On August 25, 2021, Luke Davies YNUS ’23 got an email from the Yale-NUS administration. There would be a town hall the next day at 9 a.m. Classes were canceled. “Imagine they’re going to tell us the school is closing,” he joked to a friend.
That’s exactly what they did.
With over a thousand students, faculty, and staff listening, Tan Eng Chye Ph.D.’89, President of the National University of Singapore (NUS), laid out the future of Yale-NUS, the autonomous Singaporean liberal arts college jointly established by Yale and NUS in 2011. In 2025, Yale-NUS’ existence would end. Its spirit, he claimed, would be merged into NUS’ “New College,” a nebulous initiative to expand access to the liberal arts in Singapore. Yale would be involved in an “advisory” role.
“Personally,” Davies — who requested anonymity as an international in Singapore — told me, a bitter smile taking over his face, “I started laughing.”
Tanya Sharma YNUS ’23 remembers crying and sobbing. The announcement was a betrayal, a loss, and a shock. Just two weeks before, Yale-NUS faculty had released a report on updating the school’s curriculum. In recent months, students had been advocating new financial aid policies and writing relationship advice columns in the school newspaper. With the announcement, all of that washed away. Sharma told me in an interview, “It was very much the equivalent of grieving the loss of a loved one.”
The words of Tan’s announcement were conciliatory. “We are extremely proud of what Yale-NUS has achieved in the past 10 years, and this experience has contributed to a re-imagining of undergraduate education at NUS. Our strong belief in the importance of interdisciplinarity, forged through our valuable partnership, has led to the establishment of the New College.”
In an email to the Yale community, President Peter Salovey Ph.D.’86 was equally positive. “Yale takes great pride in the accomplishments of Yale-NUS College,” he wrote. He added, “We would have liked nothing better than to continue its development.”
Yale, it turned out, had played no part in the decision to close Yale-NUS. Yale’s administration had only been informed of the decision in July — at the same time as Yale-NUS’ own president, Tan Tai Yong. “You’d think the president of Yale-NUS would have some influence on Yale-NUS closing,” Davies said bitterly. “But no.” NUS had taken the decision unilaterally.
In the days after Tan’s announcement, the Yale-NUS campus was alight with activity. Students and alumni mobilized against the decision, publishing petitions and approaching parliament for answers. Theories ran rampant about why the school was really being closed. Was it because of funding problems and new educational priorities, as Tan claimed? Or were other forces — nationalism, authoritarianism, populism — at work? The students I interviewed spoke of searching for someone to blame, bouncing from Yale to Yale-NUS president Tan Tai Yong to Tan Eng Chye and the Singaporean government itself. And many simply coped with devastating, overwhelming grief.
In official statements, at least, the reasons for Yale-NUS’ closure were finances and equity. In a September 11, 2021 blog post, Tan wrote, “Since I became President in 2018, Yale-NUS’ finances have weighed heavily on my mind… Despite hard work and best attempts by all parties, Yale-NUS raised less than 80 million Singapore dollars (S$) of endowed donations, about a quarter of the over S$300 million target which is required to build an endowment of around S$1 billion. So, even with generous government seed funding and matching, the Yale-NUS endowment is much smaller than needed to sustain it.” In the initial merger announcement, NUS stressed expanded access: “Two new colleges at NUS to deliver flexible, interdisciplinary education more accessibly, and at greater scale.”
On January 4, NUS announced that the “New College” would be named NUS College. Although the new school has yet to begin operating — it’s currently accepting applications for 2022–2023 — a shiny, glossy website promises “a chance to create something remarkable” in a model that “blends the distinctive qualities” of Yale-NUS and another NUS program, the University Scholars Program. But the school, in keeping with the prevailing political winds, will be far more insular than its predecessors: 80% of slots are reserved for Singaporean students.
To many of the Yale-NUS students I spoke to, the announcement of “NUS College” was a final, brutal blow. “It’s a slap in the face,” Davies said.
When asked at a town hall how Yale-NUS students feel about the establishment of the new college, Grace Yuen YNUS ’23 remembers Tan Eng Chye saying, “You can ask any student you see about how they feel about NUS College. Ten out of ten would say they’re okay with it.” Yuen was emphatic: “That’s bullshit.”
