A Dean Who Means Business: Derek Collins as the New Dean of Arts

Professor Derek Collins, the new Dean of Arts, is bursting with the possibilities for a Faculty that he praises to the skies, but also would like to see more engaged with the broader world.

The Faculty (and HKU) is a “hidden gem”, he said, maybe not as well-known in some places but with students and staff of very high quality.

“I have been literally blown away first and foremost by the students, who are stronger than they realise – many are functioning well in their third language and they are almost intrinsically international. And also by the staff and how international and diverse the University is in general.”

Having said that, he would like to bring some things to the table.

For students, he hopes to encourage them to pursue language training beyond Cantonese, English and Mandarin, and take up something like Arabic or Portuguese so they can communicate across more cultures.

Leadership and entrepreneurship should also be part of their training and goals, because Arts students have the communication, critical thinking and analytical skills that are assets in the business and non-profit worlds. Such capabilities are best put to use when students collaborate.

These skills are also important in building bridges between disciplines. He imagines co-curricular projects being initiated between computer science and music, or history and architecture. While some of this happens in the Common Core, he would like to see it revved up. “There are silos between the faculties and missed opportunities for students to collaborate. We have to work together to break them down,” he said.

Interdisciplinary connections are important for research, too, and he hopes to see more initiatives like the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. He especially wants the Faculty to work at raising its international research profile, by looking beyond the constraints of government funding to international and private funding sources.

All these things will be important to take HKU and the Faculty to a status well within its reach: “You want anyone who thinks about China and Asia to think of HKU as the crucial place for furthering those ideas. It’s about situating HKU as the unique ‘must’ stop for trying to understand how Asia deals with the rest of the world.”

In case you think he is all business, Professor Collins, who previously was associate dean of humanities at the University of Michigan, likes to point out he has applied broad thinking and multidisciplinarity in his own life. His scholarship in Classical Studies combines literature and anthropology (he authored Magic in the Ancient Greek World), and his interests range from travel, music and art to car racing.

He hopes students will similarly find several passions through their Arts studies. In contrast, he cites the example of lottery winners who win and squander a lot of money, and then become depressed because they do not know what else to do. “Their imagination is limited and they don’t know what to appreciate. It’s the limitation of the imagination that you want to lift” – which is where Arts comes in, as a place to stir the mind and hopefully create some magical connections.

See the original article in Arts Faculty Newsletter Issue 12 Winter 2015.