No More Top Down - Yale NUS

 After a few days of digging things up, some things have become a little clearer. The NUS administration closed the school down, and this decision was taken over the top of the president of Yale NUS. YNC would be merged with the University Scholars program to form the New College.

In many ways, Yale-NUS was a success. I thought that if it was going to fail, it would not be because of the students or the faculty. It would be a vibrant and intellectual community, professors would be in Singapore to do good work. There is a lot of new ground to be broken, especially when it comes to the academia on the East. Singapore is a confluence of the east and west. There are a few places whose existence serves to repudiate the Kipling saying about “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”, Singapore is one of them, and maybe California is another one.

Unfortunately the Yale professors were right in the end. When they protested, I thought there was a whiff of racism. Maybe there was. Maybe there was more than a bit of sanctimonious righteousness about how they circulated a big resolution that tried to hold the Yale NUS college to account, to live up to the liberal values of the USA. This attitude is well summed up in the sarcastic comment that “there is virtually no country that can match the standard we set for the rest of the world when it comes to academic freedom and human rights”. There were points when I started wondering whether the scholars of Yale saw it as their mission to bring forth the liberal arts to the world, or to deny it to the rest of the world.

On one hand, the closure of the Yale-NUS college is a vindication of their belief that this project should not have started off in the first place. It now seems that one big issue is that it would be very hard to replicate a college like Yale in Singapore, with the values that Yale holds dear to their hearts. In fairness, Yale is already a fairly challenging environment to work in. It thrived in the 20^th century but it faces an existential crisis in the 21^st century – how is it going to fare in a world that is increasingly technologically advanced, in a world which is increasingly decolonised, where America's primacy is looking shaky. Does it hold fast to its values, or does it try to engage with the world which might have different values? And if it bends with the world, is it considered open-mindedness, or an unspeakable compromise? Yale University is a classic case of the innovator's dilemma.

And at the same time that Yale is already having a great clash of values, which is the confrontation between a new “woke” culture taking place on campuses and the great tradition of Yale, where it was one of the great cultural gatekeepers of the world in its heyday. At this time, you're being thrown a curveball by the university administrators, and you're told that some guys are going to open a beach head 12 hours away, and you got to train those soldiers to go forth and conquer, and the decisions behind this great civilising mission has taken place without your input. It's possible to sympathise with the faculty in this respect.

Personally what I found baffling is that Yale was handed a very good opportunity, a window into Asia, which was one of the most vibrant areas of the world today. It's one thing to turn up your nose at failed states and say, you have failed. If the rise of Asia does not make you start pondering the universality of some of those liberal values, you have insufficient intellectual curiosity to call yourself a scholar.

More damningly, the attitude of the faculty has hung a cloud over the whole enterprise. It's arguable that the lack of enthusiasm amongst the faculty for this project was the first nail in the coffin. I don't know about the reaction amongst the faculty for the demise of this project: it's not good form to celebrate the death of an enterprise when you are one of the reasons for the death of this enterprise.

Yet you probably need to take a walk around New Haven to start asking yourself in what manner Yale University has been a benefit to its immediate urban environment. Do I want Singapore to look like that, you wonder.

Arranged marriages are not necessarily doomed. I feel for the students and faculty of the Yale NUS college. They set about their mission with revolutionary zeal, and they believed they were building something that would last through the ages.

On one hand, you could say that they were good kids, and they were intellectually curious about the world, and in many ways built a vibrant community that is a credit to themselves and their upbringing.

On the other hand, when you asked them, “what could you do in Yale-NUS that you couldn't have done elsewhere”, they might not have a clue. Yes, they would have to compromise in an environment like the wider NUS, but NUS has some kind of academic freedom that apparently the Yale-NUS people, living in their bubble of freedom, is apparently unaware of. This is the 21^st century, the era of the internet. It is impossible for Yale-NUS to be opening your mind up to ideas and viewpoints that you couldn't find anywhere else.

To the extent that they are mourning for the devaluation of their parchment, it's hard to feel sympathy for them. I think this was something the NUS faculty was counting on, that the resentment that the wider community, and NUS feels towards them might defray some of the flak that would greet the decision to discontinue the Yale name. Are the alumni mourning this wonderful, beautiful bubble world where having “Yale” attached to your name unlocks special lifelong privileges? I have myself experienced this, having graduated from Snowy Hill and imagining that for the rest of my life, I would be shrouded in some melancholy glory, bemoaning the burdens that these privileges have imposed upon me and pondering over the darker side of fame and fortune. It might have been the way for some of my peers but apparently that didn't happen to me.

