By Jerome A. Cohen
Tomorrow’s decision about the sacking of Professor Benny Tai will have significance well beyond the Law School and Hong Kong University. Last April, Professor Tai was convicted on two charges of causing a public nuisance during Occupy Central in 2014. On Tuesday, HKU’s governing council will decide whether he can keep his job as an associate professor of law. HKU’s increasingly distinguished Law School, a bit over fifty years since its belated founding, has been struggling for several years over how to cope with all the pressures inflicted by 1 Country, 2 Systems. The implications of tomorrow’s decision will be profound. Although the university faculty has recommended against sacking, it is widely expected that the governing council, stacked with pro-Beijing political figures, will reject that recommendation. Either way, the ripple effects of the decision will reach much of the entire community, certainly the educational establishment at various levels.
Professor Benny Tai PHOTOGRAPH BY BOBBY YIP/LANDOV
One of the most immediate questions is whether it will affect the forthcoming decision to formally confirm the acting deanship of the exceptional Professor FU Hualing, who has nobly sought to hold the school together for the past two years following its inability to select an outside candidate. Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s decision, and I am rooting for Professor Tai, I hope it will free the voices of many of the able, multinational law faculty, who until now, for both personal and professional reasons, have tried to remain relatively discreet in the face of doubts and provocations relating to the new National Security Law. Hong Kong needs the benefits of their robust public legal debate.