How CityU's Veterinary College Was Built from Zero — The Three Lineages of JCC's Funding, Faculty and Facilities

This piece belongs to the wild-history site's CityU chapter 09, internationalisation module. It traces the pre-history, funding sources and faculty lineage of City University of Hong Kong's (CityUHK / CityU) Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) — that is, how the idea of "academic lineage" (师承) was made concrete in three registers: money, people and bricks. The curriculum blueprint developed with Cornell, the dual RCVS + AVBC accreditation, and the first cohort of 11 graduates are covered in full in the companion piece global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md; this chapter does not repeat them, only complements them. CityU's wider international network is covered in global-partnerships-and-exchange.md.

The one-line takeaway: City University of Hong Kong's Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences was established as a unit in 2014, launched a six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine in 2017, and received a HK$500 million naming donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2018, with Cornell University as its strategic partner (from 2009). This chapter examines the college's pre-history and the lineages of its funding, faculty and facilities; the accreditation story is told in the companion piece.

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# How does a veterinary school grow out of nothing?

Before 2014, Hong Kong had no veterinary school. Local students who wanted to become veterinarians had to study in the UK, Australia or the US, then return to sit the licensure exam. To build "Asia's first internationally accredited veterinary programme" on that blank slate, CityU needed more than a curriculum outline — it simultaneously lacked money (for buildings and equipment), people (veterinary professors with clinical and research credentials), and endorsement (a quality guarantee that RCVS and AVBC would recognise). CityU borrowed each of the three from a different source: the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the international veterinary world, and Cornell University in the US. What this chapter dissects is how those three lines of "borrowing" were each filled in over more than a decade.

To grasp how hard that "blank" was, one has to start with the old landscape. Before 2014, no higher-education institution in Hong Kong trained veterinarians; local students with such ambitions had no choice but to go abroad — to the UK, Australia, New Zealand or the US — and, once qualified, return to apply to register with the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong (VSB) on the strength of their overseas credentials. In other words, Hong Kong had long relied on "imported" veterinary talent to meet its needs in animal health care and public health, with neither a local training pipeline nor any indigenous quality standard for veterinary education. What CityU set out to fill was a vacuum that ran from personnel all the way to standards — which is precisely why it insisted on importing an existing internationally recognised accreditation system: with no local precedent to draw on, a set of external standards accepted by the RCVS and AVBC was the fastest way to produce Hong Kong-trained vets who could practise the day they graduated.

The companion chapter covers "what the curriculum looks like and how accreditation was obtained"; this one covers "where the money came from, where the professors were recruited, and where the teaching actually happened" — the former is the finished product, the latter is the foundation.

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# Five milestones in building the college: from "aspiration" to "publicly funded places"

The formation of CityU's veterinary college was not a single ribbon-cutting but an institution-building process stretched over more than a decade and advanced in stages. Drawing on the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine website^※ and a Wikipedia overview^※, the process can be condensed into five key milestones:

The gap between "self-financed" and "government-funded" is worth pausing on: the BVM students in the first cohort of 2017^※ paid full self-financed fees, and it was not until the 2019/20 academic year that the degree was brought under UGC public funding. In other words, during the college's first and most cash-strapped years, it was kept running by self-financed tuition plus the Jockey Club donation; public money came later. This "self-financed first, public later" transition is the most easily overlooked stretch of the veterinary college's funding lineage — and the one that best illustrates what "building from nothing" really meant.

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# Where did the name "Jockey Club" come from? — a HK$500 million naming donation

The "Jockey Club" in the college's full name is not a symbolic flourish but the return on a very substantial donation. According to the Hong Kong Jockey Club's press release of 20 August 2018^※, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust donated HK$500 million to CityU to support the development of Hong Kong's first Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine programme; in gratitude, CityU renamed the college the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences and held a naming ceremony on campus the same day.

