Osmosis and Balance in the Professorial Vocation: A Profile of Professor Andy Hor

Formative Years osmosis

Born in Hong Kong in 1956, Andy attended primary and secondary school in the then British colony. His Shanghaiborn parents had migrated to Hong Kong in search of a decent living. Not able to afford the bus fare, his father once walked from Kowloon to New Territories, a distance of about 35 kilometres. As a child, Andy lived in a ‘resettlement area’ that was primarily built for refugees. When his parents finally earned enough to buy a black-and-white television, the eight-year-old Andy helped his family to start a ‘home business’, charging his neighbours an admission fee of HK$0.20 (at that time, roughly equivalent to S$0.05) if they wanted to watch the Hor family’s television. He also sold homemade agar-agar for another HK$0.10. Andy was never taught the concept of entrepreneurship. Instead, his entrepreneurial qualities grew out of a need to survive.

Reflection 1: What is the best way to teach entrepreneurship (if this is even possible)? What does it mean for an academic to be ‘entrepreneurial’? Is it always a good thing for academics to be entrepreneurial?

The young Andy was confident that his life would get better, only if he studied hard. He knew the value of education. It is therefore not surprising to learn that, in 1967, he continued to take the 10km bus journey to school on his own every school day, braving the riots in that year that were accompanied by exploding bombs and other dangers that civilians risked on a daily basis. While at school, he found Chinese and mathematics lessons to be relatively easy. English and history lessons were fun but tough. In addition, Andy’s mother sent him to an evening school to learn phonics, which was not part of the standard curriculum offered in his day school. This was a decision that she has been very proud of over the years. Hong Kong’s approach to education at the time, as Andy recalls, focused on drilling students to memorize hard facts. Naturally, he was not aware that there could be other ways of teaching and learning. Today, he realizes that such an approach is unsatisfactory and teachers who continue to teach in this way are really doing a disservice to education.

Reflection 2: How has your early experience of classroom learning influenced the way you conduct your own classroom teaching today? Is there anything positive to be said about ‘drilling’ and ‘memorization’ in university education?

Andy’s eldest brother spent more time in the public playground than in school. Immediately after he completed primary school, his parents started him on an apprenticeship in air-conditioning maintenance. Andy’s elder sister finished pre-university and could not wait to enter the workforce. Andy was therefore the first in his family to attend university. He was also the only member of the entire Hor clan to earn a doctoral degree. Andy’s enthusiasm for education inspired his younger brother Tommy. While Andy was pursuing his undergraduate studies at Imperial College, he persuaded Tommy to join him in London, which he did by gaining admission to Queen Elizabeth College. Supporting their studies in the United Kingdom was obviously difficult for a family struggling to make ends meet. But the family’s efforts were driven by a strong belief in the value of education. Upon graduation, Tommy returned to Hong Kong and obtained a M.Sc. degree from Hong Kong University. He joined City University of Hong Kong’s computer centre and rose rapidly to become its Director. When Andy settled in Singapore, he convinced Tommy to give up his lucrative job and come work in Singapore. Today, Tommy is the Director of the NUS Computer Centre.

Reflection 3: What was the value of education to you as a young student? What was its value to your family and social circles? Was education in any way ‘costly’ to you?

In 1976, Andy left Hong Kong for London where he was enrolled at Imperial College to pursue a B.Sc. degree. It was his first time out of Hong Kong and a real culture shock. He had a hard time understanding the cockney accent of some Londoners and an even harder time understanding the Scottish accent of some of his lecturers and classmates. The students at this academically elite college were extremely competitive. Most of his peers had been ‘straight A’ students in their former schools. Regrettably, in this ‘cutthroat’ environment, which Andy describes as rather ‘un-British’, students were generally suspicious of the ulterior motives of others and tended not to have many close friends. Looking back, he regards his undergraduate years as miserable and driven more by self-centred competition anxieties than a love of learning. In fact, he describes his educational experience at the time as ‘negative learning’, but acknowledges the value of learning to be resilient, independent, and aggressive in order to survive.

Reflection 4: What do you think Andy meant exactly by ‘negative learning’? What are the benefits and pitfalls of encouraging competition in the classroom? How can aspects of teaching and learning – such as assignments, classroom activities, online discussions, student presentations, etc – be designed to achieve the benefits of competition and avoid its pitfalls?

Armed with an Honours degree from Imperial College, Andy proceeded to send out applications for doctoral studies. He was offered a place at Imperial College, the University of British Columbia, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford. It was a difficult decision to make. In the end, he opted for the most expensive programme: In 1983, he commenced study for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Oxford University. For someone of his background, getting an overseas scholarship was almost like winning the lottery. He was lucky enough, however, to be awarded an interest-free study loan from the Hong Kong-based newspaper Sing Tao Daily. By the fifth year of his career in NUS, he was able to pay back every cent of the loan.

Reflection 5: Have you ever been a recipient of scholarships, bursaries, study loans, or other forms of financial assistance? If so, what was your experience of it? What sort of financial assistance is available to your students today? What sort of criteria are involved in selecting students for such awards? How can this system be improved? Can there be an alternative system?

On reflection, Andy sees himself as someone who – right from his childhood years – could not take anything for granted. In fact, he had to fight for every opportunity in his life. This formative experience has made such a deep impression that today he finds it difficult to understand the ‘entitlement mentality’ that he notices among some of his colleagues and, more generally, among some Singaporeans too.

