Closure (or rather "merger") of Yale- NUS

 In another lifetime, I somehow recall writing about Yale NUS. Now that that experiment is finally over, let's have another look back at it. 

I don't really know why Yale-NUS decided to close down, but this has become such an interesting topic, and not least because of all the water that's flowed under the bridge since there were the great debates about the formation of Yale-NUS. 

Since then, there have been a series of events that for various reasons changed the whole equation on this question:

1. Worsening of relations between US and China

From the end of the Cold war on, America has taken the attitude that we live in an increasingly open world, and that the US was the leader of this increasingly open world. It accepted a lot of scholars from around the world to their universities, and many of them have risen up to be world class researchers. 

But with the rivalry between the US and China heating up, many in the US education system are starting to question if this openness were such a great thing after all: it seemed as though it was just a massive transfer of technology from the US to eager Chinese students. 

This is probably more relevant to the state of STEM education. But it's also true that there may not have been a lot of enthusiasm amongst the Yale faculty, especially where working with Singapore were concerned. There have been concerns about the government interfering with the work of the academics in Yale NUS. 

Most branches of study are not Asian studies, and they don't always touch on what's going on in the rest of the humanities. It would be nice to start looking at political philosophy from a Confucian point of view, but don't expect Yale to drift too far away from the western-centric perspective anytime soon.

10 years ago, the curiosity of the US universities towards Chinese culture was at its peak. Since then, the mood has soured rapidly, and yet, this is a period of time when it's been more important than ever before for the US academic system to get a grip on what China is all about, on Chinese culture. You do see several universities on the West Coast becoming more engaged with Asia, and somehow Yale is not actively moving in this direction, and you do have to ask yourself why. 

2. Rise of MOOCs

What's also happened is that you could get an education by listening to online lectures. This was a relatively new development, that's happened since the creation of Yale-NUS. I don't really know what this portends for the university as a business model. But I know that the days where the university as the gatekeeper of knowledge is, for most intents and purposes, over. 

The problem with offering the social sciences as majors is that a lot of what you can learn can also be learned with access to a good library. They are nebulous, and it is hard to judge how good people are at their subject. Maybe a guy like LKY might be a genius at it, given that he's been shown to be right about a lot of things. But unfortunately you can only write essays, and people can mark you on how well essays are written, and it can be a little hard to gauge whether you've really learnt anything at all. 

The worst thing is that you would be paying a lot of tuition, roughly the same amount as for a STEM education, and your earning potential would not be highly enhanced by your degree. In many ways, it is a great education, but I don't know how you'd assess it once money comes into the picture.

3. Liberal arts or Big Science University

What NUS wanted to get a flavour of is how you could integrate together the various fields of study to build a wide-ranging education and whether there were cross linkages between the different departments, that could make for the more multi-disciplinary inquiry of knowledge, as well as a better richness of intellectual life. I suppose all this was the basis of a liberal education. 

This may have something to do with my choosing tech as my field, even though as an undergraduate I had more of a liberal arts background. But I notice that a lot of the research that has changed the world is taking place in the tech fields. There is a place for economics and politics and these are very important fields of study, but they tend to be reactive to the way that tech has changed our society. 

I'm probably out of the loop where Yale is concerned, but I'm not really aware of how Yale has advanced human knowledge recently. Historians very often do not advance human knowledge. They reconsider opinions that have been put forth before, and historians are very often revising peoples' opinions about important events in the past. There is a lot of rethinking, re-contextualising, reconsidering. But should it be a badge of pride that you excel in the classics? 

People might think of the study of cyberspace as some kind of new-fangled academic discipline, but it's not. The internet has become such an important part of our lives that you can no longer think about society functioning without it. And yet we still live like we're 30 or 50 years behind time. So much of the established history and literature deals with the 60s or the 80s, and these were the eras where the canonical events that shaped our understanding of the world took place. 