The money came with a specific purpose attached. According to the same press release, a key focus of the donation was to support the construction of a main teaching and research building named the "Jockey Club One Health Tower", then expected to be completed in 2022 and planned to house departments of biomedical sciences, infectious diseases and public health. In other words, the Jockey Club's HK$500 million was not merely a scholarship pool — it was literally bricked into the college's physical skeleton.

The calibre of the ceremony's attendees hints at the college's weight in Hong Kong higher education. According to the press release, those present included the then Chief Executive, the then Secretary for Education, the then Chairman of the University Grants Committee, as well as the Chairman of CityU's Council and the then President. In his speech, the then Jockey Club Chairman laid out the three-part structure: "The College's collaboration with Cornell University, together with the support of the Hong Kong Government and the UGC, will become an excellent centre for veterinary medical education and research^※" — a single sentence naming in parallel the three resource lines of "Cornell (academic) + Government/UGC (public money) + Jockey Club (charity)", which is exactly the structure this chapter sets out to unpick.

# The Jockey Club was not the only patron: the HK$100 million of 2015

Reading "Jockey Club" as shorthand for the entire funding story would miss an earlier donation. According to a CityU news release of 14 March 2015^※, philanthropists Dr Li Dak-sum and Mrs Yip Yio Chin donated HK$100 million to CityU to establish the "Li Dak Sum & Yip Yio Chin Development Fund for Veterinary Medicine", to advance professional education and research in veterinary and life sciences, support the development of collaborative programmes, build the faculty, and set up laboratories for animal health and food safety. This donation came three years before the Jockey Club's naming gift, landing in the college's earliest years when seed funding was most needed.

Intriguingly, one Cornell figure attended that 2015 ceremony — Professor Michael Kotlikoff, then Dean of Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine. In his remarks he described the two institutions' shared mission as "training the next generation of clinicians and scientists to be the answer to the challenges of animal health and welfare in Asia^※". Kotlikoff later rose to become Provost of Cornell — the same Provost whom the 2024 CityU delegation met on their visit to Cornell described in the companion piece. The same man's trajectory from "Dean of the veterinary college" to "University Provost" spans almost the entire decade of this partnership, and is a small footnote to the continuity of "lineage" on the Cornell side.

Funding lineage, summarised: the college's start-up capital was assembled from at least four sources — the 2015 Li Dak Sum & Yip Yio Chin development fund of HK$100 million (seed), the 2018 Jockey Club naming donation of HK$500 million (building plus programme), UGC public funding from 2019/20 (places), and self-financed tuition in the early years. The four flowed at different times and served different purposes, running in parallel with the line that "Cornell supplied the academic blueprint".

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# Where did the professors come from? — a faculty lineage from Sydney to Ithaca

Buildings can be bought with money, but veterinary professors are a scarce resource that money alone cannot conjure up. For a brand-new college, the hardest task is usually recruiting, one by one, academics with clinical credentials, enough standing to teach, and the profile to pass international accreditation review. The faculty of CityU's JCC falls broadly into three streams, forming a personnel lineage with a distinctly "mentorship" flavour:

The true starting point of this lineage is the founding dean's own CV. According to Cornell's 2018 reception news^※ and public academic records, founding Dean Professor Michael P. Reichel earned his veterinary degree from the Free University of Berlin, then built a career spanning New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, East Africa, Switzerland and Australia, moving between government and private practice. Immediately before coming to Hong Kong, his most recent position had been at a new veterinary school being established in Adelaide, Australia, where he served as Deputy Dean of Research — and that school passed accreditation by the Australasian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC) in 2013. In other words, the man CityU brought in to lead its institution-building had just finished building a veterinary school that had been accredited by the AVBC. That "just done it once" experience was itself the most direct "lineage" available to CityU as it set out on the AVBC accreditation path. The founding dean arrived with an accreditation blueprint that had already been road-tested, so the college's first foundation stone was not laid on the basis of armchair theory.