Reflection 6: Do you share Andy’s view about an ‘entitlement mentality’ among some colleagues and others in Singapore?

Looking back, Andy considers Oxford University to have been ‘paradise’ in comparison with Imperial College. Both places had a thoroughly good mix of talented faculty and students, but Oxford enjoyed a much more relaxed atmosphere. Yet, one was able to learn just as much and just as effectively without the kind of harsh competitiveness that motivated many at Imperial. Andy found that Oxford students thrived on independent learning. They were naturally more interested in tutorials than lectures. Every week, students formally met their tutors on an individual basis to explore new topics and discuss their essays, a costly arrangement that only Oxford and Cambridge were privileged to offer. Andy became aware of a different way of teaching and learning. Oxford’s famous tutorial system left a deep and positive impression of ‘personalized’ teaching, which has inspired his own teaching practice today. In fact, he now excels at teaching small groups of students in freshmen seminars where he finds he is able to have maximum influence in shaping his students’ thinking.

Reflection 7: What other formats and aspects of teaching and learning at NUS come closest to tutorials at Oxford and Cambridge? How valuable is this type of learning? Are there ways of achieving similar outcomes within the practical constraints that NUS faces?

As a doctoral student, Andy worked side-by-side with final-year (or, in Oxford terminology, ‘Part II’) undergraduate students who focused full-time on their research projects. These students, the equivalent of Honours students at NUS, approached their subject in a deeply conceptual way, trained to think about the intellectual basis of practical research. Even laboratory work was explicitly rationalized from fundamental concepts and first principles. Andy felt inadequately prepared for research, particularly as his own results-oriented and examination-focused education up to this point contrasted starkly with the Oxford approach. Looking back at his undergraduate experience at Imperial College, he describes his own research project as intensive and rigorous rather than stimulating and conceptual.

Reflection 8: Conceptual or practical concerns: which feature more strongly in your teaching? How have you responded in your teaching to the practical learning outcomes that are often demanded of modern universities, not least by industry, policymakers, and students themselves?

Andy’s doctoral advisor provided him with timely guidance and had high expectations of his work, but he gave him a lot of freedom instead of constantly looking over his shoulder. Many of Andy’s experiments during the first two years were not successful and so he could not publish anything. Thankfully, he enjoyed doing these experiments and persevered with them, optimistic that he was, at the very least, on the right track.

Reflection 9: How much supervision did you receive as a student? How much did you need or want? How has your experience as a student influenced your own approach to supervising students today?

An important part of Andy’s Oxford experience was his service as President of the Oxford University Hong Kong Society (OUHKS). He recalls not being terribly successful at it. Specifically, against the will of his committee, he insisted on taking on too many projects and then delegated the responsibility for looking after them to his committee members, who were not ready for such responsibility.

Reflection 10: Were you ever involved in student clubs and societies? If so, what have you learnt about the psychology of university students? How has this knowledge helped you in your teaching today?

Andy only decided that he wanted to become a career academic in his final year as a D.Phil. student.

Reflection 11: When did you decide on academia as a viable career option? Under what circumstances was this decision made?

Most of his peers, especially the British students, aimed for lucrative corporate jobs in the city, including finance and banking. Andy, however, was not interested in these options and was not even looking for a job in the UK. What he felt he needed was more experience. Having grown up in Hong Kong and spent seven years in the UK, he needed to spend some time in the United States. Not only would this put him at the heart of some of the best research work being done in Chemistry at the time, but it would also expand the breadth of his experience over three continents, putting him in good stead for an academic career. Today, Andy recognizes the profound importance of having strong foundations. Rightly or wrongly, doors tend to open for those who graduate from the ‘right’ places. They remain closed or are much more difficult to open for those who start out on the ‘wrong’ track. Hence, they must try extra hard to succeed.

Reflection 12: Was your entry into academia smooth sailing? How did you prepare for it? Did you have the right ‘foundations’? Or did you have to overcome many barriers and obstacles? Was there anyone – an advisor or mentor perhaps – who helped you to find your way into academia?

Andy, always sympathetic to those among his students who find themselves on the wrong track, makes it a point to help them find their way.

Reflection 13: Do you think your students regard you as a role model, mentor, or coach, where their life choices are concerned? Do you make yourself available to help them in this regard? How much and what kind of help should you be giving?

In 1983, Andy took up a post-doctoral position at Yale University. He found many opportunities to socialize with Chemistry freshmen, including many American-born Chinese or ‘ABCs’ as they were often called. He gave some of them free tuition, gaining his first experience of personalized teaching. Even though he felt that first-year Chemistry in US universities was taught at a very basic level, he found the experience of teaching very satisfying. That was when he understood the meaning of ‘learning through teaching’. He was offered accommodation at the International Center that featured a very international mix of students and fellows. The university had exactly what he was looking for in campus life. In such a diverse community, he quickly learnt how to deal with people who came from different backgrounds and had different ways of thinking. His postdoctoral advisor, for instance, was an aggressive and target-driven American.

Reflection 14: How ‘globally-minded’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ would you say you are as an academic? How diverse is the NUS community of faculty, students, and staff? How significant is diversity in global academic practice today? To what extent are inter-cultural knowledge and competencies crucial for a successful career as an academic today?

Andy found himself at the deep end of the research pool. The only way to survive was through hard work. The months at Yale were an exceedingly productive time during which he was able to publish five papers in leading journals.