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Meditations on Fluff: A Prologue to Mixed Marriages and the FHKGEP

by

Margaret Chu, D. Phil.

Consultant, The Hong Kong America Centre

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In 1905, the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) abolished its civil service

examinations system, terminating a meritocratic system that had been in

operation in imperial China for millennia. Thenceforth selections of talents for the

officialdom and public recognition of abilities had to look elsewhere, in the newly

founded modern schools with their new curriculum, the reformed academies and,

still a practice that persisted for a while, the clan schools and private tutoring in

mandarin families. Structural and curriculum change eventually gave rise to the

historical debate between the classicists and the modernists over the abolition of

classical and literary Chinese as the medium of instruction in favour of the

vernacular. New curriculum introduced new subjects, new books and new ideas.

The late Qing witnessed a proliferation of translations of foreign ideas, Yan Fu,

who was unversed in any Western language, being one of the most famous

translators of Western texts. Amidst foreign imperialist aggression and

exploitation, economic and political turmoil, as well as natural disasters including

the bubonic plague, Chinese society was fraught with excitement and

extremities. It was poised for change.

New ideas gave rise to new consciousness, new forms of action, new

mentality. The 1911 Revolution six years later boasted of women radicals,

modern educated descendants of the traditional literati-gentry class, overseas

returned students, the new bourgeoisie, teachers in the modern schools, the new

working class and reform-minded officials. The last Qing Emperor abdicated,

thus ending an imperial tradition that had served China for millennia, a system

well-served by its civil service examinations system, a selection structure of

immense sophistication that has often been unfairly denigrated in our time.

Republican China adopted Western systems of government, banking, education,

while staffing them with the new elite. The torrents of change, however,

continued. Millennia-old traditions needed time to adapt. Meanwhile civil wars

and foreign invasions culminating in the Pan-Pacific War waged by the

Japanese, primarily on Chinese soil, devastated the countryside, and sent the

nation’s best minds to soul-searching, its intellectuals to seek solutions from

foreign ideas and its activists to radicalism. The 1949 Revolution witnessed

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decades of excessive changes in China and a crazed, self-immolation of its

intellectual culture with concurrent annihilation of its educational system, which

effects on the Chinese psyche have yet to be studied.

Hong Kong has enjoyed a lighter chapter. It is a city within a huge

country. Its current government and the older generations amongst its

population remember, have seen or been a part of that turbulent period of

China’s recent past. The British colonial government, for its part, was

conscious of a different historical lesson, one that was learnt the hard way from

its rulership in India. It is reasonable, then, to detect in Hong Kong’s higher

education features quite unique to itself.

Faustian Rejuvenation of Civilisation

When Faust wakes up and Gretchen has drowned herself, his journey has

just begun; when the old couple find themselves displaced, Faust is intensely

preoccupied with nation-building.

Fundamental changes in education, in the case of modern Chinese

history, yield the narrative of complete overhaul of a country’s five thousand

years of historical development under the circumstance. Traumatic for the

nation, rotten roots have to be plucked out and, in the process, young shoots and

healthy roots as well. The HKSAR Government, through the University Grants

Council (UGC), mandated the abolition of the 5+2+3 system of secondary to

post-secondary education in favour of a 3+3+4 system. Taking into account a

younger group of first-year students in the cyber-space world of fewer siblings,

fast food and working mothers, integration with the Mainland and globalisation,

the UGC perceived a gap in the college student’s education that had to be filled

by tertiary institutions. Higher education is recognised increasingly as an

extension of secondary school, offering remedial programmes. Data learnt have

now to be digested and processed to feed into other channels where necessary.

Retentive memory is used most effectively together with the faculties of logic and

analysis, a process which also benefits immensely from exercising one’s

intellectual capability at the same time. Learning cannot be done without

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teachers. Inherent in the General Education reform is inevitably a demand for

pedagogical changes. When you teach differently, you necessarily assess

differently. Old styles of teaching are no longer desirable in the new types of

courses designed with new visions of the sort of minds to be nurtured, characters

to be developed, and socio-political consciousness to be espoused. Only history

has the privilege to follow the story to its end—unless future generations

hastened Planet Earth towards its perdition.