Alongside the founding leadership, the "Sydney line" carried the clinical teaching. According to a CityU JCC news item^※, Vanessa Barrs joined CityU as Chair Professor, Associate Dean and Director of Veterinary Affairs, responsible for "development of and teaching in programmes aligned with One Health"; Julia Beatty joined as Chair Professor of Veterinary Medicine and Infectious Diseases, drawing on years of clinical teaching experience to set up the Department of Clinical Sciences. Both came from the University of Sydney and specialised in feline medicine, transferring the teaching-and-research traditions of an established team wholesale into the new college.

Professor Barrs subsequently rose to become Dean — the Dean who speaks for JCC in the 2023 dual-accreditation announcement described in the companion piece. Her own path, from "Deputy Dean who moved from Sydney" to "Dean presiding over accreditation", is in miniature the story of the college's faculty growing from nothing to the point of taking the helm. As for the Cornell side of the personnel contribution, it flows mainly through 29 faculty members serving as joint PhD supervisors^※ and through doctoral students spending research periods at Cornell — "lineage" at the research level, which ran in parallel with the recruitment of local clinical faculty as two separate supply channels.

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# Was CityU Cornell's "only child"? — placing the partnership in Cornell's global map

Outsiders easily imagine CityU's JCC to be Cornell's only deep overseas partnership in veterinary medicine. The reality is otherwise. According to Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine global collaborations page^※, Cornell maintains several institution-level veterinary partnerships worldwide, and CityU is merely the one in which it has invested most deeply. Setting the three principal partners side by side makes clearer where the distinctiveness of the CityU partnership lies:

Seen against these, CityU's special position is immediately clear: compared with the "exchange visits" with Obihiro in Japan and the "facility advice" for Tata in India, CityU is the only case where Cornell participates in the entire process — from site planning all the way to curriculum committees and joint doctoral training. According to Cornell's website, its joint PhD training with CityU spans four fields — "comparative biomedicine, immunology and infectious disease, molecular and systems neuroscience, and public health and epidemiology^※" — and doctoral students may spend up to a year in the laboratories of Cornell joint supervisors. Neither the Obihiro nor the Tata partnership has anything comparable in depth.

This also answers a frequently asked question: CityU was not Cornell's "only child", but it is indeed the partner in Asia in which Cornell has invested most heavily and along the longest chain of participation. Placing the three cases side by side makes plain that in CityU's case, "lineage" is not rhetoric but actual custodianship extending from the blueprints to the lectern.

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# Were the teaching buildings its own? — from "borrowing Cornell's facilities" to building its own

A veterinary school cannot run on curriculum and professors alone; students need animals, surgical tables and diagnostic laboratories to train clinically. JCC's most concrete shortcoming in its early years was precisely that local clinical facilities were still on the drawing board. Its solution was "borrow first, build later": early cohorts were sent to Cornell to use existing facilities, while Jockey Club money was used to build local hardware. That facilities lineage can be set out as follows:

According to Cornell's October 2018 reception news^※, when founding Dean Professor Reichel and the then CityU Provost led a delegation to Ithaca, the sites they inspected were precisely Cornell's animal hospital, Animal Health Diagnostic Center, Equine Park and simulation laboratory — exactly the venues on which the undergraduate summer externships relied before CityU's own facilities were built. In an interview, Cornell's Associate Dean for International Programs and Public Health articulated the educational logic behind this "borrowing": "In an ever-globalizing world, we want our students to be truly prepared to approach issues and create solutions on an international scale, and collaborations like this are expanding that capacity^※".

The endpoint of this lineage is the college building its own complete set of teaching and research facilities locally — the Lam Tsuen veterinary teaching farm in Tai Po provides livestock and large-animal settings, the CityU Animal Medical Centre and Veterinary Medical Laboratory take on clinical work and diagnostics, and the Jockey Club One Health Tower is the main building that gathers these scattered pieces together. At that point, "borrowing Cornell's facilities for classes" gradually gave way to "teaching in buildings of one's own", closing, together with the funding and faculty lineages above, a loop that ran from dependence to self-sufficiency.