People might forget that it's Yale's ties with NUS which have died. Whether the values of the liberal arts in Singapore have died is still very much a matter of active debate, and it is always up for some kind of negotiation. This is a matter of half a glass full or half a glass empty. On one hand, Yale-NUS is shut down as an entity. On the other hand, there is a big project under way to use the experience from Yale-NUS to change the way that NUS is being run. A lot of things are still up in the air. I'm not on the ground to say exactly what has come to an end, but there are plenty of battles that lie ahead, waiting to be fought, and really, not the time for funerals.

Some people may bemourn that Yale-NUS represented some kind of a “safe space” for them. That reminds me of a saying: Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable. You are meant to have a nuanced relationship with safe spaces. Safe spaces are good and they allow you to thrive, but it should never allow you to be so comfortable that you're never going to step away from them. Is it a good thing that you have a safe space in Yale-NUS, and is that taking the best and the brightest of your cohort and building their character up? Should elite higher education be about cotton candy and warm, inviting collegiate cushy spaces? No outsider is going to shed tears if that's what's getting taken away.

What it now seems to be the case is that Singapore is enamoured of Yale's ability to foster multi-disciplinary scholarship, and to conduct enquiries of knowledge that span across traditional boundaries between departments. They may or may not love the academic freedom that comes about as a result of this process, or is essential to this process. But they most certainly cannot deal with the student activism that would find a place on Yale University. What seems to be the case is NUS wants to forge a new model: they want the fruits of interdisciplinary collaboration, and yet they want the control over society that they've always had. This is unprecedented, but there's no real reason why it wouldn't really work. Singapore has always been this case study that pluralism can go hand in hand with half-assed political freedom. And Singapore is starting to pose this question to the rest of the world: perhaps some restriction on personal liberties is necessary to ensure this pluralism can continue to exist without some kind of major strife.

The other unedifying aspect of this saga is that there are plenty of precedents for Singapore higher education to tie up with a big name from overseas – most likely America. They will leverage this big name to attract hungry and eager scholars from around the region – and make no mistake, the one thing that Asia won't ever be short of is people. And they will dangle this big name to attract them to plant their roots down, and bootstrap this big academic initiative. Somewhere along the line, they will seize control of the enterprise and run it exactly the way they want it.

Then again, if you think that only Singapore is guilty of making universities whose prestige rides upon that of a more ancient entity, consider how Harvard University is in a town called Cambridge.

In the case of Yale, you certainly could accuse them of pulling off this shady move. At the same time, you would also have to admit that, right from the get-go, it is really hard to have Yale's name on this project when the Yale faculty simply bochap. The interactions between Yale and Yale-NUS are as awkward as your average episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

You don't really want to be in a position of having killed off Yale's ties to a project that is in many ways a promising one, simply because you were intransigent about not working with a bunch of people who don't share your values. And yet at the same time, it would be a really curious thing if the Singapore government were to rethink the entire values system of our society simply because they wanted to accommodate the Yale-NUS people. It's very often cited that Singapore has that colonial era 377A on their books, but what's lost is the sheer complexity of this issue as it is seen on the ground, that this issue is a frontier in one of the most contentious political battles in Singapore.

At the same time, in the previous blog post I made on this topic, I touched on how a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the last time this Yale-NUS topic was debated. Since then, Singapore's trajectory towards a more liberal path has halted and turned around. A higher level of political liberalisation has become less desirable. The US has been seen as being less desirable as a model for the rest of the world.

You could make a case that political activism in the university is an essential rite of passage towards adulthood, or is just so much gawky and fumbling performatory political activism that's painful to watch. Is Singapore's political space large enough to accommodate that? I'm thinking of the US as a place where the four factions (smart / just / free / real) are co-existing in the same space, and I'm wondering if we want that for Singapore. It's nice to yearn for a little bit of political liberalisation in Singapore, but how do we deal with the forces unleashed when everybody's glove comes off?

At the same time, this is 2020, and we are in a pandemic. We can clearly see that mask mandates and vaccine mandates are illiberal measures to take, but we accept them because they are good for society. That goes against the spirit of the thinking that a community which is more politically open is necessarily a more intelligent and highly functioning society. It's easy to laugh at the people who invoke freedom and "doing your own research" as the reason why mask mandates are being defied. But it's not so easy to accept that for many people and in many ways, they are doing the illiberal things, such as accepting a higher level of government surveillance, and this has resulted in a lot of lives being saved.