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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Comment on this article Singapore Spinoff “I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound,” declared Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. in 1966. Brewster, who introduced a national, merit-based admissions system to Yale College, was arguing that a more diverse student body was necessary to keep Yale relevant in a changing world. What would Brewster have made of a Yale on Long Island Sound and the Singapore Strait? That’s not exactly the proposal Yale and the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced in September. Their idea is a new liberal arts college in Singapore, jointly governed by Yale and NUS and bearing both schools’ names. But it’s a radical move for Yale. The university has been forging international connections for more than a decade, including a joint center for biomedical research at Fudan University in Shanghai and a small joint program at Peking University for Peking and Yale undergraduates. The Singapore plan, however, is the first time Yale has proposed to put its name on an entire campus—and to participate in granting degrees. True, they won’t be Yale degrees. Officially, the degrees will be granted by NUS. But the diplomas will likely read, “Yale-NUS College.” The proposal means different things to different people. For Yale’s administration, it is an opportunity to establish a beachhead in Asia as the region grows in economic strength and creates an enormous market for higher education—a market that has already drawn many leading Western universities. For Yale faculty involved in the planning, it’s an irresistible chance to create a liberal arts college from scratch, without the strictures of existing departments and norms. For a few public critics, it’s an ill-advised collaboration with a government whose restrictions on civil liberties are incompatible with the very nature of liberal education. Whatever its pros and cons, the plan is part of an agenda Yale president Richard Levin ’74PhD has been advancing since 1997, an agenda articulated in a 2005 document called “The Internationalization of Yale.” One of its three broad goals is to “position Yale as a university of global consequence.” A campus abroad would be the biggest step Yale has taken on that road. Appropriately enough for a project driven by globalization, the Yale-NUS partnership began neither in New Haven nor Singapore, but over tea in a meeting lounge in Davos, Switzerland. Levin and NUS president Tan Chorh Chuan were both attending the World Economic Forum there in January 2009 and had a chance meeting. Tan told Levin that a Singaporean advisory panel had recommended that NUS establish a liberal arts college, and they were looking for a partner. “We quickly found that we had similar ideas about it,” says Tan, “the principal one being that NUS should not just take an existing model and import it wholesale.” Singapore—an island nation of five million people, slightly smaller in area than the five boroughs of New York City—has been working to establish itself as an educational crossroads in Asia by forming partnerships with American universities at NUS: Duke has a medical school there, MIT an engineering program, NYU a master’s program in law, and Johns Hopkins a music conservatory. NUS itself is a 30,000-student university ranked 31st in the world (and 5th when North America and Europe are excluded) in the QS World University Rankings. But except for a small honors program, NUS, like most universities outside the United States, offers undergraduates career-oriented education, not the liberal arts. Singapore wants to change that. Government officials say they recognize that to remain relevant, the tiny country will have to be a hub of education and innovation. “If you look at most of the important challenges Asia and the world face—climate change, urbanization, public health—they are all complex issues that cover many domains of knowledge,” says Tan. “We feel that we need forms of education that address this in a much more deliberate way. This is why we were drawn to the idea of developing a liberal arts college.” Yale’s experience in the liberal arts—specifically as a research university with an embedded liberal arts college—was what attracted NUS to Yale. That experience and expertise—along with a prestigious and marketable name—are all that Yale is bringing to the partnership. The government of Singapore would pay the entire cost of building the college (on a former golf course adjacent to the NUS campus) and all the operating costs, which would be partly funded by tuition comparable to that of a state university in the United States. As outlined in a September letter sent to faculty and alumni from President Levin and Provost Peter Salovey ’86PhD, the college would be an autonomous institution governed by a board with equal representation from Yale and Singaporean officials. It would have 1,000 students, 100 professors, and three residential colleges (another innovation for Singapore, where on-campus housing is not the norm). Half the students would likely come from Singapore, the other half from the rest of Asia and the world. The professors