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# What the "imported curriculum" imported was governance, not just syllabi

Outside observers tend to reduce the CityU–Cornell partnership to "copying a curriculum". But seen institutionally, the crux of the collaboration is not "which subjects were imported" but "a continuing governance relationship was imported" — Cornell did not sell a curriculum outline and walk away; it sat, over the long term, on CityU's admissions committee and curriculum committee, taking part in decisions. According to the Cornell veterinary college website^※, since 2009 Cornell's substantive role has covered "strategic planning, development/design/operation of teaching and clinical facilities, administrative leadership, recruitment and hiring of faculty", and it has specifically participated "in admissions, the curriculum committee, and curriculum implementation". The quality guarantee, in other words, was not a one-off authorisation but joint governance embedded in the daily running of the programme.

This model of "custodial governance" rather than "purchased curriculum" is precisely the institutional precondition that allowed CityU to navigate the dual RCVS and AVBC accreditation: what international accreditors examine is never only a syllabus, but whether that syllabus can be executed stably and sustainably. Cornell's continuing presence — through joint supervisors, a teaching-innovation fund and seats on curriculum committees — is what supplied CityU with that endorsement of "sustainable execution". The dual-accreditation outcome detailed in the companion piece rests on this long-term governance relationship: accreditation is the fruit; custodial governance is the root.

This distinction between "purchase" and "custodianship" also explains why the partnership has lasted more than fifteen years and kept adding layers at postgraduate level: it was never, from the design stage, a one-off transaction, but a long-term relationship written into committee constitutions.

# The academic skeleton: four departments

At the level of organisational structure, "lineage" takes the form of a college with a full complement of departments, rather than a single course tucked under some existing department. According to the Wikipedia overview^※, the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences is organised into four departments, each corresponding to a block in the Cornell curriculum blueprint:

What this structure signifies: JCC did not "outsource" veterinary education to Cornell; it built its own departments, hired its own department heads, and had Cornell participate in governance at the level of the admissions and curriculum committees. The fact that the Department of Biomedical Sciences was reorganised from CityU's existing biology and chemistry department shows that the new college also absorbed CityU's own disciplinary base — it did not rise entirely on bare ground. Four departments mapping onto different blocks of Cornell's training landscape is precisely how the "imported curriculum" was translated down to the organisational level.

# How narrow is the intake? — about 30 places a year on the six-year degree

This college, built with hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars, borrowing Cornell's facilities and recruiting professors from Sydney, admits only about 30 undergraduates a year. According to a summary of admissions information^※, the six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM, JUPAS code JS1801) is taught entirely in English, with roughly 30 places a year, of which non-local places are usually no more than 10; because the course involves an interview stage, competition is fierce, and successful local HKDSE applicants typically score 30.5 points or above. As the programme is accredited by the RCVS and AVBC, graduates may register to practise directly with the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong (VSB) without sitting further exams — which is the key institutional difference from the past, when Hong Kong students had to study abroad and can now stay home.

The enrolment figures above come from an admissions-information platform of a non-official nature, not from official year-by-year announcements; for the definitive place numbers and entry requirements in any given year, see CityU's JCC admissions page^※, as they may be adjusted annually. Since the BVM came under UGC funding in the 2019/20 academic year, local students have paid standard fees for publicly funded places.

The intake may be narrow, but it is growing steadily more international. According to a CityU news release of 10 November 2025^※, that academic year the BVM welcomed a "record international intake", with new students from Germany, Italy, South Africa, Jordan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, mainland China (Shanghai) and Macao; among them was a Jordanian student admitted with a perfect International Baccalaureate (IB) score of 45, and a Hong Kong student admitted with six 5** grades in the DSE. In the announcement, Dean Professor Barrs said the college would "support them to make the most of their six-year journey at CityUHK and to grow with curiosity and empathy^※". According to the same release, BVM students can also undertake overseas exchanges during their studies, visiting Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge, Toronto, Columbia and other institutions. Cornell's place on that exchange list is the most everyday kind of continuation of the "lineage" this chapter describes.