A Touch of Likeness

An attractive feature of the HKSAR is its bureaucratic efficiency, lovable

certainly on the receiving end of its services but perhaps less so for those caught

in the labyrinth of authority. The a-historical assign credit to the British for having

imported a sophisticated civil bureaucracy. The comparatively more versed point

to China’s own tradition of organising huge numbers of people for monumental

construction, of which the Great Wall stands out as an example. Millennia before

that was an ancient example of flood control efforts by the famous Da Yu of the

Xia Dynasty (ca. 2183–1752 B.C.) when hundreds of thousands of people had to

be mobilised to undertake the herculean task for substantial periods of time over

a range of terrain. Some historians, for their part, have shown that the reverse is

true: it was the Chinese who taught the British the operations and efficacy of a

bureaucratic civil service system. A fishing port within a huge country and a

colony under the former British Empire, the HKSAR has benefitted from both.

The University of Hong Kong was the signature tertiary institution that trained

competent and obedient civil servants who readily carried out orders from their

colonial masters without questions asked. Just say the word, and the job is

done. When reinforced by a bureaucratic tradition at once extremely

sophisticated and long lived, the die is cast: universities in the HKSAR will

perpetuate the bureaucratic culture come what may.

All Great Minds Think Alike: General Education and the Confucian Tradition

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The six core areas of study in imperial China were: rites and propriety,

music, archery, charioteering, book learning and mathematics, while the core

texts were The Four Books and the Five Classics. Learning was emphasised for

the sake of the Self, wei ji zhi xue, because the Self was where everything spins

off: It is only after you manage to cultivate yourself that you can harmonise the

family, govern the country and, finally, bring peace to the world. And the way to

cultivate yourself is through rectification (systematic analysis) of things, extension

of knowledge, sincerity of intent and a correct mind-and-heart. In short, imperial

China opted for breadth of learning, which included the aesthetic and physical

prowess, humane and mathematical subjects, all of which backed by core texts

for the sake of self-cultivation, while the nurturing of the self requires intellectual

capability, mental acumen, ethical development and psycho-physical

preservation. It was not just the ancient Greeks (such as Plato in his Republic)

who had thought about the matter along the same lines, the Chinese had come

to similar conclusions. General education, very much an American brand, is

finding itself cross-fertilised through the Fulbright Hong Kong General Education

Programme. Better produce are yet to come in the course of time.

Journey to the West

That is, journey westwards to the East—Asia.

The Fulbright Scholar Programme advertised on the website

(www.cies.org) of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES),

announces a New Fulbright Scholar Award “Building a General Education

Curriculum in Hong Kong Universities”:

Recipients of these new awards will work with Hong

Kong universities as they prepare for a transition from a three-year undergraduate program to a four-year undergraduate program in September 2012. … Grantees will be part of a team that will be coordinated by the Hong Kong-America Center (HKAC). The team will work with all of the Hong Kong institutions. Each grantee will also be affiliated with one of Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions where the

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grantee will consult with colleagues and the committee that have responsibility for developing the general education curriculum and courses for the new undergraduate program. Grantees will also teach one course in their area of specialisation. … With support from the U.S. Department of State, the awards are made possible by a generous grant from Po Chung, a Hong Kong businessman and entrepreneur, and the University Grants Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

That is to say, apart from coming to Hong Kong with the support of the U.S.

Department of State, these Fulbright Scholars are coming as guests to Hong

Kong’s universities invited by a generous gift from a private individual with a

matching grant from the UGC of the Hong Kong Government for the stated

purposes and functions.

While these “American scholars will work with Hong Kong scholars who

are developing general education in their host universities,” their “housing will be

provided by the host universities.”

In addition, they will be affiliated with the Hong Kong-

America Center, a consortium of Hong Kong universities, and will work together as a team … to strengthen general education in all HK universities in the run-up to … September 2012. The HKAC will convene regular working meetings of the Fulbright scholars and their HK colleagues to share experience and promote collaboration among universities.

