Professor Terry Au Kit-fong well understands the impact of good mentoring and sympathetic managers. As a bright student from a modest background (her father had only six years of schooling, her mother had none and they ran a small shop in Tsuen Wan), she benefited from teachers and scouts who spotted her potential and helped her in her path to Harvard and Stanford universities. As a professor at UCLA, she learned a great deal from her Department Chair who helped lift the department’s research ranking into the top five in the United States, from below 10th place.

Now she is the mentor of mentors herself, in charge of academic staffing and resources at HKU, and she is bringing the lessons she learned to the University as a whole.

“My strategy is to take a leadership role in getting other senior colleagues, like professors, to mentor other colleagues. This is really about mobilisation and engagement, so the senior colleagues have a greater sense of ownership and care more about what’s going on, and the colleagues who benefit from their mentoring can feel that HKU is a caring place,” she said.

To achieve that, she is encouraging staff to share knowledge about how to set and achieve high standards, and make those standards transparent. In the spring, she organised a forum where academics with top-rated research offered tips on how to develop internationally-excellent and world-leading research. She also held a leadership workshop to help department heads and high-flyers develop their mentoring and people management skills. “We want them to make sure colleagues are reasonably happy so that we can be happily productive,” she said.

Gender gap and family life

An important aspect of that happiness is addressing gaps. The gender gap is a big concern – women comprise about 40 per cent of assistant professors but only 20 per cent of full professors. Professor Au has organised lunch talks with women academics to develop policy ideas for consideration by the Senior Management Team that could start to right some of the imbalances, particularly in leadership roles.

She is also very keen on issues related to family life. “I’m a developmental psychologist so when I think about gender policy, I also think about the well-being of the family and the children – what is good for the family and what is good for the people we care about instead of just making it a gender issue,” she said.

This means introducing policies that address all aspects of family life, including fatherhood and caregiving to ailing relatives. HKU has done well in some areas, not so well in others, she said. For example, it allows both mothers and fathers to extend their tenure-clock if they have a baby in that period, but does not have a University-wide policy to provide teaching relief to new mothers (although some individual departments do this, including the Department of Psychology which Professor Au headed before taking up her new post).

Retirement age is another contentious issue. The current official age is 60, which almost everyone agrees is too young, but suddenly increasing the retirement age across the board is not financially feasible. She said the University was trying to offer more flexibility so productive members of staff could continue to work in some form, as full-time professors or in more specialised roles including Professor of Practice (already in place for several years), Professor of Teaching or Professor of Research (the latter two have been recently approved).

Seeking happy solutions

While Professor Au is visibly energised at the prospect of finding solutions to these issues, one thing does drain her: having to handle complaints. “Dealing with complaints is very time consuming and it’s also very emotionally draining. Most colleagues don’t file a complaint unless they really have a grievance and they’re really unhappy,” she said.

The current system requires interviewing both parties at the departmental and faculty level and often at the University level, and going through a back-and-forth process of written submissions. She hopes to bring mediation into the process as early as possible and she is also in the midst of organising a conflict management workshop for department heads, on how to defuse problems and avoid escalating them.

“The really exciting part of my job is that there’s a lot of engagement and I can try to come up with good ideas to make HKU better, to raise our standards and then make sure that colleagues are reasonably happy and feel that this is a caring environment. If I could move HKU even just a little bit more in that direction, I would consider I have done a good job,” she said. 

First ‘Lunch and Learn’ series for women academics featuring Professor Helen Siu (left) from Yale in June, 2016.