# The partnership keeps adding layers: a new Master of Veterinary Medicine in 2026/27

The "lineage" did not end when the undergraduate programme passed accreditation; it has continued to add layers at postgraduate level. According to a CityU announcement of December 2025^※, the college will launch a brand-new Master of Veterinary Medicine (MVetMed) in September 2026 — a one-year, full-time, English-taught programme focused on small animal medicine, aimed at graduates who already hold a veterinary qualification and wish to strengthen their clinical reasoning and evidence-based practice skills.

The curriculum continues JCC's consistent orientation: case-based learning, diagnostic reasoning, advanced imaging, epidemiology and One Health approaches, with animal welfare principles folded into clinical decision-making. According to the announcement, Dean Professor Barrs cited "the strategic partnership with Cornell University" as one of the foundations supporting the development of the master's programme; the programme director, Professor Elliott Chiu, said: "The MVetMed marks a significant advancement in postgraduate veterinary education in Hong Kong^※". This master's, first offered in the 2026/27 academic year, extends the Cornell "lineage" from undergraduate institution-building into postgraduate clinical training — the newest layer of the partnership in its second decade.

In fact, international cooperation at postgraduate level had already been laid out before the first BVM cohort had even graduated — and not only with Cornell. According to a CityU news release of 2015^※, CityU cooperated with the University of Stirling in the UK to launch an "MSc in Aquatic Production and Veterinary Health" in 2016, with a planned intake of 30. That master's corresponds to the "aquatic animal health" strand among the BVM's four local themes. It ran in parallel with the Cornell-led mammalian clinical line, showing that JCC's "lineage" has never been single-source: Cornell is the backbone, but other international partners were layered on top as disciplinary needs required. Postgraduate offerings, from the 2016 aquaculture master's to the 2026/27 small animal medicine master's, form a second strand of collaboration that has kept building, quite apart from the undergraduate programme.

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# Conclusion: the convergence of the money, people and bricks lineages

The companion piece answers "what CityU's veterinary programme looks like and how it obtained Asia's first dual accreditation"; this one answers how it was built out of nothing. Setting the three lineages side by side gives "lineage" a concrete referent:

1. The money lineage — starting with self-financed tuition, seeded by the 2015 Li Dak Sum & Yip Yio Chin development fund of HK$100 million, bricked into the main building by the Hong Kong Jockey Club's HK$500 million naming donation of 2018, and joined from 2019/20 by UGC public funding for the places — four streams of money arriving at different times and serving different functions.
2. The people lineage — founding Dean Reichel arriving to lead the institution-building with the experience of having just built an AVBC-accredited veterinary school in Adelaide; Barrs, Beatty and others moving wholesale from the University of Sydney in 2020 with a mature clinical team; and 29 Cornell faculty members feeding in research traditions as joint PhD supervisors.
3. The bricks lineage — borrowing Cornell's animal hospital and Equine Park for early summer externships, building its own diagnostic laboratory in the middle years, and completing the Jockey Club One Health Tower, the Animal Medical Centre and the Lam Tsuen teaching farm at maturity, moving from dependence to self-sufficiency.

These three lineages did not run on separate tracks: the Jockey Club's money built the One Health Tower, giving the professors from Sydney somewhere to teach; the accreditation experience the founding dean brought with him determined the standards to which the money and the people were configured; and Cornell's custodial governance ran through the whole like an axle, stringing money, people and bricks onto a single set of internationally accredited coordinates. Remove any one of the three and the other two could not stand alone. All three converge on the academic main line of Cornell, and together they hold up a veterinary college able to pass dual RCVS and AVBC accreditation — but for the accreditation itself, and the graduation of the first cohort, see the companion piece global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md. All figures and dates cited here carry official sources; living individuals are named factually in neutral academic contexts, and government office-holders are referred to by the titles they held at the time.

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# Further reading

• Cornell curriculum blueprint, dual RCVS + AVBC accreditation, first cohort of 11 graduates → global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md
• CityU's overall international cooperation network and what "the most international university" means → global-partnerships-and-exchange.md
• The CityU–Columbia University dual degree (another flagship international partnership) → global-partnerships-and-exchange-2.md

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