CityU president will not renew contract in 2023
News comes two days after HKUST reveals its head will step down early
The president of City University will not be renewing his contract when it expires in 2023, with the institution’s vice-president announcing an international search for his replacement.
The news that Professor Way Kuo, who has been with CityU for over 13 years, would be quitting as head of the institution came just two days after the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) revealed its president, Professor Wei Shyy, would be stepping down 11 months before his contract was set to end.
Neither Kuo nor Shyy disclosed their reasons for leaving, or what they planned to do next.
City University vice-president Matthew Lee Kwok-on confirmed both Kuo’s departure, and the initiation of a global search for a replacement.
A CityU council member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said governing council chairman Lester Garson Huang had announced the international search for the next president in the body’s last meeting, adding that word of Kuo’s impending departure had been circulating for a few months.
The source said, given the current political climate, the next president would have to be a Chinese national deemed loyal to Beijing, adding foreigners or those with ties to Taiwan or the United States would not be considered.
Kuo, who has been president of CityU since 2008, was born in Taiwan and was educated and worked in the US, having formerly served as dean of engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Dr Eugene Chan Kin-keung, another council member, praised Kuo as a committed and enthusiastic leader with a willingness to listen, while also noting the university had made great progress during his tenure. Chan said he respected Kuo for keeping education matters separate from politics, even with members holding a range of different views.
Aside from a strong record of academic achievements, he hoped Kuo’s successor would acknowledge the governing principle in the city of “one country, two systems” and not have a preset
position on China, adding: “The future of Hong Kong is in line with the country’s developments.”
Ho Cheuk-long, external vicepresident of the university’s student union, said Kuo respected students’ views to a certain extent, citing as an example his refusal to follow some universities in making campus access conditional on Covid-19 vaccination. He expressed hope the next president would show a similar willingness to communicate with students.
Last May, Kuo was the only one of Hong Kong’s 11 university chiefs not to join a 1,500-member think tank called the Hong Kong Coalition launched by two former chief executives, Tung Chee-hwa and Leung Chun-ying. The think tank aimed to research how to improve the coronavirus-battered economy and resolve the city’s political impasses following the anti-government protests of 2019.
Around the same time, Kuo, along with Shyy, declined to put his name to a joint statement supporting the national security law imposed on the city by Beijing in June last year. CityU later clarified that it supported “one country, two systems”, and adhered to the principle of keeping politics and education separate.