Honorary University Fellows
Citation delivered by the Dean of Arts, Professor Kam Louie:
Dr Jennie Yee Ching Lee is a prominent Hong Kong philanthropist and visionary educator. Born and educated in Hong Kong, Dr Lee graduated from HKU with an honours degree in English Literature. After further studies in the United States, she taught English at a renowned private school in the US where she lived for about ten years. Since her return to Hong Kong, she served as Director of the Hong Kong YWCA from 1975 to 2003, and made significant contributions chairing and co-chairing numerous committees. Dr Lee also served on the Scholarship Committee of the American Women's Association. As the only local member of the Building Committee, she helped set up the first Ronald McDonald House to provide temporary lodging for young cancer patients and their families in Hong Kong - the first such charitable project in the Far East by McDonald's Corporation (USA).
Mr Pro-Chancellor, ‘Pay it forward’ is not only the name of a Hollywood movie, but also an idea of serial reciprocity, in which debts can be repaid in the currency of good deeds. This is the philosophy at the heart of the ‘Lee Shiu Socio-Economic Study Project’, established at HKU in 1998 by Dr Jennie Lee and her husband, Dr Lee Shiu. This and similar programmes at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University have gained wide recognition for being signal innovations in global education. Every year, these programmes bring together outstanding university students from Hong Kong, China, Singapore and the US, with the aim of cultivating international leaders with a broad understanding of China and world cultures. More than 1200 students have benefited from these programmes to date. Many of these students have since assumed leadership positions and consider these programmes to have been a life-changing experience for them. The student-fee for this life-changing experience? Only that the students ‘pay it forward’ and extend the manifold benefits of what they learnt from the Project to others in the future. The success of all these programmes would not have been possible without Dr Jennie Lee's extraordinary passion and extensive involvement.
Dr Jennie Lee and Dr Lee Shiu have also generously supported a great many educational projects, and at HKU, we are grateful for their commitment to and participation in a variety of HKU exchange programmes in Medicine, Law, Social Science, HKU SPACE and the HKU Foundation.
In addition to tirelessly promoting intercultural learning among university students across Asia-Pacific and the US with her husband, Dr Jennie Lee also devotes much effort to the ongoing endeavour of improving the English communications ability of school and university students in Hong Kong and China. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Lingnan University in 2007.
It gives me great pleasure, Mr Pro-Chancellor, to present Dr Jennie Yee Ching Lee for the Honorary University Fellowship, in recognition of her contributions to Hong Kong and academia.