This website, http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/hkac, further elaborates in its

announcement of the “Fulbright Hong Kong General Education Program In Hong

Kong Universities”:

The Fulbright scholars will be affiliated with the

general education units and will be cross-assigned to appropriate academic departments for some teaching responsibilities and collegial interaction with local scholars in their fields.

In addition, some macro outline of work distribution is indicated:

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We expect the Fulbright scholars to teach about half-

time and to reserve other time for developmental work on general education at their host universities, as well as to collaborate across institutions on general education where appropriate.

The international angle of the Award is brought to bear. Not merely for the

usefulness of administration purposes to support the development of general

education in Hong Kong has the Award been endowed but also for the benefit of

students for which education is about, the HKAC announcement envisages that:

… the Fulbright scholars in the FHKGEP will remain

engaged with their HK host universities to develop partnerships for student exchanges. These may involve two-way movement of students and/or the joint delivery of general education via technology reflecting Asian and Western dimensions of world civilisation. We also hope these returned Fulbright scholars will advocate for a greater place for Asian civilisation in general education programs in American universities.

Dissimilar in mission but not so in spirit, Chinese Buddhists in more identifiable

designation and intellectuals interested in metaphysics had played that role since

at least the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220), culminating in the famous

pilgrimage to the west by Xuanzang (596–664), founder of the Faxiang School of

Buddhism, philosopher and translator. There were many other contacts and

interactions in the meantime, not only via the Silk Road but especially with Korea,

Japan and, later, Vietnam, the last group of which were cultural and intellectual

as well. The final period of benign intellectual and religious exchange before the

onslaught of imperialism in the nineteenth century would have to be the Jesuits

during the early Qing Dynasty. Until the Vatican interfered with the practice of

ancestor veneration by Chinese converts, the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722)

received his foreign guests almost with open arms, curious about Western

philosophy and science, tolerant of missionaries registered with a licence.

Beyond chinoiserie, Chippendale furniture, porcelain, silk and a variety of cultural

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artefacts, Europe was perhaps more insular intellectually with respect to Chinese

philosophy although Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) had made reference

to it. Reforms in German universities are said to have been influenced to a

degree by the Chinese examinations system, as was the British civil service

system to an extent.

History tells a mixed story. Yin and yang operate each on its own and on

each other, giving rise to the Five Agents, wuxing:

By the transformation of yang and its union

with yin, the Five Agents of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth rise. When these five material forces (ch’i) are distributed in harmonious order, the four seasons run their course. The Five Agents constitute one system of yin and yang, and yin and yang constitute the Great Ultimate. The Great Ultimate is fundamentally the Non-ultimate. The Five Agents arise, each with its specific nature.1

Human nature shares universal, common denominators but individual human

beings each have their unique combinations and permutations. It is never wise

to generalise. “Culture” and “civilisation” are terms that are meant to generalise.

The Chinese intellectual tradition, to be draconian about our generalisation, is

essentially non-theistic and without creation myth. When asked about ghosts

and spirits, or the after-life, Confucius famously replied that he would not

deliberate on that which he does not know and his attitude towards ghosts and

spirits (as is towards anything) is due respect. This sentiment underlies the

consciousness of many a Chinese, and may still be relevant in our appreciation

of the People’s Republic of China. It explains the Kangxi Emperor’s annoyance

with missionaries who “carped” at our customs. It also signifies areas that are

off-limits for international conversion. For the cultural anthropologist, these may

be viewed as characteristics that distinguish one civilisation from another.

A mere metropolis that is moreover a Special Administrative Region, Hong

Kong enjoys the luxury of a welcome oasis for the East and West, North and

1 W.T. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963: Princeton University Press), p.463.

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South to feed into and drink out of. The academic and intellectual reciprocations

the Hong Kong-America Centre would wish the Fulbright GE Scholars embrace

echo the intents and purposes of the magnanimous gesture of Mr. and Mrs. Po

and Helen Chung, a private vision cherished by both the Hong Kong SAR and

the United States.

