CO129-594-2 Rehabilitation of Hong Kong University. For extracted photographs see CN 3-45- Advisory Committee report 1-7-1946 - 19-8-1946 — Page 91

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further existence or closing down.

Furthermore, the provision of a college of medicine and of technical institutes of less than university status in Hong Kong would, in the Committee's opinion, be adequate to meet the needs of these students, in the period before university facilities were developed in Malaya.

THE QUESTION OF PRESTIGE

6. The Committee appreciated that the death of the University would be a shock t. the Colony and t sections of opinion in China and the Far East. It proceeded to consider therefore whether the claims of sentiment and prestige, the practical value of the continuity of tradition, nu the need to avoid the embarrassing political implications involved in a decisiɔn tɔ close the University were sufficient t justify the restoration

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of the University on not more than its former scale. The information at the disposal of the Committee led it to believe that the University had to a great extent succeeded in maintaining British standards in its undergraduate training and examinations, but that university stanlards in research had been quite beyond its powers. The Committee recognized that

a University in Hong Kong would in futurs have to stand far more severe tests of comparison than before the Japanese Occupation, in the face of the rapilly rising standards of the Chinese universities. If revived merely on its ina de qua te pre-war basis, the University would relatively be in an increasingly inferior position. It could not fairly claim to be a university unless its staff possessed the quality and facilities enabling them to make significant contributions to knowledge by research. Even in its undergraduate work, it would, in the new competitive conditions, run the risk that its degrees might come to be held in so little esteem that in other British, or in Chinese and American universities, its graduates would be required to pursue further courses of undergraduate studies before they could be admitted to postgraduate courses. Such a position would be discreditable, indeed intolerable. The Committee judged that the pretentiousness of maintaining an institution of less than University quality with the title and superficial attributes of a university would, over a period of years, do more damage to British prestige than the frank and intelligible decision now to substitute for the university a group of professional schools of first-class standards.

The

7.

The Committee was thus of opinion that neither the present 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 'establishment of a full university on a permanent basis. Committee was, further, of opinion that to establish an institution of less than university standard and to call it a university would be seriously damaging to British prestige. Unless, therefore, the re were different reasons for restoring a full university, the Committee felt that it could not recommend the continuation of the University of Hong Kong.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR ASSISTING ANGLO-CHINESE UNDERSTANDING.

The more deeply the Committee studied the University's past and the present situation, the more impressed it became with the

8.

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