would not be Yale faculty members—although Yale professors might go there as visiting professors—but academics hired by the college. Yale’s officers and trustees won’t make a final decision on the plan until some time this winter, after they’ve had a chance to hear the opinions of the faculty and after the Singaporean government decides how much money it will commit to construction of the campus. If a final agreement is reached, the first core faculty—five to ten professors—will be recruited this spring. During the next academic year (2011–12) those professors would work on designing the curriculum and hiring the rest of the faculty. And during 2012–13, the entire Yale-NUS faculty would spend the academic year together at Yale, before decamping to Singapore to welcome the first entering class in the fall of 2013. Imagine that you’re a professor, and someone gives you a blank piece of paper and asks you to design a college—the curriculum, the buildings, the faculty, the extracurriculars. There are no existing departments whose constituencies must be satisfied, no traditions and customs that students and alumni are loath to change, no buildings whose limitations must be considered. You are free to imagine the ideal undergraduate education. That was essentially the charge given to three committees of Yale professors and administrators last year after talks with Singapore began. “We all had way too much fun,” says Charles Bailyn ’81, an astronomy professor who chaired a committee on faculty development for the college. “We kept going out to dinner and had all these bright ideas. We had to stop ourselves from getting carried away and coming up with the reading lists for the courses, which will be the faculty’s job, after all.” Bailyn himself was so carried away that he agreed to be the college’s dean of faculty and go to Singapore for its first year of operation. “It’s because the enthusiasm was so high that Yale is pursuing this,” he says. On the curricular front, the ideas run something like this: what if all seniors were able to engage in an intense, focused research project? What if faculty could design rigorous, meaningful science courses for non-scientists? What if students spent the beginning of each semester in intensive two-week mini-courses, at different levels and with varied perspectives but all on the same grand topic, so everyone would be discussing black holes or War and Peace outside of class? And, most important—this is something that everyone involved with the project mentions again and again—what if there were a core curriculum that made students familiar with the history of thought and culture not just in the Western world, as Yale College’s optional Directed Studies program does for freshmen, but in the entire world? Former Law School dean Anthony Kronman ’72PhD, ’75JD, who co-chaired the curriculum committee, gives some examples: “a course on the art of war where your principal texts are Sun Tzu and Thucydides; Confucius and Aristotle on the wise man. Or Plato’s Republic and some selections from the Upanishads on the theme of reality of illusion. The great enduring human themes of love, danger, political action, war and peace, truth and illusion, all of these can be pursued, but now drawing on a repertoire of materials from vastly different civilizations whose juxtaposition has got to enrich the experience of the students studying these works.” This idea—a liberal arts curriculum that looks at the world’s cultural traditions in dialogue—has enthusiastic Yale faculty enthralled, for two reasons. First, if Yale hopes to popularize liberal education in Asia, such a curriculum will be necessary to make the liberal arts relevant there. Second, globalization is making a broader knowledge of non-Western culture increasingly important for graduates of schools like Yale itself. Curricular innovations from Yale-NUS might very well find their way back to New Haven. Yale imagines using the new college as a workshop in other areas, too, including extracurricular and residential life. Some of the differences between the residential colleges at Yale and Yale-NUS would be the result of necessity. For one, the NUS site is small, so the three residential colleges there will have to be high-rises. Moreover, the tropical climate would make enclosed courtyards stuffy, so the common space will need to be configured so as to capture welcome breezes. But planners are also considering some other changes that could strengthen the relationship between academics and residential life, including more faculty apartments, offices, and classrooms within the colleges themselves. As for extracurriculars, the planners say they’d like to have extracurricular life more deliberately integrated into a student’s education. What if there were formal opportunities for students to report on their summer internships and study-abroad trips, or leadership seminars for campus newspaper editors, team captains, and club presidents? All this blue-sky thinking is heady stuff. But even the most enthusiastic backers of the new college concede that Singapore’s government is a valid cause for concern. Singapore is a more open society than China—where Yale already has many partnerships and programs, though