Hong Kong University Gets Cal State S.F. Head

The president of California State University, San Francisco, Chia-Wei Woo, will leave his post next September to head the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a new school envisioned as the “MIT of Asia,” state university officials announced Friday.

The appointment “stunned” faculty and students at the San Francisco campus and also surprised Woo, 49, who had not expected to be named as president of the new institute, even though he has been a member of its planning committee for the last year, according to a Cal State spokeswoman.

Woo, a physicist who is said to be the first Chinese-American head of a major American university, said he had mixed feelings about leaving the 26,000-student San Francisco campus but could not pass up the opportunity to found a university of science and technology “from ground zero.”

The Hong Kong university is scheduled to open in the fall of 1991 with 2,000 students and is expected to eventually enroll 7,000 students. It will be a publicly funded institution and will be built over the next four years on a 140-acre site on Kowloon, a peninsula on the Chinese mainland that is part of the British territory.

Woo said he does not expect any problems in university governance after China takes control of Hong Kong in 1997.

Woo said he hopes that the university will play a major role in reshaping Hong Kong’s economy, which he said “needs to go more high tech.” Known as a place that manufactures products designed in other countries, Hong Kong needs to produce more of its own entrepreneurs, which will require workers skilled in engineering, design and business management, three areas the new university will focus on, he added.

Because Hong Kong produces relatively few doctorates in those areas, Woo said he expects that the university will have to do almost all of its faculty recruiting overseas, in the United States, England and Australia.

Hong Kong has two comprehensive public universities--the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong--two polytechnical institutes and several private colleges but not a university devoted to science and technology, Woo said.

A search committee of faculty, staff and students will be named to select Woo’s replacement, university spokeswoman Sheila McClear said.

Woo, a scientist whose research has focused on an esoteric branch of theoretical physics, was the provost of Revelle College at UC San Diego before coming to San Francisco State in 1983.

A naturalized U.S. citizen, he was born in Shanghai and attended high school in Hong Kong before moving to the United States when he was 17. He is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and the Shanghai dialect. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky., and his masters and doctorate in physics from Washington University in St. Louis.

In accepting Woo’s resignation, W. Ann Reynolds, chancellor of the California State University system, said Woo “brought a high level of enthusiasm and vitality” to the San Francisco campus and made many contributions systemwide.

San Francisco State University officials credited Woo with placing renewed emphasis on faculty scholarship, developing private funding sources and bringing an international perspective to the school, where the enrollment is 20% Asian.