In summer 2011 we received some expected help. By chance, we got to know Prof. Dayle Smith, who was professor of management and organization behaviour at the University of San Francisco at the time. She was then visiting another university in Hong Kong as a General Education Fulbright Scholar. University of San Francisco is a Catholic Jesuit school where service-learning is compulsory and Prof. Smith happens to be a strong advocate of service-learning in the business school. Even though she was not attached to our school, she was very kind and gave us a lot of advice on various aspects on service-learning. Prof. Smith ran a seminar at PolyU on assessment, an important aspect on which we had very little experience. And it was very well received. She introduced us much scholarly work on different aspects of service-learning. That included the work of Prof. Andrew Furco, whom we got to know very well subsequently.
Assessment was indeed on of the challenges threw up at the debate at the Senate in December 2010, when the proposal to make service-learning a core requirement was discussed. Some professors in science and engineering were of the opinion that they do not know how to assess “soft” skills required in understanding and providing community service to people in need. However, teaching and assessment of such skills are quite common in many disciplines such as social science and health. Prof. Smith and others (including colleagues within PolyU) have demonstrated and showed us ways to teach and acquire such skills ourselves.
We had since became very good friends with Prof. Smith. In the following year we sent a small delegation to visit a number of American universities to learn about service-learning. That included a fruitful visit to Prof. Smith at the University of San Francisco. One very concrete result of that visit is detailed understanding of their McCarthy Center for Public Service, which became very valuable when we set up our own Office of Service-Learning. Another tangible result was discovering that their rector, a Jesuit priest, went to South American to visit their students carrying out service-learning projects in the field. In 2014, we successfully invited our own president, Prof. Timothy Tong to visit our students serving in the villages and slums in Cambodia. Prof. Tong has since become a vocal supporter, visiting many projects.
We had kept in touch with Prof. Smith even after she moved east to Clarkson University and then west again to Loyola Marymount University. She is one of many special friends of PolyU that we have made through service-learning, who have been very helpful on our journey.
Our collaboration with Prof. Smith provides an interesting context to a phenomena noted by many people from different perspectives. Mainstream economic theories are generally believed to be founded on the assumption that individuals seek to make decisions to optimise personal benefits to themselves. Altruistic motivations are generally not given heavy consideration. This point has been made by very prominent scholar including Prof. Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit and microfinance and Nobel Prize awardee. Some scholars have observed that business schools may be less active in service-learning compared to disciplines such as social science, humanities, and engineering. Prof. Smith and other like her provide testimonies that this observation may or may not be universally valid. More studies may illuminate this interesting and important issue further.
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