none this big—but its people live under restrictions that Americans would find unacceptable in their own country. The People’s Action Party, headed by Lee Hsien Loong and before him by his father, Lee Kuan Yew, has ruled the country since Singapore gained its independence in 1965. Human rights advocates are critical of the government’s use of capital punishment, especially in drug-possession cases; its use of criminal libel laws to silence its critics; and its rules against public protest. Many Americans who know nothing else about Singapore remember the 1994 caning of an 18-year-old American who had been convicted of spray-painting cars and other acts of criminal mischief. In terms of academic freedom, President Levin says that Yale’s investigations have shown that “what’s taught in the classroom, and student and faculty expression on campus, are essentially uncontrolled, free, and open. Faculty publications in the scholarly literature are similarly not censored.” He acknowledges that Yale officials were concerned this summer when British author Alan Shadrake was arrested when he visited Singapore to promote a new book that criticizes the country’s use of the death penalty. (His trial began late in October; he could face jail time.) But Levin says the Shadrake case, while troubling, concerned a polemical book for a general audience, and scholarly works are treated differently. Lance Lattig, a researcher on Singapore for Amnesty International, says academic freedom in Singapore is in the eye of the beholder. “If you ask people who are on faculty in a country ‘how is academic freedom?’ they’ll say it’s fine, but if you ask people who have had to leave because the authorities have given them problems, they’ll say it’s atrocious.” One academic who left Singapore (after running for office as an opposition candidate) is James Gomez, who is now at Monash University in Australia. Gomez writes in an e-mail that an American-style liberal arts environment in Singapore “is clearly not possible because of self-censorship practiced by academics and university administrators.” He adds that it is “just a matter of time before an issue blows up directly in Yale’s face.” University Secretary and Vice President Linda Koch Lorimer ’77JD says the administration has received 290 e-mails from alumni and 25 from faculty about the plan, with 72 percent of alumni and 64 percent of faculty expressing full support and 11 percent and 8 percent opposed, respectively. Not many faculty at Yale have spoken out against the college plan—few attended a series of forums for faculty to make their views heard—but those who have cite both philosophical and practical problems in collaborating with the Singaporean government. “I’m worried that Yale’s values will be compromised by allying with an authoritarian, illiberal regime,” says Mark Oppenheimer ’96, ’03PhD, director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a lecturer in the English department, who has argued against the proposal on his blog. “If you get into bed with human rights abusers, you feel less free to criticize human rights abuse, and if you get into bed with people who don’t take academic freedom seriously, it’s unlikely that you’ll continue to take academic freedom quite as seriously.” Classics professor Victor Bers, who says he is one of the few professors who has spoken out against the plan at faculty meetings, thinks there is too great a risk that students or teachers will run up against government restrictions. “The potential for some extremely shocking sequelae are there if you have a little imagination and a little bit of knowledge about how authoritarian regimes operate,” says Bers. “My feeling is that the [Yale] administration is honestly naïve and lacking in imagination.” Bers suggests that more traditional student exchanges are a less risky way of engaging with countries like Singapore. “You know the old proverb ‘To sup with the devil you need a long spoon?’” he says. “You need an extremely long spoon here.” James Scott ’67PhD, a Yale anthropologist and political scientist who studies Southeast Asia, considers the plan to be “a kind of bet” over whether “Yale will liberalize Singaporean education or Singapore will Singapore-ize” the new college. “I respect the motives and the sensibility behind this project,” says Scott, a Sterling Professor of Political Science. “I just remain skeptical about how independent it will remain and whether it will do appropriate honor to the liberal arts.” Yale officials emphasize that they take these concerns seriously and share them to some degree. They say they spoke to former NUS faculty members, now in other countries, who are experts on Singapore and Southeast Asia. Most were positive, they say, although one was concerned that Yale’s actions might seem to legitimate the country’s politics. With regard to the practical concerns, administrators point to language in their memorandum of understanding that gives assurances that “faculty and students in the college will be free to conduct scholarship and research and publish the results, and to teach in the classroom and express themselves on campus, bearing in mind the need to act in accordance with accepted scholarly and professional standards