Who governs HKU? — Council composition, official appointments, and the Chancellor’s (Chief Executive’s) power of appointment

Unofficial history · Module 13. This article lays out the institutional structure (the facts of the system come from official sources) and presents, side by side, contending statements on the “government-appointment-dominated” structure; it does not adjudicate political stances. The current leadership is referred to by title, not by name.

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In a nutshell: The University Council of the University of Hong Kong currently has 24 members^※ (as of March 2026 under the University of Hong Kong Ordinance, Cap. 1053). The Chief Executive, in the capacity of Chancellor, appoints one Chairman and six members — seven seats in total^※ (approximately 29% of the Council). This power of appointment originated in the colonial governorship, passed seamlessly to the Chief Executive upon the 1997 handover, and has repeatedly become the focus of institutional reform in successive controversies over university autonomy.

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# Who is the Chancellor, and where does the power come from?

The office of Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong is, under the University of Hong Kong Ordinance (Cap. 1053)^※, held ex officio by the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. This arrangement is not a post-handover innovation: since HKU’s founding in 1912, every Governor of Hong Kong served as Chancellor, the university’s highest titular leader, and the power to appoint the Council Chairman and to nominate external members travelled in tandem with the governorship. After the 1997 handover^※, the role transferred with sovereignty to the Chief Executive, who has exercised the power to appoint the Council Chairman ever since.

The Chancellor is designated in the Ordinance as the “chief officer of the University,” though in practice the executive functions are performed by the President and Vice-Chancellor. The Chancellor’s ceremonial duties include presiding at Congregation and conferring honorary degrees in the university’s name; by convention the Chancellor does not attend ordinary Council meetings. This produces a curious disjuncture: the Chancellor is the nominal supreme head yet is almost never involved in day-to-day university affairs; the office’s real weight is concentrated in a single function — the appointment of the Council Chairman and external members. Precisely because this power is exercised in writing rather than in person, it is both decisive and relatively unobtrusive, easy to overlook in ordinary times until a critical vote lays bare its structural significance. The Ordinance also provides for a Pro-Chancellor to assist with ceremonial duties, but that office carries no power of appointment.

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# Who sits on the HKU Council?

The University Council (formerly the Court; see below) is the university’s supreme governing body, holding final decision-making authority over finance, personnel and institutional development. According to the official membership list (March 2026)^※, the Council consists of 24 members, constituted as follows:

Taking the current term (2025–2027) as an example, the present Chairman is Mr Peter Wong Tung-shun^※, appointed by the Chief Executive in the capacity of Chancellor in November 2024 for a three-year term (1 January 2025 to 31 December 2027). The same batch of Chancellor-appointed external members includes Mr Simon Li (from 1 December 2024), Mr Irons Sze (same date), Mr Rock Chen (from 1 January 2025), Mr Wilfred Wong (from 1 January 2025) and Dr Samuel Yung (from 1 January 2025), all for three-year terms. The government’s press release described the new members as “all pillars of the community who possess outstanding ability and a wealth of experience” — an official phrase that encapsulates the appointment logic of bringing community talent onto the governing body.

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# Court, Senate and Council: a three-tier structure — who holds the real power?

External discussions of HKU governance often treat the Council as the sole centre of power. In fact, under the University of Hong Kong Ordinance, HKU has a three-tier structure, each layer with its own boundaries. To grasp the weight of “Chancellor’s power of appointment,” one must first understand the division of labour among these three tiers.

The Court is the nominal supreme body, large in scale and mainly symbolic in function. According to the HKU Court membership list (October 2024)^※, the Court consists of over a dozen categories of members, including ex officio members such as the Chancellor, Pro-Chancellor and President; three Life Members; five members elected by and from Legislative Council members; twelve members elected by the Standing Committee of Convocation; three representatives of the Subsidized Schools Council; and up to 20 external members appointed by the Chancellor (Chief Executive). The Court holds the power to make, repeal and amend the University’s Statutes, but does not routinely intervene in specific decisions; it normally meets only once a year.

