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Yale’s Singapore Venture
The Alumni Discuss
November/December 2010
Editor Kathrin Day Lassila has urged alumni to respond to the university’s proposed relationship with the National University of Singapore (NUS). Let me summarize my understanding of the debate, and then add what I hope will be an additional consideration.
Critics of the NUS partnership warn of potential damage to academic freedom. They predict that robust inquiry and freewheeling debate will collide with the restrictions on speech and assembly that narrowly circumscribe the rights of residents in Singapore. In addition, affiliation with Yale will enhance the prestige of this authoritarian regime, and Yale’s reputation will be held hostage to the regime’s caprice.
Defenders of the arrangement, among them President Richard Levin and other senior administrators, declare themselves satisfied that free expression will be adequately protected. Beyond that, the sort of cooperation envisioned in the Yale—NUS agreement affirms the university’s commitment to international engagement, a commitment that will always entail risks.
Whatever the merits of the discussion, both sides would agree that, once the partnership is in place, it will take courage and exceptionally good judgment to supervise the problematic transactions that will undoubtedly follow. That is the basis of my own concern. While I can support President Levin’s proposal in principle, my reservations are more practical. How will the Yale administration react at critical moments of stress? When Yale students and faculty members find themselves charged with violating Singapore’s defamation laws—often termed the strictest in the world—decisions will be needed that will require wisdom at the highest university levels along with a fierce determination to protect academic freedom from assault.
Unfortunately, in dealing with the protection of academic freedom, the current Yale administration has quite recently demonstrated neither good judgment nor a deep commitment to fundamental academic values.
Recall, in case any of us has forgotten, that just over a year ago, Mr. John Donatich, editor of the Yale University Press, deleted a sequence of illustrations from Dr. Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons That Shook the World. That decision—which was surely taken with the assent and presumably under the direction of senior administrators—was appropriately condemned across the scholarly community.
As I wrote at the time in a letter to Mr. Donatich, to which he has not yet responded, his censorship subordinated the requirements of truth-seeking and truth-telling to the hypothetical behavior of an angry mob. In short, the Press and its overseers chose to abandon the central principles of the university, and I infer that they did so with the support of the President and other administrators. (I am reduced to inference since I have also never heard from President Levin, to whom I sent a copy of my letter.)
The defense of academic freedom is easy when it is not endangered. Unfortunately, America’s university administrators have repeatedly shown that they are all too ready to cave in when actual political or financial threats present themselves. This is the lesson we have learned from the history of faculty blacklisting and loyalty oaths in universities across the country, a history to which Yale’s censorship of the Danish cartoons adds a sad chapter.
It may be that the administrators of some universities possess the stamina and proven moral courage that will be needed to withstand the attacks on freedom of inquiry, speech, and assembly that collaboration with Singapore’s government will inevitably provoke. Yale’s administrators manifestly do not.
Peter Conn ’69
Vartan Gregorian Professor of English
Professor of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