Despite promises from NUS leadership, Yale officials, and NUS College’s nascent administration that NUS College will carry forward much of Yale-NUS’ liberal arts DNA, many of the students I heard from were skeptical. Yuen mentioned hearing from one Yale-NUS professor working on the NUS College curriculum committee that pressure was being applied to integrate science and math into every aspect of the school’s course offerings. The purpose of the new school, she said, was not to continue the liberal arts but to replace them with an interdisciplinary education, a point stressed in the NUS announcement of Yale-NUS closure. She saw “interdisciplinarity” as a sort of marketing strategy that would provide Singapore with a semblance of the liberal arts but without the accompanying dissent, freedom, or will to change.
Six months after the merger announcement, the buzz on campus has transitioned from pushback to simply preserving what is left of Yale-NUS’ culture, academics, and purpose. Interest in Yale-NUS, especially on Yale’s campus, has faded to sporadic articles about developments since the closure.
But the story of Yale-NUS, from beginning to end, is far too interesting — and far too tragic — to be neglected. Yale-NUS was, at its best, a successful attempt at the reinvention of the liberal arts, carried aloft by incredible students and a dedicated faculty. It was, at its worst, an exercise in hubris and greed doomed to failure by the weakening resolve of one parent and the growing ambition of the other. Regardless of how it’s interpreted, Yale-NUS is worth understanding. It is a microscope with which to study Yale, a lens with which to view Singapore, and a telescope with which to peer at the meaning of a liberal arts education in the 21st century.
And it began, as things often do, at Davos.
A Connecticut College in Singapore
January 2009. Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum, a gathering of the global elite. Over a cup of tea, Tan Chorh Chuan, then-president of NUS, makes an offer to Richard Levin, president of Yale University. Let’s build a liberal arts college. In Singapore. We’ll put down the money. You bring the know-how.
In 2007, Singapore’s International Academic Advisory Panel had published a report that advocated for “exploring the possibility of creating a small liberal arts college” associated with NUS. But none of the institutions NUS approached — Warwick University, the Claremont Colleges, Haverford College, and Williams College — seemed all that interested. Discussions with each school had fizzled. But Yale wanted in. By September 2010, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Yale and NUS agreeing that they would explore the idea of setting up a joint college. Seven months later, in April 2011, the exploration became definite: Yale-NUS would welcome its first class in 2013.
“Singapore came to us,” Professor Charles Bailyn ’81 stressed to me in an interview. “This was a Singaporean initiative to found a liberal arts college, and they figured they needed some other institution with a deep background in this to build it with them. It wasn’t Yale looking for a campus, it was Singapore looking for a partner.”
Bailyn remembers being called to a meeting with Levin in 2009. “‘Charles,’ [Levin] asked, ‘how would you like to reconceive the liberal arts education from the ground up with no constraints?’ And I said, ‘Well now, that sounds very interesting.’” As he said this, Bailyn broke into a boyish grin. A few months later, during a conversation with officials from NUS and the Singaporean Ministry of Education, he whispered to President Levin, “You know, if this goes forward, I’m really interested.” Forty-eight hours later, Bailyn relayed, “I’m back in his office and he says, ‘I’ve got a deal for you.’” Bailyn went on to serve as the inaugural Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS, a role in which he shaped the design, curriculum, and instruction of the college.
Levin’s pitch to Bailyn speaks to the way Yale understood the Yale-NUS venture, and to one reason why it took the Singaporean offer: It was a chance to redefine the liberal arts for the 21st century. “We were convinced that we were building something that would still be there 400 years in the future,” Bailyn told me. The spirit of scholarly rediscovery and renewal pervaded the whole of the Yale-NUS enterprise.
“Humanities are dying at so many universities across America,” Mira Seo, one of Yale-NUS’ first faculty, said at a 2012 panel. “I wanted to go somewhere they were growing. That place turned out to be Singapore.” The college, Bailyn said, was “truly 21st century but in the liberal arts tradition.” Even the new institution’s opponents understood that goal. “[It was meant] to reconceive liberal education for the world, as well as Yale,” former Yale professor James Sleeper ’69, one of Yale-NUS’ most persistent critics, told me.