“We Come Bearing Gifts”

A dangerous reminder. When the Greeks came up with the idea of the

wooden horse, they might be said to have set down on the pages of the history of

the ancient Western world determinant factors, as Troy was indeed taken in by

the gambit and died an extremely youthful death in the history of the nations of

the world. The Fulbright GE Scholars, however, arrived only with suitcases,

being several times scrutinised by airport securities. They stood before you in

plain clothes, with neither helmet nor armour: they did not even arrive encased

in their body armour. They are soldiers of knowledge, not of arms. Their

qualifications are neither the ability to shoot an arrow nor yet to fire a rocket,

while battlefield experiences or wartime injuries are not carte blanche to winning

the Award. According to the announcement of the said Award on CIES’s

website:

They should have experience, preferably in a

leadership role, in the development of a university or college’s general education curriculum or first-year program. They should also have experience in developing interdisciplinary courses and in organising and presenting faculty workshops on effective modes of teaching and learning. Familiarity with outcomes-based evaluation, curriculum alignment and online teaching strategies will be an advantage.2

An academic exchange, it is a two-way street with input from Hong Kong:

2 “New Fulbright Scholar Award: Building a General Education Curriculum in Hong Kong Universities,

Fulbright Scholar Program, 2008–2009” on the website: www.cies.org.

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Fulbright CIES will recruit educators who have achievements in developing, managing and delivering general education at the university level in the U.S. We seek scholars who have a passion for teaching and deep interest in the inter-relationship of bodies of knowledge in the context of educating students beyond their academic majors. They should have strong records in their respective academic fields … The general education units and teaching-learning centres of the HK universities, working with the HKAC, will set the criteria and desired profiles of skills to recruit each year.3

The Wooden Horse inside the Gate of Troy

The predicament of guests is that you never know whether the host who

invited you still fancy your coming, or whether other members of the family in

particular the dowagers and the governors will not give you the cold shoulder. In

big households, you even stand in fear and trepidation of the servants and

housemaids who scrutinise you from the brand of the gel you use to style your

hair to the newness and freshness of those little personal items that you

generally tug between spaces in your suitcase and rarely place atop for the

public eye. If you are red-haired or green-eyed in a community of brown hair and

grey eyes, or vice versa, you may suffer pangs of vexation with a particular gaze,

a cough otherwise so natural in a roomful of people, or hushed exchanges. But

these are behaviours of “them”—the others.

Not us.

The Fulbright GE Scholars vouch for it. Their responses have been

positive about the hospitality and friendliness of the vast majority of Hong Kong

colleagues whom they met on the campus of their host institutions or when they

sauntered out to other campuses. Apart from making great friendships amongst

themselves though they have all come from different parts of the United States

and from different backgrounds who have moreover been teaching at very

different college or university systems, they have also made friends and

3 “Fulbright Hong Kong General Education Program (FHKGEP) in Hong Kong Universities, 2008–2012” on

the website: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/hkac.

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acquaintances, professional connections individually and institutionally with

academics, sometimes non-academics as well, in Hong Kong, Macau, the

Mainland and countries where they were invited to participate as Fulbright

Scholars on general education or on their own discipline.4

The quandary came, rather, from their reception as Fulbright General

Education Scholars charged with the duty to perform the functions so clearly

stated in the award scheme both from the United States and Hong Kong.5 While

teaching was not routinely assigned to every GE Fulbrighter during his/her

sojourn of usually two academic terms, some institutions quite consistently

assigned them duties not within their job description and for which they travelled

thousands of miles to perform. An administrator in general education in one

institution might have even quarrelled, so to speak, with one of the unfortunate

Fulbrighters, while a faculty member of another institution might be quizzical of

the Fulbright Hong Kong General Education Programme itself. At times, a

curious apathy towards, mixed with ignorance of, general education was

exhibited by faculty members of some departments and middle as well as senior

administrators. Somewhere between benighted and benign sits human

consciousness. The flip side to the benefit of the alien scholar may well have

been greater highbrow indifference and less green-eyed animosity, not

infrequently the product of intellectual cachexia, the very condition for which the

magnificence of the Po donation is determined to remedy.

“Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’

Did not Erasmus once remark that “If I contradict myself, why then I

contradict myself?” The Praise of Folly humanises our weaknesses.

