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It's so hard for universities in Hong Kong to find a president (dean) these days, as illustrated by the experiences of three institutions of higher learning in the past year - the University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University and the Open University of Hong Kong. The Selection Committee of Lingnan University considered several candidates before officially hiring Cheng Kwok-hon, dean of the Business School of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), as the new president, but the decision was met with strong opposition by the students' union on political grounds.

Cheng served as a consultant with Leung Chun-ying's Chief Executive election campaign last year. He also supports national education for local primary and secondary schools. The Lingnan students union has used these anecdotes as the reason to suspect the selection committee's decision was politically tinted. To allay such concerns, Cheng promised he would defend academic freedom and would not comment on political issues as long as he is the university's president.

Bernard Charnwut Chan, chairman of the Lingnan University Board of Directors, said he felt sad about some students' attitude on this issue. He emphasized that the selection process could not have been more democratic and students should care more about the president's administrative prowess instead of putting him under political censorship. Chan said he believes respecting people of different backgrounds is part of Hong Kong's core values, and it's more important to know if a university presidential candidate is open to different opinions than political censorship.

According to Chan, the selection committee picked 21 out of 380 hopefuls recommended by headhunters and narrowed the smaller number down to a shortlist of five, including Cheng. The committee then interviewed the five candidates one by one, of them four teach at local universities and one is based in Taiwan. Finally, the selection committee agreed to recommend Cheng as Lingnan University's new president after 23 hours of intense discussions.

Chan added that, after the over-enrollment scandal involving the university's Institute of Continued Education and Community College last year, the university management and faculty members all agreed that the primary criterion for the next president should be outstanding administrative prowess. He also stressed that the candidates' political inclination was not a concern of the selection committee in individual interviews lest people smelled political censorship. As it turned out, Chan and the selection committee agreed that Cheng ticked the boxes in administrative prowess and necessary experience as well as academic achievements and the fact that he shares the university's aspiration to be a champion in liberal arts education, all of which fit the university's expectations for future development.

Cheng's resume offers a good reason why he was chosen to head Lingnan University's management in terms of administrative and academic institutions. He graduated from the Department of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1975 and went to the celebrated University of California at Berkley for graduate studies, where he earned master and doctorate degrees in economics. He returned to Hong Kong in 1992 after 10 years teaching in the US and became a professor of economics at the Economics Department of HKUST. He was later promoted to the positions of head of the Economics Department and dean of the Business School at HKUST. The Business School of HKUST remained one of the top 10 in the world during the six years when Cheng was its dean. He also worked as deputy editor of two prestigious academic journals - the Journal of International Economics and the Pacific Economic Review.

It's interesting to note that former Lingnan president Chan Yuk-shee, like Cheng, also taught at HKUST before joining Lingnan as president and boasted a similar academic background. The main difference between the two is that Chan experienced nothing of the kind Cheng was subjected to after taking the job.

It's a common understanding around the world that university presidents, as top administrators of such institutions, must boast impressive administrative capabilities as well as outstanding academic achievements, with sufficient knowledge about local and overseas educational affairs to boot. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in Hong Kong nowadays, as university president candidates are wantonly subjected to political censorship by biased media entities and some students and faculty members, who tend to ignore the academic and administrative capabilities of the candidates.

Another recent example of such unwarranted political screening can be found at the Open University, where some students went so far as to question the qualification of Professor Wong Yuk-shan when he was appointed president only because Wong is a Hong Kong deputy to the National People's Congress, despite the fact that he is an accomplished environmental biologist and served as vice-president of the City University of Hong Kong before the new appointment.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

(HK Edition 07/12/2013 page1)