The Senate is responsible for academic affairs — curricula, degrees, examinations, and teaching and research standards — and is made up primarily of the President, deans and professors. It is the institutional vessel of “academic autonomy.” The Chancellor has virtually no power to appoint its members, which is why debates over institutional autonomy tend to land on the Council rather than on the Senate.

The Council is the true core of governance and financial decision-making: it has the final say on budgets, major personnel matters, disposal of university property and the selection of the President. Precisely because its powers are real and its seats are few (only 24), the seven seats appointed by the Chancellor carry far more weight here than they do inside the hundred-plus-member Court. In other words, the same power of appointment is diluted to insignificance in the symbolic Court but carries decisive weight in the 24-seat Council. This structure — power concentrated in a compact body — is the key to understanding the controversies that follow. For the century-long evolution of HKU’s governance framework since the 1911 University Ordinance, see A century of governance reform^※.

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# What exactly does the Council decide? — even the President is its appointee

To gauge the significance of those 24 seats, one must see the levers the Council actually holds. According to HKU’s official governance structure description^※, the Council is the university’s supreme governing body, with final authority over budgets, disposal of property, personnel appointments and removals, and the making of regulations; among these, perhaps the weightiest power is that the President and Vice-Chancellor is himself appointed by the Council — the Council appoints the President and other senior officers and determines their conditions of service.

The design of the presidential selection process neatly illustrates how “who holds the power to appoint” cascades down through the system. Taking the 2017 search for the 16th Vice-Chancellor as an example, the Council resolved on 28 February 2017^※ to establish a Search Committee and a Selection Committee: the former was to identify and make initial contact with candidates and submit a report to the latter; the latter, comprising 11 members (nine drawn from staff, students, alumni and Council members), was to interview and assess candidates, agree on a single nominee after consulting the Senate, and submit that nomination to the Council for consideration and appointment.

The crucial point lies in the final step: however widely the search and selection stages draw on internal opinion, the ultimate power of “consideration and appointment” resides with the Council. This means that for any top-level personnel decision — President, Provost, Vice-President — the final gate is, in theory, the majority will of those 24 seats. The reason the 2015 Provost selection could be overturned has its institutional root exactly here: a selection committee’s recommendation is never more than a “recommendation”; the final decision rests with the Council. When the seven Chancellor-appointed seats (including the Chairman) converge with the six external members appointed by the Council itself, a majority “not elected from within” is sufficient to determine the outcome of any top-level appointment.

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# What does “government-appointment-dominated” actually mean?

When the figures in the table above are turned into proportions, the structural character of the system becomes plain: the seven seats directly appointed by the Chancellor account for about 29% of the 24-seat Council (the government’s own phrasing in a 2015 LegCo answer)^※. If the six external members appointed by the Council itself are also placed in the category of “not internally elected,” the seats filled by “non‑university‑members” total up to 15 (62.5%). The Ordinance expressly requires that external members must not be students or employees of the University — meaning that, by design, a majority of Council seats are held by outsiders, and the seven Chancellor-appointed seats (including the Chairman) occupy the most central and least electorally accountable position.

According to a 2015 government answer to the Legislative Council^※, among Hong Kong’s eight UGC-funded universities, the proportion of Chancellor-appointed seats varies enormously: from as high as 83.3% at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts to just 11.5% at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with HKU’s 33.3% (calculated on the basis of 21 non‑Chairman members) falling in between. In the same answer, the government explained its selection logic: appointments are based on “ability, expertise, experience, integrity and commitment to serving the community,” and stressed that all Council members are required to “act in the best long-term interest of the institution, while safeguarding academic freedom and institutional autonomy.” From this the government argues that, since institutions receive substantial public funding, the appointment arrangement is a legitimate channel for public accountability, intended to bring community talent into governance rather than to interfere in academic matters. Critics counter that regardless of individuals’ merits, the power of appointment vested in a Chief Executive chosen by a narrow electoral college — and lacking a direct public mandate — leaves open, in structural terms, an institutional entry point for political influence in academic governance. Both positions have formal statements on the record; this article presents them without judging their merits.