That idea had a lot of appeal to a lot of people across the world. “It’s not every century that Yale starts a college,” Andrew Hui, another early faculty member at Yale-NUS, told the Yale Daily News in 2012. “For me, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something from the ground up.” “Once-in-a-lifetime” is a phrase that comes up frequently in reference to Yale-NUS. For people who approached Yale-NUS as a chance to imagine a liberal arts ideal, their lives were separated into before Yale-NUS, and after. “I noted that when I departed from Singapore I would become an old man,” Bailyn wrote in a 2017 article for The Octant, “in the sense that my most important work would be behind, not in front of me. After a year away, I still believe this is true… nothing will ever compare with what I was privileged to be a part of at Yale-NUS.”
For some of the college’s architects, the fervor inspired by Yale-NUS took on quasi-religious overtones. “Our work was the liberal arts experience made manifest,” Professor Pericles Lewis told YaleNews. “Yale-NUS will be a place of revelatory stimulation.” The fervor of Lewis’ words is a reminder of Yale’s long history as a missionary school — a strand of the school’s spirit that accompanied the focus on a liberal arts education as Yale crossed an ocean to establish Yale-NUS. Singapore may have come to Yale. But Yale, like any good missionary, saw a people in need of saving.
“Yale itself was founded by graduates of an older university — at Cambridge, in England — who intended to carry revelatory stimulation across an ocean to a strange people in a strange land. Like the Yale-NUS founders, they intended their new ‘city upon a hill’ to set an example for both their coreligionists and their oppressors back home, where their faith was beleaguered, as liberal education is in America now,” Sleeper wrote in one of dozens of essays on the establishment of Yale-NUS.
The Yale missionary inclination has crossed oceans before, most notably in the creation of the Yale-in-China Association two hundred years after Yale’s founding to proselytize both Christianity and education in China. And even as the religious aspect of Yale’s identity has faded, the urge to evangelize has been paired with other interests.
“Bringing liberal education to Singapore partook of the old Christian subthemes,” Sleeper said. “Do I think Rick Levin sat up all night thinking that way? Not at all! They grafted that mission of liberal education onto that old [religious] spirit and the commercial spirit.”
And for all the emphasis on reviving a liberal education, Yale certainly had a commercial interest in the establishment of Yale-NUS. Sleeper described the Yale tradition as “wealth-making, truth-seeking, power-wielding.”
And there was wealth to be made in Asia. Reporter Karin Fischer said in an interview with me that in ventures like Yale-NUS, “Americans were the partners with expertise. They were the partners with prestige. What the international partners often brought was desire and the need for human capital development. And money, which is not inconsequential.” At Yale-NUS, the money was definitely not inconsequential. This wasn’t just because Charles Goodyear IV ’80, Trustee of the Yale Corporation, was appointed CEO-designate of Singapore’s state-owned holding company in 2009. Nor was it just because the Singapore Ministry of Education and NUS were footing the bill for the college’s design, construction, and foundation. It’s also because Singapore may have paid well for Yale’s expertise. According to one rumor I could not definitively confirm, hundreds of millions of dollars were3donated to Yale in exchange for its participation in the project.
The deal, to Yale’s administration, must have seemed to have no drawbacks. Like an artist in the Medici court, the school would receive a patron’s generous backing to paint the future of liberal education on a blank canvas. Lewis recalled, “I just had such a fun time. It’s like you get a blank sheet of paper and [ask], ‘How do we build an excellent college?’” “Forces resisting change do not exist,” as one report rather eerily put it. Yale wouldn’t just get to buff its reputation. It would get to cement it. Yale: “a university of global consequence.”
The focus on marketing Yale as an international university with global clout was, in Sleeper’s and Fischer’s opinions, a key factor in the Yale-NUS partnership. Salovey, then provost of the university, seems to have agreed with them. He called Yale-NUS an opportunity “to influence — and be influenced by — the introduction of the liberal education in Asia… to make potential students and scholars more aware of Yale University in a part of the world that is already investing in ways to augment and improve higher education.”
In an interview, the movements of his mint-green fingernails punctuating his points, Michael Sagna YNUS ’23 seconded Salovey’s viewpoint. “[It’s] an amazing addition to the Yale brand in Southeast Asia, which is such an untapped region.” If Yale-NUS succeeded, it would show just how much influence Yale wielded — and how it was redefining education for this century.
Entangled as they were, the mingling of many motives has always made Yale-NUS’ raison d’être difficult to unpack. Was it an esoteric journey into the soul of the liberal arts? A move to establish Yale as a leader in international education? A holdover from Yale’s Puritan ancestors? “Nobody is really sure what the real motivation for creating it is, and so consequently people are free to speculate,” Marko Micic ’15 told the Yale Daily News in a 2012 article.