Magnanimity, though, is not so easy to come by. Which is perhaps why Aristotle

calls it a virtue. The Fulbright Hong Kong General Education Programme is not a

project devised by some secret intelligence office or by any underground Mafia

organisation. Both the FHKGEP and the shorter CIES announcement can be

4 Points gathered from amongst confidential reports by the Fulbrighters.

5 Ibid.

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found on the Internet with clear descriptions. Its scholars came in commercial

aeroplanes, were assigned office space by their host institutions and given

university lodgings. The HKAC acted as their coordinator, facilitator, often

energetically making plans and regularly holding meetings with them. Its

Executive Director is not of small stature, even by Western standards, whose

voluminous voice and pleasant laugh can be heard a few doors down the

hallway. There is an office with friendly staff who will offer their services

whenever they can oblige.

The likelihood is that Hong Kong academics are too busy. Senior

administration is forever inundated with responsibilities to be able to

communicate down the bureaucratic ladder a Programme designed precisely to

invite overseas experts to lend their help. As authority rests in their hands, it

could have been the case on some campuses that the top level had been too

busy to have the time to give concrete instructions as to how best to utilise the

Fulbright Scholars for the development, reform or enrichment of general

education. Amongst the middle echelon academics, some literally had not the

time to search the Internet for simple information precisely because there are

always too many complex matters to attend to. They had not even the time to

check with the Executive Director of the HKAC when they encountered each

other on occasions because there was always something more urgent to

address. Neither had they the chance to enquire from the Fulbright Scholar who

was a resident guest on their campus. And time flies. Four years had gone by.

It is still not clear what the Fulbright guests had been doing with their time when

they were here.6 It is equally baffling that each cohort seemed to get around

together and, happily, sometimes going off to other institutions, if not flying to

other countries to lecture or participate in conferences.7 Should they not be

serving their host institutions—and full time?8 After all, it is a lot of financial and

human resources allotted to this FHKGE Programme. Not to mention a lot of

6 Data collected from confidential interviews conducted in 2012.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

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time and energy on the host universities and local institutions to entertain them

and extra workload for faculty atop an already impossible workload.9

The casual observer fails to understand. There had been obvious

disconnect between the Fulbright Scholars who were not given teaching duties

and/or assigned responsibilities for which they came to perform and the

frustration expressed by some local academics. Direct enquiries from the HKAC

confirm that every Fulbright scholar from every cohort has led a very busy and

productive schedule. Individually, these scholars performed services on their

respective host campuses by offering workshops on the new pedagogy, giving

presentations, leading focus groups, attending meetings opened to them, helping

with vetting and revising course proposals, advising local faculty on the writing of

course proposals, designing and administering pre- and post-course surveys,

designing grading rubrics of all kinds, visiting classes, observing pilot courses,

providing hands-on help with interdisciplinary courses, explaining conceptually

and practically Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning Assessments,

distinguishing conceptually introductory courses from general education

broadening courses, breaking internal barriers as outsider-insider, easing

tensions by taking the advantage of being a foreigner, reaffirming the value of

general education at institutions where the subject and the office managing it had

always been discredited, helping with setting standards for language courses,

improving communication and information-sharing within the host institution,

involving more campus constituents in general education, increasing

engagement with senior administration, acting as negotiator and ambassador to

department heads, putting committees in touch with American institutions

successful with common reading programmes, sharing experiences of similar

difficult situations in the United States, aligning the host institution with

universities from two different countries for experiential community outreach

programmes, assisting in writing grant proposals to the European Union

9 Ibid.

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Commission, offering insights as trouble-shooters and, above all, acting as

sounding boards.10

This is quite an impressive list of the variety of services provided by the

guest-scholars and the benefits reaped by various sectors within the respective

host universities. Far from being exhaustive, the list does not include activities

performed by each cohort as a team. The FHKGEP requires each member of

each cohort to work together on general education as a team across institutions.