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# Placed in the “Big Eight” context: how much does the Chancellor’s appointment power differ across institutions?

Looking at HKU alone, it is hard to gauge the weight of the numbers; only when set against the landscape of Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities does a clear picture emerge. All eight share one feature: the Chief Executive serves ex officio as Chancellor — the supreme head — of every publicly funded university^※ and holds a certain proportion of appointment power over each institution’s governing board. Yet the “quota” granted to the Chancellor by each university’s Ordinance varies enormously.

According to the government’s 2015 LegCo answer^※, measured by the proportion of members that the Chancellor may appoint, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts is the highest (about 83.3%), The Chinese University of Hong Kong the lowest (about 11.5%), and HKU sits in the middle at about 33.3% (based on 21 non‑Chairman members). Viewed from another angle — the overall ratio of external to internal members — the tilt toward outsiders is widespread:

(HKUST figures based on the Wikipedia governance entry^※; PolyU on the Council composition page^※; CUHK on the Council membership page^※. Reliability: multiple sources corroborate. The appointment proportions are from the 2015 government answer; individual ordinances may have been fine‑tuned since.)

This table makes two points. First, an external‑member majority is not unique to HKU; it is the norm in Hong Kong and indeed in British‑style university governance. Handing ultimate decision‑making power to “lay members” — people not employed by the university — is meant to insulate against conflicts of interest and introduce social accountability, placing budget and personnel oversight in hands that do not depend on a university salary. Second, what truly distinguishes one institution from another is the share of those external seats that the Chancellor appoints directly: HKU’s 33.3% is neither the highest nor the lowest, yet because of the university’s stature and the high visibility of successive controversies, it has become the most closely watched specimen of this governance issue. HKU’s official governance page^※ states plainly that its Council is made up of external and university members in a ratio of about two to one — a ratio fixed at the regulatory level, unaltered by any particular round of appointments. In other words, the controversy has never been about whether outside members should form a majority — every one of the eight universities does that — but about how large a slice of that outside bloc is directly named by a Chief Executive who is not directly elected.

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# Where does the system come from? — the colonial era

To understand the present structure one must trace its colonial roots. From HKU’s founding in 1912, the University of Hong Kong Ordinance^※ stipulated that the Governor would be Chancellor ex officio; the power to appoint the Council Chairman and external members was embedded in the Ordinance at the same time, never having been tested through a democratic vote or an independent selection mechanism. In the political context of the colonial period, this was seen as a customary arrangement by which the representative of the Crown exercised oversight over a publicly funded institution, and it attracted little public controversy. At the handover of sovereignty in 1997, the word “Governor” in the University of Hong Kong Ordinance was replaced by “Chief Executive”; the provisions otherwise remained largely unchanged, and the power of appointment passed from the Governor to the Chief Executive, where it has remained ever since.

The university’s own reform report — the 2003 “Fit for Purpose” executive summary^※ — once suggested that, with a notional Council size of 21 seats, external members should account for two‑thirds (about 14 seats) and internal members for one‑third (about 7), and recommended setting up a Nominating Committee to help identify external candidates, yet it did not recommend pruning or abolishing the Chancellor’s power of appointment. Some scholars therefore regard that report as an exercise in “maximising external oversight within the existing framework” rather than a fundamental change to the source of authority.

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# Which university model does this Chancellor–Court–Council architecture come from?

HKU’s three‑tier structure was not designed from scratch: it copies the governance template of late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century British “civic universities” (commonly called redbrick universities): a ceremonial head (Chancellor), a large and symbolic Court, a lean body holding real power (Council), and an academically focused Senate. HKU’s founding University Ordinance of 1911 was modelled on this blueprint, slotting the Governor of the day into the Chancellor’s ceremonial position that in Britain was usually occupied by a retired statesman, royal family member or eminent public figure. In Britain, university chancellors are typically honorary figures detached from the serving government; Hong Kong’s singularity lies in permanently binding that ceremonial office to the incumbent head of government.