I made the point that many of the Ivy League universities made the big mistake of not developing their engineering departments, preferring instead to emphasise the sciences and the arts. A liberal arts education is something that might be good at producing some of the visionaries in society, the poets, the artists, the philosophers who try to nail down what makes a good life a good life. But it probably won't produce the cutting edge in tech, and won't produce the workers that make up your industry. Or it might have these benefits, but it won't show them in a tangible way. 

At the same time, the Singapore government has to think about a larger question, regarding the role of the university in society. A liberal arts education in the US is widely admired, but it's role in the US having the greatest university system in the world might be a bit more murky. 

The US ascended to the ranks of the greatest university system in the world, partly because big projects enabled the big universities to achieve great technological advancements in real life. This is the essence of innovation: not merely having bright people with creative ideas, but also the ability to execute the process of bringing them forth into real life. 

There was a time when there was more active co-ordination between the US government and academia. These days, with the libertarian free market ideas having taken hold, a lot of this has become patchy. People are starting to believe that governments shouldn't direct large research programs, and simply let serendipidity and chance to do what it will. And somehow people believe that private enterprises, whose ostensible interest is to further their own ability to keep on making money, and whose interests are not even supposed to be aligned with the country where they are incorporated, holds the key to producing great research for the nation in the future. 

What does all this have to do with the liberal arts? I don't really know. As great as I found the liberal arts experience to be, I also noticed that it wasn't the locus for knowledge discovery in the tech era. It's great for teaching, it's great for soapbox preaching, it's great for a young mind to grasp and make sense of the world, but it's not technological advancement. 

4. Crisis of democracy in the USA

American universities are going through some kind of crisis of their own. There are the four tribes that were outlined by George Packer. Smart America, Just America, Real America and Free America. Free America might have a tetchy relationship with universities. Smart America and Just America are probably the two tribes which are closes to the American university. While there's never been anything wrong about the quest for social justice, of late people have sounded more bolshevik, and taken offense over some of the craziest things. Some of the moderation that's characterised the best of how intellectual inquiry should take place in a free society has been lost. 

Campus activity has been more and more politicised, and not necessarily in a good way. We've had people from Yale fighting over Halloween costumes and tearing down statues. The US is going through a crisis that makes people wonder whether the much vaunted system of democracy is worth emulating. One of the most important test beds of democracy is the university. (Well, at least free speech is something that's supposed to be sacrosanct in the university. In many ways, universities are not democratic places). There are very important reasons why free speech is supposed to exist in a university. 

Free speech in a university challenges people to make up their minds and form their own opinions. It is a rite of passage for university students. Free speech challenges students to come into contact with opinions they feel uncomfortable with and resolve them in a mature manner. 

5. Clashes of culture

MIT has managed to make a big tie-up with Singapore's engineering work, because it's a less broad-based collaboration. It was just a few academic departments, and it's always easier to get engineers to agree on things together. Same with the Duke-NUS medical school tie-up. It's very easy to collaborate with somebody else in research. You do it all the time, regardless of whether you've formalised your relationship. Research is like jazz, you should be able to play well with just about anybody else who plays jazz. (Otherwise you wouldn't be a jazzman). IT's not so much of a big deal for Duke medical to have a tie up with NUS medical school, or MIT to have a tie-up with NUS engineering. 

But a liberal arts school is something altogether. For starters, liberal arts is not one academic unit, but maybe 50 different academic departments. And the boundaries between the academic departments are even more fluid than if they were engineering departments. Becoming a liberal arts college demands that you not only change how research is done, but also how teaching is done: your administration has to be more flexible, you have to do more to accede to the needs of the individual, and you have to accept that sometimes, people might just coast through and take advantage of the flexibility to do the minimum required to get through their degree. Liberal arts degrees are in many ways less rigorous. Is NUS prepared to accept that? 

6. Rise of the opposition parties

Since the 2011 election, the opposition parties have made strides into the political scene. The PAP has suddenly become quite vulnerable. That's the great paradox of Singapore politics: it is an authoritarian government, albeit one that could in theory be voted out in any general elections. 

