HONG KONG: More than a thousand students, alumni and teachers joined a protest at Hong Kong University on Friday evening as anger mounts over political interference in the city’s education system.Protests have gathered pace since the appointment of a liberal law scholar to a senior administrative post at HKU was rejected last week. The university’s council, which has a number of members seen as pro-Beijing, voted against Johannes Chan becoming pro-vice chancellor.

Some members of the council, HKU’s top decision-making body, are appointed by the city’s unpopular leader Leung Chun-ying.

Chan was a close colleague of pro-democracy leader Benny Tai, also an academic at HKU, and who helped orchestrate last year’s mass pro-democracy protests that brought parts of the semi-autonomous Chinese city to a standstill.

Protesters on Friday were dressed in black and gathered around a stage set up outside the university library.

Some were wearing t-shirts with the Martin Luther King quote: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” “We should ask whether the government is trying so hard to destroy Hong Kong’s tertiary education that it doesn’t care about the consequences,” education lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen told reporters.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2015

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