Robert Peckham

Opinion | In a critical hour for Hong Kong, universities can help us find our way back to humanity

Universities play an increasingly economic role in society but, more importantly, they should be places of thinking. In a polarised Hong Kong, it is the study of humanities that will equip people with critical thinking skills and empathy

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Why you can trust SCMP

Students attend a rally at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on September 2. Photo: AFP

Robert Peckham

Published: 2:30pm, 6 Sep 2019Updated: 8:21pm, 6 Sep 2019

On the first day of the new academic year, the campus of the University of Hong Kong was as glum as a washed out holiday. Yes, there were students in the classrooms, but there was none of that first-day-of-semester camaraderie that usually animates the corridors. The jumble of anti-government posters stuck up on the walls looked utterly forlorn, a hopeless cri de coeur.

Ostensibly, it’s business as usual, despite the proposed class boycott. The university’s senior management has reiterated its pledge to uphold the institution’s core values. As President and Vice-Chancellor Xiang Zhang told all staff and students recently: “HKU forms a key part of the wider community, and is deeply invested in everything that takes place in our city.”

Along with many of my fellow academics, I have followed the intensifying violence between police and anti-extradition protesters with dismay. After all, the young protesters whose bloodied faces now circulate through the global media could well be our students. Some of them probably are.

And it’s impossible to reconcile our own experience of Hong Kong’s courteous youth with the increasingly censorious local news coverage that lumps young protesters together indiscriminately as “radicals” and “criminal elements”.

Anyone who has taught at a Hong Kong university can attest to the conscientiousness, consideration and impeccable manners of the student body. If there were Times Higher World University Rankings for student politesse, Hong Kong would be at the very top, no contest.

And, as with many of my colleagues, the escalating violence – much of it directed at young protesters – has elicited in me mixed emotions of shock, sadness and exasperation at the government’s political failure to find a solution. As a professor in the School of Humanities, events have also prompted deeper reflection about the field I research and teach in: the humanities.