and the regulations of the College.” That said, they also acknowledge that there will be restrictions on expression that students and teachers would have to accept. Public demonstrations are out, and criticism of the government outside the classroom is not advisable. Further, the college rules, Levin and Salovey’s letter says, would ban “defamatory language concerning race or religion” out of respect for Singaporean cultural norms. As to the larger question of whether Yale should get involved with Singapore at all, Levin’s answer is unsurprising, as he has maintained a similar stance on China for many years. He argues that the best course of action is to “engage and hope that through conversation and interaction there’s going to be some advance in mutual understanding and perhaps some liberalization of the society.” That’s one reason Yale is pursuing this venture. The faculty’s enthusiasm for reinventing liberal education is another. But many faculty and alumni have wondered aloud just what tangible benefits to Yale make this project worth investing the university’s time, energy, and reputation. For Linda Lorimer, the answer is a straightforwardly altruistic one. “Right now,” she says, “we take 140 international students in Yale College. Here’s a chance to create the educational experience for a college that will have a thousand students a year, and may well become a model for the many, many liberal arts colleges that will be created in Asia in the next 20 years. We hope we’ve done an incredible job for 300 years educating young people in this country, and here’s an incredible opportunity, without costing us a penny, to get something that will have the potential to be truly excellent for another part of the world.” Levin and Salovey mention other motives in their letter, including a growing imperative for universities to invest abroad. “We do believe it is inevitable that the world’s leading universities by the middle of this century will have international campuses,” they write. U.S. and European universities have hundreds of partnerships and joint ventures in Asia and the Middle East, and the demand for higher education in both regions is growing tremendously. Yale’s ambitions have grown steadily over the centuries. In 1701, Yale’s founders thought Connecticut clergymen needed an orthodox Puritan school. In 1828, Yale’s faculty and trustees decided to use liberal education to help equip future American leaders with “the two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, … the discipline and the furniture of the mind.” Now, the university is poised to find out if it can take that mission global—and at what cost. As a Yale alumn and a university administrator and professor interested in global issues, I applaud Yale’s decision to open a branch campus in Singapore, the dynamic city-state where NYU (where I work) operates two degree-granting campuses for law and film production. I think the article would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of the changing landscape of higher education in Asia. The map of “branch campuses in Asia” fails to include Temple University’s successful campus in Tokyo, Japan (founded 29 years ago and an exemplary branch campus of an American university in Asia), Monash University in Malaysia (founded in 1998), and other such institutions. The map printed in the Yale Alumni Magazine also places Xi’an Jiatong Liverpool University (XJTL) incorrectly in Xi’an, instead of Suzhou, and thus about 400 miles West of where the campus of this British-Chinese branch campus is actually located. This error is akin to placing the Sorbonne on a map at the location of Hamburg, Germany, or locating Yale University in Cleveland, OH. Yale’s endeavor in Singapore is to be commended, and I hope that Yale and its magazine editors, proof-readers, designers and researchers will learn about the great successes and correct location of branch campuses in Asia, and allow the Yale community to benefit from an in-depth understanding of these experiences. Higher education may be a competitive field but it is ultimately a pursuit in the search for the betterment of humankind. A correct and detailed understanding of other models, rather than a myopic focus on a few American universities alone, will prove beneficial to all.
Reading Mark Branch’s interesting and informative article about plans for Yale and the National University of Singapore to collaborate in establishing a new liberal arts college, I could not help but reflect on whether a similar undertaking might be feasible elsewhere, specifically in the Near East. U.S. interests in that region are longstanding, extensive, and seem certain to expand in future years. There are “American universities” in the region, one in Beirut and the other in Cairo. Both have made significant contributions in educating regional leaders—there were more holders of degrees from the American University in Beirut among delegates to the 1945 conference that established the United Nations than from any other university. In an era of globalization and rapidly expanding world trade an associating with Yale could bring great benefits to both American and regional students, enhancing appreciation for differing cultures and traditions.