Team Fulbright therefore travelled around trying to break barriers between faculty

by showing through their own example of cooperation the efficacy of

collaboration and constructive management, act as catalyst of inter-institutional

connections and conversations, help to reduce isolationist tendencies of

institutions, encourage more productive exchanges among and between

universities, hold workshops on ways of making institutional change more

successful, stress the urgency of putting in place procedures and committee

structures for vetting course and programme proposals, provide conceptual,

substantive and logistical contributions to particular institution for its particular

needs, underscore thematic relatedness and coherence among core courses,

hold workshops and conferences on the basic principles of Outcomes-Based

Teaching and Learning and, collectively, performed a variety of activities that

each individual Fulbrighter already did for the host institution. Beyond Hong

Kong, Team Fulbright also travelled to Macau and Zhuhai to offer their

services.11

It is no wonder that the Fulbright scholars were not often found sitting in

their offices, hiding in campus libraries, or loitering around the campus of their

host institutions.

The view is baffling: That their presence was superfluous; that, even

without the FHKGEP or the Fulbrighters, the general education programmes,

certainly in some of the universities, would still have looked the same; and that

10

These are screened from the informal reports of each of the Fulbrighters. 11

These are screened from the confidential reports of the Fulbrighters.

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difficulties encountered during the process could have been overcome.12

Coming from more than a singular voice, the comment is cause for concern.

Tastefully Functional Décor

We have mentioned that the Chinese had a lengthy bureaucratic culture

which they had been refining from at least the time of the Xia Dynasty when

columns of people had to be mobilised for flood control. Since the expansion of

the British Empire, the British can boast their own. Colonial Hong Kong

benefitted from those fruits of British imperialist expansion. The HKSAR’s civil

service is not to be slighted. Neither is the bureaucratic culture in its tertiary

institutions. The efficiency the institutions have been exhibiting in getting

themselves ready for the 3+3+4 reform to be implemented in autumn 2012 is

phenomenal. The general education programmes and the concomitant

adjustments made to a variety of courses, programmes, centres and schools are

equally impressive, as has been the move towards implementing Outcomes-

Based Teaching and Learning approaches.

Yang gives rise to yin. The shady side of bureaucracies is hierarchy,

authoritarianism, opaqueness, incommunicado, pusillanimity, fecklessness and

cynicism. Coming in from overseas, the guest-scholars were for the most part

somewhat taken aback by the scene before them. They did not see academic

politics diseases peculiar to Hong Kong. Rather, their intellectual acumen

perceived a reality troublesome for the seminal reform at hand. Their humanism

brought forth that compassion only sensitive souls could feel. All four cohorts

were perturbed. Objectively speaking, something is amiss. Selected for the

mission to lend help and support, the good Samaritan in them cried out for the

urgency to remedy cancerous growths that are injurious not only to the

bureaucratic system but also to the quality of life of its faculty. More regrettably,

the academic atmosphere makes a laughing stock of the spirit of general

education.

12

From confidential interviews conducted in 2012.

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A Doll’s House?

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” curiously echoes Mencius’ metaphor of the

impossibility of conducting a conversation with the summer insect about ice in the

winter. Broadening one’s horizons implies expanding one’s knowledge. There

is, besides, the faculty of imagination, without which we would probably still be

living in caves. A common concern for the road ahead of general education is

the fact that most faculty and administrators in almost all the institutions had not

the experience of general education as student or teacher. Ignorance breeds

contempt. Faculty resistance to general education manifested itself in the form of

professional discourtesy towards their guest-scholars, with remarks at times

verging on, one should say, a form of racism.13 A corresponding issue is faculty

workload in research universities striving to leap forward in international ranking.

If general education courses are taught by faculty hired specifically to teach

general education, and when the size of such courses tends to be large, GE

faculty would hardly be able to compete for promotion and standing in institutions

obsessed with ranking. More institutions, however, adopt the policy of assigning

the departments the task of offering general education courses in their respective

discipline. Where breadth is required, teaming up across disciplines,

interdisciplinarity, will be the option adopted. Given the phenomenon of a highly

specialised faculty, interdisciplinarity, though not always understood by members

who team teach, seems to be the chosen way to go.