It is precisely this “binding” that is at the root of today’s controversy. Some commentators have pointed out^※ that a serving head of government acting as a university chancellor is already a rare arrangement in contemporary university governance, and that it faces an intractable dilemma: if the Chancellor’s role is purely ceremonial, it contributes nothing to public accountability; if the Chancellor does exercise real authority over an academic institution, that in itself conflicts with the principle of academic freedom. This line of argument has been repeatedly cited because it captures the structural predicament of the “ex‑officio Chancellorship” — the near‑impossibility of drawing a boundary between ceremony and power that all sides can accept. Supporters of the status quo reply that the power of appointment is a legitimate accountability channel given public funding, that it carries no necessary political connotation attached to the head‑of‑government status, and that it operated for nearly a century under British rule without significant controversy. Both positions are recorded here; this article does not judge their merits. For the century‑long arc of HKU’s governance evolution and its successive reforms since 1911, see A century of governance reform^※.

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# In what layer is the appointment power actually written? — Ordinance, Statutes, and Code of Practice

When people say “the Chancellor appoints seven seats,” those words rest across three layers of documentation, and the difficulty of changing them varies enormously. Understanding these three layers is essential to grasping why successive reforms have circled around the lower two.

The top layer is the University of Hong Kong Ordinance (Cap. 1053)^※, which defines the university’s purposes, powers and constitutional structure. It can only be amended by the Legislative Council^※ — meaning the source of the power, “the Chief Executive, as Chancellor, appoints,” cannot be altered except through the legislative process. The middle layer consists of the “Statutes” that the University makes under powers delegated by the Ordinance; the Statutes specify the precise composition of the Council and how its members are chosen, and are enacted, repealed and amended by the University itself. The Council’s “roughly two‑to‑one ratio of external to internal members” lives at this layer. The third layer is the Code of Practice for Council Members^※; it creates no new seats but regulates conduct, requiring all members — however appointed — to act in the best overall interests of the University, to observe confidentiality, to declare and avoid conflicts of interest, and collectively to safeguard academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

This Ordinance–Statutes–Code three‑layer cascade explains precisely why various demands since 2015 have struggled to bear fruit. Improving nomination procedures, capping terms of service, and tightening confidentiality and accountability can all be achieved through amendment of the Statutes or Code, which is why the two rounds of reform in 2003 and 2017 were able to proceed. But “who makes the appointment” is written in black and white in the top‑layer Ordinance, where even a single‑word change requires clearing the Legislative Council hurdle. Proposals to abolish the ex‑officio Chancellorship or to ceremonialise it — these are exactly the things that would require touching the hardest layer of the three to alter.

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# The 2015 storm: how did “official votes” determine a historic veto?

The 2015 controversy over the selection of a Provost was the most contentious real‑world demonstration of the “government‑appointment‑dominated” structure. The sequence of events ran as follows:

In late 2014, the Selection Committee unanimously recommended Mr Chan, then Dean of Law, as the sole candidate. According to the relevant Wikipedia article^※, no selection‑committee recommendation had ever been overturned by the Council in HKU’s history. The Council, however, repeatedly deferred discussion of the candidate: in March 2015 the then‑Chief Executive (as Chancellor) appointed Mr Li to the Council, adding a new government‑appointed member; on 30 June 2015 the Council voted 12–6 to shelve discussion; and on 29 September 2015 the Council, in a final vote of 12 to 8^※, rejected the nomination — the first time in HKU’s history that a Selection Committee’s recommendation had been turned down.

In terms of voting structure, according to disclosures by the then student union president^※, the eight votes in favour included the then President, Mr Ma, four staff representatives and two student representatives. In other words, members “from within” almost uniformly supported the nomination while “externally appointed” members almost uniformly opposed it. Although the ballot was secret and cannot be individually verified, this structural alignment has been the central factual premise of reform discussions ever since.

