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The Role of the Government and Autonomy of University
Governance
The government has always played a key role in higher education in Macau. As we
mentioned above, the Portuguese government played a big role in the financing of
the College of St. Paul. The Portuguese Macau government did not want to register
the colleges around the 1950s, which is one of the reasons why they were disbanded
(Ma Zaoming 2010a:32). The government bought the University of East Asia partly
because it wanted the University to teach Portuguese (Ma Zaoming 2010a:33).
Financially the government rules and regulations also constrain how public univer-
sities spend their money on purchases and personnel (Xie Anbang and Zhang
Hongfeng 2009 ). The government has not only invested heavily in the public insti-
tutions, such as the UM, MPI, and IFT, but private ones as well such as the MUST,
CityU, and USJ, although the funding of some private universities is often viewed
as favorite treatment of government officials’ own political allies (Bill Chou 2012 :9;
Ng Kuok Cheong 2009 :41).
Whatever is the case, there is a lack of studies on the government’s rationale in
financing some and not others. And there is no study on how the money is spent and
whether it is spent wisely. The investment in the new campus of the UM far exceeded
its budget, almost double its amount to about 2 billion USD, but no one knows
exactly why. And no one knows why so much money was spent but the workman-
ship was so substandard (Wu Jinting and Vong Sou Kuan 2015 ). The faculty has no
voice in budget planning and its execution.
Other than financial investment and lack of consultation with faculty on how
the money is spent, the government has largely left the universities to manage
themselves. Quality control is pretty much done with whatever methods the uni-
versities themselves want (Ma Zaoming 2010b). There has been, however, dis-
cussion as to an overall evaluation system both in terms of academic and
administrative affairs, and the government’s Tertiary Education Services Office
may play a more important role in assisting the evaluation (Ma Zaoming 2009 ;
Zhang Hongfeng 2012 ; Zhang Yunhong and Feng Zengjun 2011 ). The University
of Macau has also been rewriting its charter to become more independent of the
government in the use of government money and other areas of management. But
these are all work in progress, and there are no in-depth studies of the rationale
and processes of the reform.
Meanwhile, however, some researchers point out that there is a lack of university
autonomy and academic freedom. One researcher points out that public universities
are constrained by government wills in terms of curricular issues and academic
management (Xie Anbang 2010 ). But this researcher does not give much detail as to
how that works. We will examine these issues now.
Z. Hao