BY HANK REICHMAN
In 2011 Yale University announced the establishment of a joint venture with the National University of Singapore, Yale-NUS, a four-year, fully residential undergraduate institution. The venture differs from overseas programs like NYU’s controversial Abu Dhabi campus (see here, here, and here) because it is ostensibly independent of Yale, offering its own degrees. The endeavor, Yale promised, would be financed entirely by the host government.
Yale-NUS Campus at Dusk
From the start Yale-NUS became a target of criticism in the U.S. media and from Yale faculty members. Singapore is regularly faulted by human rights advocates for the severe limits it places on freedoms of expression and association. The city-state has draconian laws restricting homosexuality; in 2014 its Supreme Court upheld the country’s ban on same-sex relations between consenting adult men. In an April 2012 resolution, the Yale faculty, citing Singapore’s “history of a lack of respect for civil and political rights,” expressed concern over the venture and urged administrators “to respect, protect and further principles of nondiscrimination for all, including sexual minorities and migrant workers” and “to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society.” Yale’s then-President Richard Levin dismissed the resolution as “unseemly.” When, soon after, Yale-NUS announced a policy that “will prevent students from creating campus branches of existing Singaporean political parties, in accordance with the nation’s law” two faculty leaders wrote: “So now it is official: an institution bearing Yale’s name — headed by professors and staff taken from Yale-New Haven — is in the business of restricting the rights of students. Yale–NUS students will not enjoy full political freedom, nor full freedom of association or speech.”
The project also attracted the attention of the AAUP. In July 2012 then-Committee A member Marjorie Heins examined the controversy at length on this blog, concluding that at Yale-NUS “academic freedom, at best, will be limited to the classroom and will bear no resemblance to what we have come to expect on U.S. campuses.” In December the Association released a letter to the Yale community, drafted by four members of Committee A and approved by the committee as whole. The letter raised multiple questions about the possibility of true academic freedom in an authoritarian country; about the specific measures that Yale will take to protect the freedom of faculty, staff, and students; and about the lack of transparency that characterized the planning process.
In 2013, Jackson Diehl, an editorial page editor at the Washington Post, published a blistering critique of both the Yale collaboration and NYU’s Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses. He asked, “Is it possible to accept lucrative subsidies from dictatorships, operate campuses on their territory and still preserve the values that make American universities great, including academic freedom? The schools all say yes, pointing to pieces of paper — some of them undisclosed — that they have signed with their host governments. The real answer is: of course not.”
The controversy seemed to have died down after that until it was revived earlier this month when Yale-NUS canceled a one-week-long course on “Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore.” According to the Washington Post, the course “was among 14 off-campus learning experiences from which students had to pick one as part of their curriculum. It was to feature a lineup of Singaporean activists discussing what it means to be a dissident in the local context. Students were to visit the park where rallies are allowed, hold discussions with activists and design protest banners.” Yale-NUS president Tan Tai Yong told the Post the course “did not adequately cover the range of perspectives required for a proper academic examination of the political, social and ethical issues that surround dissent” and risked “breaking the law and incurring legal liabilities.”
In an op-ed piece in the pro-government press a former Singapore lawmaker wrote that “it was a stroke of luck that the college managed to pull the plug in time, but this incident also showed the risks involved in rolling out liberal arts education, especially the risks of infiltration by external influences.” The speaker of Singapore’s parliament also criticized the planned course, connecting it to the protests that have jolted Hong Kong: “Given what is happening in Hong Kong and elsewhere, do we believe that this is the way to go? Is this the liberal education that we need to get us into the future?”
Well, yes it is. Such engagement is precisely one important purpose of a liberal education.
The cancellation quickly became an issue on the Yale campus. In a statement Yale President Peter Salovey said:
When I learned of this impending decision, I expressed my concern to the president of the National University of Singapore and the president of Yale-NUS. In founding and working with our Singaporean colleagues on Yale-NUS, Yale has insisted on the values of academic freedom and open inquiry, which have been central to the college and have inspired outstanding work by faculty, students, and staff: Yale-NUS has become a model of innovation in liberal arts education in Asia. Any action that might threaten these values is of serious concern, and we at Yale need to gain a better understanding of this decision.
Salovey said he had asked Pericles Lewis, Yale’s Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Strategy and the inaugural president of Yale-NUS from 2012 to 2017, to investigate. That will be of little comfort, however, to faculty and other critics because of Lewis’s questionable role in establishing the collaboration in the first place.
One of 30 students who met with the Yale-NUS president to protest the cancellation reported, “We were very clearly told that academic freedom is something that has to be managed, and framed in a way that doesn’t allow for partisanship. But at the end of the day, what is considered partisanship is in the eyes of those who have power.”
Yale has argued from the beginning that the “bedrock value” of academic freedom would not be compromised by the joint venture but rather bolstered by Yale-NUS’s presence. But Linda Lim, a Singaporean professor at the University of Michigan and a Yale graduate, told the Post, “instead of Singapore becoming more like Yale in terms of academic freedom, it looks like Yale is becoming more like Singapore.”
In 2009, the AAUP and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued a joint statement “On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses.” “Participating in the movement for international education can rest on laudable educational grounds,” the statement noted. “But those grounds will be jeopardized if hard-earned standards and protections are weakened rather than exported.” What is happening at Yale-NUS further demonstrates that the 2009 statement is more timely and important than ever.