Excellent story on the proposed Yale-NUS college in Singapore. You say that nine American and European (and Australian) universities have opened full scale campuses in Asia, of which three have already closed. I would have liked to have heard why they closed and perhaps what lessons we need to learn.
President Levin’s naïve assertion that “faculty publications in the scholarly literature are similarly not censored” does not accord with academic reality in Singapore. The government’s Controller of Undesirable Publications banned Christopher Tremewan’s academic book The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore in the 1990s even though the work is probably the best available scholarly introduction to the island state’s political system. The National University of Singapore likewise sacked American economist Christopher Lingle and U.S.-educated psychologist Chee Soon Juan for publicly criticizing the People’s Action Party regime. Democracy-advocate Chee has since become close to the Singaporean Nelson Mandela because of his many terms in prison.
Excellent coverage of Yale’s plans for a partnership with the National University of Singapore. It sounds like a fine program. In view of the slow declining status of the United States and its influence in world affairs relative to the new economic powerhouses such as China, India and to a lesser extent, Brazil and Russia, it seems prudent for the U.S. and its citizens to have a far better understanding on the peoples and cultures of Asia. Generally, I think we as a people are woefully uninformed about the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. will have to learn to share global power with others in order to continue to be a leader in democratic governance and as the world’s policeman. Although we as Americans may not want to admit it, the balance of power in the world has shifted since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, the Yale in Singapore experiment should be a way to begin the process of new mutual cultural understanding, which can take place by student exchanges which the new liberal arts college will provide. Despite some comments of caution about perceived lack of political and civil rights freedoms in that country, we should not lose sight of the fact that Singapore can leard from Yale’s liberal arts philosophy and teaching. Cross-cultural understanding flows both ways. I hope this expeiment succeeds!
I am one of the very many Yalies who have traveled to and through Singapore and done business there. In my case, it was over many years. I write to encourage the project proposed for Singapore. The cultural and particularly the civil liberties differences there are representative of the rest of Asia—so it will be a good thing, not a bad, for Yale to experience those differences and try to deal with them—a good thing for Asia, also for Yale. Personal experience with what some scholars call Sinic culture—the U.S. press and politicians are pleased to label it “crony capitalism”—is a useful thing for a Yale scholar to gain. The first time a Yalie gets a “we must consult the committee” reply, in Korea or Japan or certainly China, will be far less frustrating this way. President Reagan famously thought President Nakasone’s “yes” meant “yes”, and he was angry when it turned into a “maybe”, and Nakasone was confused by the anger—Yale-NUS experience might have helped both men greatly. So I encourage Yale to soldier ahead, with Singapore. I was “shocked, shocked” too, the first time I was there, by my taxi driver’s fearful reaction when I tried to exit on the street-side of his cab—“canings”, he said. I know of the corporal punishment for spitting, and for dropping chewing gum—I’ve read William Gibson’s famous essay on the place, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, and I recommend it. But Yale taught me, as an impressionable young 1960s undergraduate from California, that all ideas need challenge. Robert Dahl taught me that even “democracy” did. Coming from the West Coast, I knew “preppies” and “ivy” and “mixers” and other new ideas would be different, but “democracy” I’d always taken for granted. So that Yale does not take democracy for granted, either, I encourage you to go to Singapore. Asia does it different, as it does civil liberties and government and family life and most things. As Asia is to be our global future, we must learn about it; deal with it; consider it not “better” or “worse” than we are but simply “different;” and appreciate it. Good luck to Yale in the adventure, then. Have patience with those “committee decisions.”
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Related Alumni comments on Yale’s proposal for a new college in Singapore From the Editor Q&A: Rick Levin Yale and National University of Singapore in Discussion to Set Up Liberal Arts College |
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