Bulletin Supplement Aug 1969

The courses are not merely pragmatic in nature but are part of our current social developments. They all have relevance to regional affairs as well as international interaction. For example, the devaluation of a currency will create panic all over the world, and set up a chain reaction in international trade and the balance of national budgets. The aim of "international education" is, therefore, to give students better ears, better sensitivity and make them aware of what their relations are and should be with the rest of the world. A corollary to the new concept of liberal education is that we may need new teachers, at least, new methods of teaching. The liberalizing of the liberal arts is to open new horizons to the students. To fall in the pattern of rigid and formalistic teaching—instructions, brief s and gathering of more facts 一 will defeat its own purpose. In any way, civilization cannot be "passed on" to students. Students react as people and in the process they criticize, remodify and change the civilization. So in a university the young not only learn from the old, but the old also learn from the young. In teaching the students, the teachers are also taught. The civilization takes a new shape in the university. I n this sense the university is a place for re-defining a cultural heritage. In this sense, also, the university provides a programme of courses that are relevant and dynamic at the same time. It is well said that if we do not plan for and worry about the future, we shall face immediate repercussions. The main concern of the university is to go further than our present priorities and face problems of the future. One of our main tasks is to prepare our future leaders to deal with matters in the next decade or the next generation which we can only dimly see and perhaps cannot see at all now. I n achieving this, the only course is to strain for humanistic excellence. It is only in the growth and maturing of the individual to his fullest dimension that our crucial priorities in both present and future can be met with confidence. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have the pleasure to introduce to you His Excellency, Sir David Trench. As Chancellor of the two universities in Hong Kong, he has been singularly instrumental in fostering higher education and the training of leaders for the generations to come. And he is sympathetic to innovation and experimentation. It is, therefore, appropriate for the Workshop to have Sir David officiate at the opening ceremony. His Excellency the Governor Sir David Trench's Address My first duty today must certainly be to welcome you all to Hong Kong. It is a very great pleasure to us, of this quite young University, t o see so many representatives of the universities of Asia sitting here in this, the first of our purely University buildings on our new site. Most of your parent institutions are a great deal older than we are, and I assure you we are very sensible of the honour you have done us by coming here. You have chosen a very broad theme for this Workshop and I think wisely. It will enable you to range freely over subjects which are certainly of the very greatest importance to the Universities of this whole area. And surely we now find ourselves at a critical point in the history of university development: at a time when thoughtful re-appraisals of the structure and role of Universities, and of some of the basic assumptions of recent years on which so much rapid expansion has been founded, are most necessary. For we have to admit, sadly, that all is not quite as well as it might be with the university world. Somewhere, an d I speak particularly of the Universities of the West, something does seem to have gone rather wrong: and we would do well in this region to try to locate the reasons for these upsets before it is too late. Before considering therefore , as your theme requires, how best the Universities can change society, I fear we must recognize that at this moment in time, they face in many parts of the world something of a problem of convincing society that they can improve themselves: and not necessarily by ever larger doses of the mixture as before. For I am afraid society is not likely to continue to find academic opinions altogether persuasive if they derive from a system which appears itself to be in some degree of disarray: and, very unfair in many ways though it is, that undoubtedly is society's impression of the general state of the University world today. Temporary Phenomenon But this trouble i n the Universities is, I am sure, a temporary phenomenon; a phase to be gone through; and it is up to all of us who have the future of the Universities very much at heart to find — 4 —