SLS-5b University Social Responsibility Summit

At the same time, there was another initiative at PolyU that complements and strengthens what we have been doing in SL.  Under the leadership of the then Vice-President for Institutional Advancement, Professor Angelina Yuen, the university had organised a First Summit on University Social Responsibility in 2012 for senior university administrators. To follow-up, the “USR team” was planning to organise a Second Summit as well as the formation of a University Social Responsibility Network (USRN).

USR shares some of the vision of Service-Learning but is much broader in scope.   Service-Learning can be conceived as the integration of social responsibility into teaching, backup up with research.  From this point of view, USR is the integration of social responsibility into institutional management, teaching, research, services, and public activities - in other words, all aspects of the university.  The “USR team” at PolyU has been mulling the idea of an organization to bring together a group of thought leaders to exchange ideas, resources, practices of varied scope and scale to steer global discussion and development of USR in higher education.  

The SL and USR initiatives target overlapping but distinct communities.  The SL initiative is about the teaching of SL and is thus aimed mainly at academics and practitioners.  The USR initiative is about the mission of a university beyond teaching and research, and is thus aimed mainly at senior university administrators.  There is, of course, a lot of overlap between the two initiatives and hence the respective target communities.  If the two events are held together, they can make each other more attractive.  Some people would want to attend both.  The two events can also share some resources, reducing the cost and effort for both.  Hence the motivation to coordinate the two events. After much discussions between the SL and USR teams, it was decided to hold a joint multi-day event towards the end of 2014.  The first day will be devoted to USR - the Second Summit on USR.  The subsequent two days will be devoted to SL - the First International Conference on SL (ICSL).  Participants are free to attend any or all of the events, and a significant number of are expected to attend both sections.  

The USR Summit was opened by a presentation from Mr. Eddie NG Hak-Kim, Secretary for Eduction, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government.  PolyU was represented by a presentation by Professor Timothy TONG, President of PolyU, and another by Mr. CHAN Tze-ching, Deputy Chairman, Council of PolyU.  

Speakers at The Second USR Summit include senior executives from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong), Beijing Normal University (China), Tufts University (USA), Haifa University (Israel), University of New South Wales (Australia), Peking University (China), University of Manchester (UK), Sichuan University (China), Kyoto University (Japan), National University of Singapore (Singapore), University of Pennsylvania (USA), University of Cambridge (UK), Washington University at St. Louis (USA), Yonsei University (Korea), and Stanford University (USA).  

One of the major achievements of the summit was that a decision was made to launch a USR Network soon after the summit.  More on that in a later section.