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of the absence or limitation of facilities for higher education in their places of origin, because the University provided the opportunity of obtain- ing a degree instead of a local diploma (as for example in the case of the College of Medicine, Singapore), and because their lack of Mandarin made it difficult for them to attend the universities in China. The Committee reached the conclusion that if easily accessible alternative facilities of university education became available the numbers of these overseas students would decline. It was understood that the recommendations of the McLean Commission, endorsed by the Asquith Commission, that there should be a University College, and ultimately a full University in Malaya would almost certainly be implemented. The Committee decided that it would be uneconom- ical and short-sighted to restore the University of Hong Kong in order to meet a probably temporary demand from Malaya, with the risk of prejudicing the development of the Malayan University in the interim period and confront- ing the University of Hong Kong later with the crisis of discovering a new purpose for its further existence or closing down. Furthermore, the pro- vision of a college of medicine and of technical institutes of less than university status in Hong Kong would, in the Committee's opinion, be ade- quate to meet the needs of these students, in the period before university facilities were developed in Malaya..
6. The Committee was of opinion therefore that in terms of British colonial needs and interests it was not necessary to restore the University. Neither the needs of Hong Kong itself, nor the requirements of students in other British territories in the Far East, nor the two together, constituted sufficient justification for the great effort required and the heavy burden on local resources entailed in the rehabilitation of a full university on a permanent basis. The Committee considered, only to dismiss, the still more extravagrant and indeed infeasible alternative of restoring the University on a temporary basis and thus postponing or evading the decision on which the Committee had been invited to advise.
7. The Committee gave due weight to the claims of sentiment, to the practical value of continuity of tradition, to the loss of prestige, and to the embarrassing political implications involved in a decision to close the University. It appreciated that the death of the University would be a shock to the Colony, to Ching, and to other sections of opinion in China and the Far East, but judged that mere repugnance to face death was an insufficient reason for surviving. A negative basis of that kind would eventually prove fatal to the University and, instead of its disappearing with courage, for intelligible reasons, it would run the risk of lingering discreditably on a small pension until it expired with a whimper. Unless the currency of titles is to be debased, an institution claiming the title of "University" will have to face fierce competition in the future.
One of the chief reasons for the prestige of the Medical School in Hong Kong was that its degrees achieved a standard that gained for them recognition by the General Medical Council of Great Britain. The Committee thought that, in respect of these imponderable factors of sentiment and prestige, British interests would suffer gravely by preserving a so-called "University" whose degrees, for example, held in so little esteem that its grad- uates would be required in other British, or in Chinese and American univer- sitics, to pursue further courses of undergraduate study before they could be admitted to post-graduate schools, or whose staff did not possess the quality and facilities enabling them to make significant contributions to knowledge by research. Indeed, the Committee judged that the pretentious- ness of maintaining a non-university institution with the title and merely superficial attributes of a university would cumulatively do more damage to British prestige than the frank decision now to substitute for the Univer- sity a group of professional schools of first-class standards, particularly as such a "University" would exist in the shadow of great Chinese univer- sities and at increasing disadvantage in relation to the Malayan University which British effort would be energetically developing.
8.
The Committee has decided therefore to recommend that the University "as such in the sense of a colonial university as it existed before the Japanese occupation should not continue to exist.
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