carried through without a hitch the first Inter-University Athletic Sports meeting which has probably been held in China. The students from the Lingnam and the Sun Yat-sen Universities, Canton, and the students of this University competed at this meeting, the Hong Kong team proving the winners.
In the course of the year under review the Education Society opened a Free Night School.
The conduct of the students throughout the year has been on the whole good. Political feeling in China has been running high especially among the students, but the Hong Kong University undergraduates have shown in this respect the most commend- able restraint, general balance and good sense.
STUDENTS RESIDENCE.
At the end of 1931 there were 268 students residing in the University and attached hostels. Their distribution was as follows:
•
Eliot Hall
May Hall
Morrison Hall
St. John's Hall
Ricci Hall
St. Stephen's Hall (women students)
Total
62
61
41
51
39
14
268
Seventy-eight students were exempted from residence. Lugard Hall was temporarily closed for the 2nd session of 1931.
Statute 20 of the University Ordinance enacts that under- graduates shall reside either in the University buildings or in approved halls or hostels which shall be subject to such regula- tions as the Council may prescribe. These provisions are subject to the proviso that in any special or exceptional case the Council, on report from the Senate, may grant exemption from them.
When the University was first opened, women students were not admitted, though there was nothing in the Ordinance to
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justify their exclusion. Since September 1921-when women. students were first admitted-the University authorities, partly because they were not, and indeed are not, in a position to pro- vide a hostel of their own for women students and partly on other grounds, have not applied the provisions of Statute 20 to women. Residential accommodation has been provided by the Church Missionary Society and the scheme for a Women's Hostel to which reference was made in the last annual report was a scheme for providing the present attached hostel for women, St. Stephen's Hall, which is accommodated in rented premises, with a building of its own. But it was the essence of the scheme that the new hostel should continue to be an attached hostel conducted on a distinctly Christian basis, the Warden being always a member of the Church Missionary Society.
It has never been made a condition of a woman's being admitted to the University that she must reside in St. Stephen's Hostel all that she is required to do is to satisfy the University authorities before they admit her, that she is living under suit- able conditions.
The present project is a most desirable one but even if, as a result of it, St. Stephen's Hostel be provided with a spacious building, the residence of the women undergraduates of the University in it will have to continue to be on a purely voluntary basis.
Under the University Ordinance no test of religion may be imposed and it seems obvious that it would be against the spirit of the Ordinance, if not its letter, to make the residence of a woman undergraduate in an attached hostel conducted by a missionary society on a distinctly Christian basis a condition of her admission to the University.
The question of the residence of women students is a com- plicated one. The University Council and Court will, as soon as possible, be called upon to consider the question and announce a policy. Meanwhile it is necessary that the present position of the University in this matter and its attitude towards the hostel scheme should be realised. The object of the appeal was, and is, what is now called an attached hostel, but was called in Statute 20 an approved hostel, and not a hostel to be maintained and
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