Research pressure combined with an already impossible workload, the

stress of which had rendered uncouth behaviour and xenophobic reception of

guest-scholars coming with the purpose and function to lend assistance and

support, the decision to let the departments have ownership of general education

courses may not bode well for GE reform, unless the departments genuinely

have scholars who have equipped themselves over the years with quality training

in a range of subjects, a phenomenon which does not exist in Hong Kong’s

universities for the most part.

13

From Fulbrighters’ confidential reports. The term, “racism,” is not used in the reports. The sentiment of anti-foreignism was sometimes felt and, possibly, a degree of antipathy towards “those Americans.”

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Could the senior administration be persuaded? Or would they behave like

those chained to their chairs in the Cave? Could they see that a successful GE

programme hinges on either the point articulated in the preceding paragraph, or

a knowledgeable faculty with breadth of learning dedicated to the teaching of GE

courses? Would they, perhaps, like Torvald, fail to see? Conversely, would the

faculty themselves, like Nora, dare speak up, thereby liberating themselves from

the chains of a bureaucratic culture that needs to democratise, with more

transparency, communicativeness and egalitarianism? In the end, if the culture

in Hong Kong’s universities is not open and democratic, and if the universities

themselves do not practise these principles, how can they nurture young people

for the task at hand?

Where Angels Fear To Tread

The hardware in Hong Kong’s institutions of higher education is

impeccable. It is the software that needs fixing. Human agents constitute a part

of that software. Institutions are now hiring general education faculty where a GE

Centre has been set up, or of new faculty in the disciplines willing to teach

general education courses. Existing faculty, in some cases, senior members,

have also been engaged to do the teaching. Is that not sufficient? Unless that

sector of the senior administration which oversees GE comprises of academics

trained in general or liberal education, it is not likely to take to heart the critical

importance in the hiring, because it is not likely to appreciate the fact that those

who never experienced general education as student and teacher are individuals

who do not have a native interest in breadth of knowledge. Scholars only

presumably have that interest. In our era of mass education even on the doctoral

level, intellectual inquisitiveness is rare. The narrowly trained and narrowly

focused should not be selected to teach general education courses, as that

obviously goes against their grain. Not unlike the challenge of a survey course,

which requires immense breadth in the discipline, general education courses, if

they be of any worth, must equally be offered by scholars solid in the general

knowledge that they, though not necessarily specialists, ought to command.

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The Fulbright Hong Kong General Education Programme has clear

stipulations with regards the purpose of the Award and the duties and functions

of the Fulbrighters. Two governments are involved, one in selecting the experts,

the other in providing matching fund to private donations. Participating

institutions have signed agreements with the benefactor endorsing the duties and

functions outlined in public pronouncements. If there were a problem with a

Fulbrighter, should not the host university take up the matter with the HKAC?

The point is that host universities, in accepting public funding, are publicly

accountable and to the private donor. Thus, they must bear their share of

responsibility in living up to the agreement signed—which they seemed to have

failed to fulfil. Where internal miscommunication exists, those are internal

problems, as are the problems of the distribution of labour, funding or resource

allocation the responsibility of which does not fall on the shoulders of the guest-

scholars or the HKAC, while the problems, being internal, are irrelevant to the

FHKGEP.

Unequally Yoked

Marriage is about ties, reciprocal respect, mutual understanding,

communication, toleration and cooperation. It can also remain fraught with

problems and challenges. A successful, lasting one is strengthened by ties of

loyalty, holistic personal growth (WPE), communicativeness (language and

rhetoric), and appreciation and understanding (global peace and knowledge). In

the course of the last four years, marriages—occasionally uneasy and barely

cordial—between the Fulbrighters and their respective host universities have

each produced an offspring fed by generous donations. In their commitment to

the FHKGEP, Team Fulbright, individually or being part of their cohort, have

crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s. They passed on and shared unstintingly

with the local universities their knowledge, experience and expertise in general

education. Living and working a year in Hong Kong gave them the additional

insight into the operations and structure of its academic system. These scholars

were more than capable as advisers to the universities. Their qualifications

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should have allowed them to bring pressure to bear upon their host institutions to

build, review, re-examine, improve and reinforce the General Education

programme. The daunting task has just begun; there is little room—or time left—

for complacency among the educators and administrators in Hong Kong.