The incident triggered an intense public debate over “who makes decisions for HKU.” Fifteen former HKU professors issued a joint statement^※ charging that the Council was “packed with pro‑government external members” in violation of the principle of institutional autonomy. The HKU Convocation passed a non‑binding motion calling for the Ordinance to be amended so that “the Chief Executive shall not be the Chancellor and chief officer of the University of Hong Kong”; if that proved infeasible, it proposed, the Chancellor’s role should be purely ceremonial.

This article addresses only the institutional angle of “how the appointment‑power structure shapes Council votes”; the full story of the two deferrals, the student storming of the meeting room, the leaked recordings and injunction, and the overwhelming alumni vote, together with all parties’ accounts, is reserved for the dedicated file The 2015 Provost selection storm^※.

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# What cross‑institutional reform movements did the “ex‑officio Chancellorship” trigger?

The 2015 storm at HKU was not an isolated event; it triggered a systemic scrutiny of the “ex‑officio Chancellorship” across the higher‑education sector. According to the Wikipedia entry on the “Chief Executive as ex‑officio Chancellor” system^※, on 17 June 2016, led by the CUHK Student Union, students from all eight UGC‑funded institutions together with representatives of other institutions held a march explicitly demanding the abolition of the arrangement under which the Chief Executive serves ex officio as Chancellor of every university. Groups such as the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union also voiced support for amending the relevant legislation.

The critics’ core logic is this: the Chief Executive is chosen by the Election Committee (a “small circle”) and lacks a direct popular mandate; the power of appointment derived from that office, when superimposed on university governance, therefore suffers from a democratic deficit in institutional logic. The government’s consistent stance is that universities receive substantial public funding, that the government bears a public‑accountability responsibility for their operation, and that the appointment arrangement is intended to draw community elites into university governance, not to interfere in academic affairs. Both sides have issued formal statements; this article presents them alongside one another without ruling on them.

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# The Convocation: another source of reform pressure

Beyond the “Chancellor‑appointed” and “Council‑appointed” tracks, HKU governance contains another institutionalised voice that is often overlooked — the Convocation. According to the official Convocation page^※, all graduates of the University and certain full‑time teaching and research staff are ex officio members; the Convocation elects a Standing Committee to handle routine business and sends representatives to the Court. It has no power directly to appoint Council members, yet it can convene general meetings and pass resolutions, providing an institutional channel through which alumni can express a collective view and exert pressure on the Council.

That channel was thrust into the limelight in 2015. At an extraordinary general meeting on 1 September 2015^※, members voted on the Provost candidacy: with counting overseen by an independent audit firm, 7,821 of 9,298 valid votes supported recommending the candidate to the Council; a separate motion requiring the Council to confirm an appointment within 30 days of receiving a Selection Committee recommendation was also passed overwhelmingly. None of these resolutions were legally binding on the Council — and that is precisely the problem: the Convocation, though numerous, can only “express an opinion” institutionally, not “make a decision.” The real power to appoint remains in the hands of the 24‑seat Council and the Chancellor‑appointment structure behind it.

The Convocation thus becomes a telling footnote in the debate over “where the appointment power should lie”: it demonstrates that the alumni community has a strong and quantifiable concern for institutional autonomy, while also exposing the lack of any channel for that concern to be converted into a decision in the current architecture. The full proceedings of the 2015 general meeting are covered in The 2015 Provost selection storm^※.

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# Why did the 2003 reform report fail to touch the core of the appointment power?

Institutional reform at HKU did not begin in 2015. The 2003 “Fit for Purpose” reform report^※ was the most systematic review of the Council’s structure to date. It recommended an ideal Council size of 18 to 24 members, keeping the external‑member proportion at roughly two‑thirds, and proposed the establishment of a “Nominating Committee” to help identify external candidates and enhance transparency. Yet its recommendations had an implicit boundary: the Nominating Committee’s function was to “provide advice to the Chancellor for appointment purposes,” not to supplant the Chancellor’s appointing power. In other words, the 2003 reform strengthened external oversight and transparency at the procedural level, but did not shake the Chancellor’s core appointing role at the level of the source of authority.

