Christian Vision and Hong Kong Higher Education

1
Christian Vision andHong Kong Higher Education

• WONG Wai Ching Angela
• Chinese University of Hong Kong

2
A Globalizing Society

• Crossing of national boundaries
• Intensive flow of money, idea, people and culture
• Information revolutionary innovations
• Weakening of the nation-state
• the emergence of global infrastructures, e.g.
  GATT/WTO, IMF, APEC, etc.
• decisions taken at one place affect ordinary
  people far away

3
Globalization and Higher Education

• partly an object/victim of the processes of
  globalization
• partly a subject/key agent of globalization

4
Higher Education in Hong Kong

• largely state institutions
• bound up with the emergence of a knowledge
  society
• that trades in symbolic goods, worldwide brands,
  images-as-commodities and scientific know-how

5
Recent Education Reform

• Main goals of the governments and university
  councils
• to steer toward increasing effectiveness and
  efficiency outcome-based assessment
• expansion for international economic
  competitiveness
• Belief more graduates with more knowledge and
  skills will make for more wealth

6
Economic changes

• cutbacks in public funding
• education as a private good
• cost sharing with students and parents
• University management with more than 50 business
  representation

7
Administrative

• A new culture a tightly integrated system of
  managerial discipline and control
• Caught in growing bureaucratization
• Old ways/goals replaced in the name of
  modernization of public service
• Academic morale is low

8
Cultural

• Todays watchwords continuous monitoring and
  audit of performance and quality
• value added better efficiency and higher
  productivity
• Student outcomes as a hallmark of quality
• Success measured by graduates income, employment
  rates and employer feedback

9
Political

• to support
• the process of national reconstruction
• nation-building
• economic reform through capacity building,
  knowledge transfer
• the education of a local intellectual cohort to
  modern and international standards

10
Some Immediate Impacts

• Restructuring of departments and programmes
• Academic achievement increasingly tied to awards
  of grants
• Language policy Indigenous versus international
• Campus development versus environmental
  preservation

11
Christian universities in Asia

• Largely privately funded and managed, relatively
  elitist
• Bases of resistance to market globalization
• Defenders of institutional autonomy
• Guardians of liberal education
• Commitment to building a more humane society

12
Christian Vision

• Identifying a set of common goods
• Affirming the interrelation between knowledge and
  virtues
• Persistent demand for peace, love and equality
• Eliminating differences between men and women,
  racial groups, religions, classes and caste,
  divisions of the world, etc.

13
A Christian Prophetic Tradition

• Scholars exercising the prophetic office
• Bearers and guardians of human wisdom
• The pursuit of freedomfreedom to teach and
  freedom to learn
• To provide best leadership to the whole society

14
A Christian Prophetic Tradition

• John Henry Newman
• To immerse the educated in their cultural
  heritage
• To study ancient classics, in order
• To cultivate in them a liberal habit of mind,
  including the attributes of freedom,
  equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom

15
A Christian Presence

• Zhuangzi zaiyou (??)a generous presence, a
  presence that does not insert itself
• a Christian presence
• that finds resource and strength in local
  cultures and traditions
• that builds a community who dares courage,
  commitment and even sacrifice at times of
  violence
• for the sustaining of lasting hope for desperate
  peoples

16
Chinese Educational goals

• Hanyu (768-824)
• To be a teacher is to transmit the way (dao), to
  calling to a vocation, and to unravel doubts and
  curiosity

17
How Christian is a Christian faculty today?

• An insistence on teaching with a passion with
  such Christian calling