Attractions and Research Achievements

Lingnan is a teaching and research liberal arts university. This means that it emphasizes both teaching and research and that it sees the two as closely linked. Like many American liberal arts colleges, and like the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, Lingnan believes that the ethos of liberal arts education requires limited student numbers (the University has about 2300 undergraduate and 50 research postgraduate students) and an intimate campus setting. One of the key values of liberal arts education – student-centered learning – is equally applicable to undergraduate and postgraduate study. For postgraduates, student-centered learning ensures close and supportive thesis supervision, while at the same time encouraging candidates to exercise intellectual creativity in their research endeavors.

At Lingnan we hope that postgraduates will see their postgraduate work as more than simply a means of gaining a qualification. We believe that postgraduate study should engage and develop the whole person. It should be a fun, dynamic and richly rewarding phase of life set in a supportive campus environment. Because the University community is small, familiar and collegial, postgraduate students at Lingnan do not get ‘lost in the system’. They establish peer-type working relationships with academics in their departmental homes; they have generous opportunities to gain undergraduate teaching experience; and they experience a strong sense of membership of a campus-wide postgraduate community, including representation on various policy making committees.

Lingnan postgraduates are encouraged to exercise leadership by participating where appropriate in innovative collaborative research projects, mentoring undergraduates, and taking an active role in the life of the campus community. Having said this, we do not want our postgraduates to ‘spread themselves too thin’: we monitor student progress carefully and we expect candidates to complete their degrees on time so that they can move on to the next phases of their lives.

The University offers excellent research support to postgraduates through the provision of well-maintained and equipped office space, generous conference and research travel funding, and a very good library that has quick and efficient links with other libraries in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

The Lingnan campus is tranquil and lovely and has something of a village scale and atmosphere. There are good places to gather and talk, but also secluded pockets for reflection. Hong Kong Island is within easy reach by bus and there is much to explore in the New Territories – and of course across the nearby border to the Mainland!

Our research outputs and the scholarly activities of our academic staff in the past few years have put Lingnan University firmly on the global academic map. The University Grants Committee’s (UGC) latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results released in March 2007 confirm that in addition to its strengths in teaching and learning Lingnan is a highly accomplished research university. The University’s overall research-performance index rose sharply to 76.35% (from 38.85% in the last RAE in 1999), putting Lingnan in the fourth place among all Hong Kong Universities in overall terms, just after the three ‘research-intensive’ universities with particular strengths in the sciences. Of the nine cost centres for which Lingnan was assessed, the research indexes of seven – Accountancy, Business Studies, Economics, other Social Sciences (Politics & Sociology), Chinese, English, and Translation – surpassed their corresponding sector-wide averages (see Table 1), and Lingnan was ranked second in the Business Studies and Economics Panel, with an index of 84.14% (see Table 2). The results in the RAE confirmed Lingnan’s research strengths across all our academic areas: arts, social sciences and business studies.

Similarly, according to the survey results published by the Hong Kong Economic Journal in its October 2003 issue, Lingnan ranked first among the eight UGC institutions for the quality of its teaching. Notwithstanding its short history, our Department of Economics, as reported in the January 2005 issue of HKEJM, came third in a survey of the academic performance of the economics departments of seven Hong Kong universities. This evaluation was based on the number of articles per capita published in quality international economics journals by the universities’ academic staff, and on the number of Competitive Earmarked Research Grants awarded by the Research Grants Council per full-time academic staff member.