This reform orientation — optimising within the existing framework rather than replacing the source of appointments — stands in contrast to the “complete abolition” and “ceremonialisation” demands that have surfaced in every reform debate since, forming the institutional backdrop of an enduring tension. From the wording of Convocation motions in 2015 to the 2016 eight‑institution march, the calls for abolition or ceremonialisation all train their sights on the core that the 2003 reform left untouched: where should the power of appointment ultimately reside? To this day, the text of the law remains unchanged.

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# The 2017 governance review panel: procedural reforms that skirted the source of power

In the wake of the 2015 storm, the HKU Council formally established, on 26 April 2016^※, a “Review Panel on University Governance” composed of external experts: Sir Malcolm Grant (Chancellor of the University of York), Professor William Kirby (Harvard University) and Mr Peter Van Tu Nguyen, a former High Court judge. In June 2016 the panel invited submissions from Council members, staff, students and alumni and held forums, subsequently submitting to the Council a full review report with an addendum^※. The Council then formed a working group in February 2017 to digest the recommendations, and on 27 June 2017 approved a package of reforms^※; the then‑Council Chairman said the aim was to enable the Council to “return to long‑term strategic governance” and rise above the noise of the day.

The approved measures focused on three areas: terms, procedures and transparency. First, term limits: apart from the President, no Council member may serve more than three consecutive three‑year terms, to prevent individual external members from entrenching themselves. Second, regular self‑assessment: the Council must conduct a review of its own effectiveness every five years, with the first review taking place one year after the first meeting of the reconstituted Council. Third, nomination and communication mechanisms: the terms of reference of the Nominating Committee were revised so that it identifies the mix of skills, knowledge and experience the Council currently needs, and a new “Advisory Committee on Matters Relating to the Council Chairman” was created to facilitate communication with the Chancellor over the choice of Chairman. The Council also resolved that all current and future members must sign a unified confidentiality agreement^※, with sanctions for breaches.

What is notable is what the reform did not touch. The entire 2017 package left intact the power of appointment vested in the Chief Executive by the University of Hong Kong Ordinance: the Chancellor still appoints the Chairman and up to six external members; the newly created “advisory committee” is merely a supplementary channel to “facilitate communication with the Chancellor,” not a mechanism for sharing or reclaiming the appointment decision. In other words, after a storm that produced the first‑ever veto of a Selection Committee recommendation, the institutional response was once again “refine procedures, cap terms” — but not “change who makes the appointment.” Just as with the 2003 “Fit for Purpose” report, two rounds of internal HKU reviews came to a halt before the same boundary. For the thread of reforms along this century‑long line, see A century of governance reform^※.

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# The 2024 public clash between the President and the Council: the latest chapter in the appointment‑power controversy

The 2015 controversy revolved around the Council vetoing a personnel choice; the 2024 clash was in a sense the mirror image — the flashpoint was whether the Council could circumvent the President and make its own senior appointments, extending the question of “who has the power to appoint” from external members into the layer of interim Pro‑Vice‑Chancellor posts within the university.

From May 2024, the President, Mr Zhang, and the then‑Council Chairman, Ms Wang, clashed openly over the appointment of six interim Pro‑Vice‑Chancellors. The President’s side argued that the Council had acted without adequate consultation, undermining his statutory management authority and “academic autonomy”; the Council’s side maintained that the relevant management positions had been left vacant for too long and needed to be filled urgently. After the dispute escalated, the Hong Kong government set up an “Investigation and Study Group” on 11 June 2024^※, composed of the Permanent Secretary for Education and the Chairman of the University Grants Committee.

