SCMP 9/6/2012
Professor’s trips raise questions
Lai See (“Burning question over rubbish trips”, May 26) has revealed that a Baptist University professor who has received a number of research grants from the Environmental Protection Department in recent years and is an advocate of incineration is organising a trip to Taiwan.
This is to be paid for by the Environment and Conservation Fund, http://www.ecf.gov.hk/en/home/index.html on whose funding committee the professor sits.
This visit, together with a similar one to Singapore when 50 people were invited, appears to be a government exercise in “manufacturing consent” (using Noam Chomsky’s phrase for brainwashing).
Does not this report raise the interest of the directorate of audit, and the chancellor of the university, in regard to the use of public funds and academic independence? If not, why not?
S. P. Li, Lantau