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Hong Kong’s battered universities work to recover from turmoil that turned them into battlegrounds between protesters and police

  • Schools resort to holding classes in hotels and making students video themselves taking exams at home
  • But measures such as online ­seminars to allow students to ­continue learning have led some to ask for tuition refunds

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Polytechnic University in Hung Hom was besieged by police last month as student protesters held out inside. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Universities are struggling to recover from the protest chaos that turned campuses into battlefields last month, with some holding classes in hotels and others making students video themselves taking exams at home.

Measures such as online ­seminars to allow students to ­continue learning – after face-to-face sessions were axed – have led some to ask for refunds on their tuition fees.

But others were angered after staff insisted they returned to their vandalised universities despite safety concerns for grounds that hosted clashes involving tear gas and petrol bombs.

Classes at 11 public and privately funded universities, as well as most of the higher education institutions under the banner of the Vocational Training Council (VTC), were cancelled for the rest of term after campuses emerged in mid-November as a new battleground between police and diehard protesters.

At least six universities were damaged, while radical protesters occupied Chinese and Polytechnic universities and surrounding areas, blocking roads and attacking officers with petrol bombs. Police responded with thousands of rounds of tear gas.

The most intense violence was at PolyU, where police besieged hardline protesters trapped on the campus for nearly two weeks.
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