The Group conducted over 60 meetings and submitted its recommendations to the Council on 3 September 2024^※, concluding that the Council’s earlier interim Pro‑Vice‑Chancellor appointments were “null and void” and urging the Council and management to complete without delay the selection processes for the Provost, Vice‑Presidents, Registrar, Deans and other senior posts. The Council indicated it “fully accepts” the recommendations and would implement them as soon as possible to restore normal operations. In November of the same year, the Chief Executive, as Chancellor, appointed a new Council Chairman and members; the previous Chairman’s term expired and she left office. The full account of this round of conflict, with statements from all parties, is reserved for the dedicated file The 2024 public clash between the President and the Council^※.

For the purposes of this article’s main thread, the 2024 conflict confirms the same institutional logic: when the majority will of the Council clashes with the President’s managerial judgement, who has the final say depends on the distribution of seats; and the government’s capacity to intervene through the twin channels of the Chancellor’s appointment power and the Investigation and Study Group is precisely the institutional interface that this structure leaves open. On the historical role of the presidency within the power structure, see Vice‑Chancellors and the struggle for institutional power^※.

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# The structural tension between “official appointees” and “internally elected” members

As outlined, of the Council’s 24 seats, the seven directly appointed by the Chancellor (around 29%), together with the six appointed by the Council itself (25%), give a combined 13 externally sourced seats (roughly 54%), forming a built‑in majority. Conversely, the six seats elected by staff and students (25%), plus the three ex officio members (President, Treasurer, Registrar), constitute a minority of “internally drawn” members.

This proportional relationship is inconspicuous in normal times, when the majority of Council decisions are procedural or administrative and there is rarely a head‑on clash between government‑appointed and internal members. But whenever a situation arises in which a Selection Committee makes a unanimous recommendation and a Council majority vetoes it — as in 2015 — this distribution of votes directly determines the outcome. In its November 2015 LegCo answer^※, the government stressed that the appointment criteria are “ability, experience and integrity”; critics counter that, whatever the criteria, it is the source of the appointment power that is the real issue — when the appointer (the Chief Executive) operates in a political context that may overlap with university business, any claim to “independence” becomes structurally difficult to sustain from within the system itself.

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# The present state of play: has the appointment power changed?

As of the date of this article’s last update (July 2026), the core provisions of the University of Hong Kong Ordinance (Cap. 1053)^※ regarding Chancellor appointments have not been amended: the Chief Executive, as Chancellor, still appoints the Council Chairman and up to six external members. The most recent round of appointments, in November 2024^※, followed this mechanism, with the Chief Executive, as Chancellor, naming the current Chairman and five new members, all for three‑year terms. The government also announced at that time the establishment of a review group on HKU’s internal operations (comprising the Permanent Secretary for Education and the UGC Chairman) to propose improvement measures — but the group’s terms of reference again did not touch upon any change to the Chancellor’s power of appointment itself.

All the reform proposals advanced by various parties since 2015 — abolish the ex‑officio Chancellorship, ceremonialise the Chancellor’s role, give staff and students a greater say in selection — remain unimplemented at the level of law. The gap between this institutional stasis and the public debate that reignites with every controversy is the constant backdrop to the HKU governance issue.

Look back along the timeline: the 2003 “Fit for Purpose” exercise optimised external oversight; the 2017 review capped terms and added nomination and communication machinery; the 2024 Investigation and Study Group clarified the boundary of authority between the President and the Council in one instance. Each of these three responses had tangible effects, yet none touched the source of the authority itself — the Chief Executive, as Chancellor, appointing the Chairman and external members. Whether the appointment power ought to change, and if so how, remains an unresolved institutional question; and so long as the relevant provisions of the University of Hong Kong Ordinance remain unchanged, every crucial vote on a senior appointment will push that question back onto the table.

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# Related reading

• A century of governance reform — from the 1911 University Ordinance to the struggles over Council reform
• The 2015 Provost selection storm — the first time the Council overturned a Selection Committee recommendation
• The 2024 public clash between the President and the Council — the Mr Zhang affair and the fight over “academic autonomy”
• Vice‑Chancellors and the struggle for institutional power — from Rayson Huang to the 2000 poll controversy

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