meditations on fluff_a prologue to mixed marriages and the fhkgep
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Meditations on Fluff_A Prologue to Mixed Marriages and the FHKGEPTRANSCRIPT
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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.