Hong Kong campuses ‘could be the target’ for China’s security law

Why the obsession with HK? I’m also concerned with national security ACTION in the US.

A few mainland Chinese universities have been able to achieve comparatively high rankings in those perpetually suspect global rankings that so obsess higher ed administrators. Insofar as these rankings are accurate, it's mainly because of the quality of education and research in the supposedly apolitical science and engineering areas. While there are excellent individual scholars and artists in the humanities and social sciences, at an institutional level these subject areas are permanently hamstrung by the manic, pervasive, paranoid censorship policies of the CCP, and as a result Chinese universities are misshapen things that through their very remit defecate on the idea of academic freedom. This is what I fear awaits higher education in Hong Kong, where in recent years, before the passage of this craven, fearful national security legislation, teachers and researchers already have faced increasing pressure to avoid dealing with "sensitive" issues and events. Over the past three decades, and especially since the ascension of Xi, many top academics in China have voted with their feet and departed the homeland for more open intellectual communities--very much including Hong Kong. That's over as of now, and the brain drain from HK universities of both expat and local scholars will accelerate rapidly in the coming years. And if and when the Party introduces some kind of loyalty oath into employment contracts, recruiting top-line faculty will become very difficult, leaving universities staffed increasingly with compliant, complicit mediocrities. All the efforts Hong Kong universities have made over the decades to build up international academic credentials (some genuinely useful, some misguided) will atrophy and crumble. All because authoritarians are cowards.