GE2011 probably took place in a 5 year period during which Singapore was experimenting with looser political control. During the aftermath of GE 2011, a lot of civil society activity was sprouting up everywhere, and I don't really know if that shifted the mood on the thinking of the PAP. The PAP then pulled out all the stops, first with the 50th anniversary of independence in 2015, (nicely coinciding with the death of LKY – he always has a good sense of timing). Then there was the kerfuffle with 38 Oxley, which at least demonstrates to the whole world that the second Lee was not above requisitioning his own house to use as an instrument of political propaganda. Coupled with the unprecedented Malaysia election results which showed Patakan Harapan finally wresting power away from Barisan National for the first time ever, this is the setting behind the Singapore government's recent push to get a tighter grip on political subversion in Singapore. 

It might shift the needle on the government's thinking, that perhaps it's not good to grant a university too much freedom. Of course, a liberal arts university doesn't necessarily mean you have liberal or anti-government politics. Having a more well-rounded and broader liberal arts education on paper should be a completely separate issue from how outspoken you are in society at large. But liberal arts means you have more leeway, more latitude, and less shackles imposed upon the manner in which you pursue education. In some sense, liberal education is political freedom. 

7. COVID-19 pandemic

There's also the case that COVID-19 has changed the business environment regarding the sustainability of university, and liberal arts colleges were especially hard hit. For a mode of operations that necessitates a lot of face time between students and professors, liberal arts colleges are going to suffer inordinately as a result of having to conduct zoom classes. 

And add to that, there's the pressure of having to link up with the Yale side in the middle of a pandemic with a lot of travel restrictions. And add to that the pressures surrounding the breaking down of relations between the US and China. 

So I previously focused on why a lot of Yale's objections to Yale-NUS are specious and ill-founded, but I hadn't actually gone down to really think about how much Singapore needs a liberal arts education. 

How much does Singapore need a liberal arts college? 

For that matter, since the US higher education system itself is undergoing some kind of a flux, what is the future of liberal arts education?

How much should the US keep on opening campus branches abroad? Do they benefit Yale, do they benefit Singapore, how much better would Singapore be if it tried to pursue the idea of liberal education by going it alone? 

So there are all sorts of possibilities about why NUS severed its relationship with Yale in Yale-NUS. I'll list them out here because, frankly, I don't know any better, and to be fair to people so that we can all consider the scope of our discussion.

1. Yale-NUS never had the buy-in from the Yale faculty.

2. The faculty complained about Singapore being “too authoritarian” / “not American”. Or maybe the mood has been somewhat soured. Or maybe decolonisation never ever did mean shit.

3. NUS was unable to accede to the requirements of running a liberal arts college, perhaps on a public university's budget?

4. It's demeaning to NUS that you need the Yale name in order to make the college prestigious enough to join.

5. It's demeaning to Yale that “Yale” has been reduced to no more than a brand name.

6. NUS was resisting the demands to increase the synergies between the departments.

7. NUS (maybe also the Singapore Government) was sick and tired of having to foot the bill.

8. Yale-NUS was potentially a hotspot for dissident political activity

9. NUS had already obtained the expertise from Yale and knew how to carry on running a liberal arts college.

10. Or, NUS, having seen what it means to run a liberal arts college, has decided that it's just not worth the bother, and has decided to go back to a one-size-fits-all approach. 

11. There is tension between a smaller start-up and its parent organisation (NUS is basically the parent since Yale is basically the deadbeat dad). 

12. Yale NUS students are simply inferior to the ones in Yale. 

Of these, I'm not willing to make any comment on whether or not it's true, other than the last point, which I believe is simply not true. 

Somebody remarked that notwithstanding possibly the higher selectivity of people applying to Yale (through the front door, at least) the students in Yale NUS were as good as, if not better than the ones at Yale. (This is contentious, because a lot of the time, when somebody has a worldview different from yours, and you're just trying to keep up with it, it can make him seem like he's very smart). And furthermore, unlike Yale University, Yale-NUS does not have legacy admits.