Perhaps that’s because Yalies often forget the unlikely couple’s other half. What in the world did NUS want so badly with a liberal arts college?
The answer to that question is inextricable from Singapore’s dreams for its future. The city-state is often described as an “entrepôt.” It’s a massive commercial hub, facilitating trade and transactions between East and West, Global North and Global South. One thing it wasn’t moving around much? Ideas. Lewis said, “Many Asian countries look at the U.S. and the dynamic economy and the dynamic culture and ask, ‘How is that related to the kind of education you have?’”
“There is always a right answer [in Singapore schools],” Yuen told me. According to Yuen, a Singaporean citizen, this is true everywhere from elementary school to the country’s most prestigious universities, including NUS. At 15, students are streamed into educational paths based on their academic strengths. Once placed in a stream, Yuen said it’s hard to escape the current. “[There’s an] unspoken rule that people who do science are more intellectually superior to the arts.” STEM students end up at well-funded national universities. Arts students may not end up at university at all.
Throughout the education system, little to no emphasis is placed on critical thinking or creativity, even at wealthier schools with more academic options. “Memorizing, memorizing, memorizing” is the basis of Singapore’s education, Davies said. “It doesn’t teach you ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you believe in,’” Angela Hoten YNUS ’23 explained. “We’re asked these really big questions at Yale-NUS. Things we’re not exposed to in Singaporean education.”
By the 2000s, leaders at the Ministry of Education and in Singapore’s corporate world had decided that needed to change. Bailyn was told in one meeting that his job was to produce “the Singaporean Steve Jobs.” Davies agreed. “They need to invite students to think outside the box if Singapore wants to evolve further.” Yale-NUS was a pragmatic way to achieve progress.
Lily Kong, President of Singapore Management University, chaired the Singaporean side of the task force that helped design Yale-NUS. She told me in an email interview that “[Yale-NUS] was an exercise in learning about other cultures and institutions, seeing things through other lenses, finding and forging common ground, and resoluteness in charting a way forward that is respectful of different perspectives… These, and other ideals associated with liberal arts education remain appealing and relevant to Singapore now as they were then.”
The problem, then and now, was that a liberal arts education doesn’t exactly seem compatible with the country also known as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” And that’s where the critics unleashed their fire.
Strange Bedfellows
Across the hundreds of pages Sleeper has written opposing Yale-NUS (over 21 articles, at last count), his argument has been consistent. “[There’s been an] all too smooth convergence of their kind of state capitalism and our kind of corporatism that does not bode well,” he told me. “Each side learned from the other in ways that are not necessarily good for the soul of liberal education.” Sleeper’s argument has a resonance that won’t be unfamiliar to a Yale student dissatisfied with the Yale administration’s latest move to treat students as customers, not students.
During the early 2010s, Sleeper was one of a group of Yale faculty that led the charge to stop Yale-NUS — or at least to show the colloquium’s displeasure with the establishment of the new institution. Faculty resistance came to a head with a 2012 vote on a resolution by Professor Seyla Benhabib Ph.D.’77, that read, in part, “[Civil liberty and political freedom] lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as of our civic sense as citizens, and they ought not to be compromised in any dealings or negotiations with the Singaporean authorities.” The resolution passed 55%-45% in a spirited debate among almost 200 Yale College faculty. Benhabib, Sleeper (who is also Benhabib’s husband), professor Victor Bers, and professor Christopher Miller, were among the many faculty who saw the establishment of Yale-NUS without their explicit consultation as an affront to the spirit of the university — and as a dangerous cooperation with an autocratic state. “A government that severely constricts human rights, civil liberties, and academic freedom” was how Benhabib described Singapore.
Even Benhabib’s opponents agree on the last point. “It’s an autocratic, one-party state,” Bailyn told me, bluntly. “It has actual laws against gay male sex.”
The nature of the Singaporean state is especially clear to the students who live in its shadow. Davies said, “Singapore has done a great job of instituting fear and suffocation… They do a really good job of hiding [the reality of Singapore].”
In Reporters Without Borders’ 2021 World Press Freedom Index, Singapore places 160th out of 180 countries. “Singapore’s political environment is overwhelmingly repressive,” begins the Human Rights Watch’s description of the country. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
For Bailyn, all this made Singapore “just the kind of place where you want to have a liberal arts college.” To opponents of Yale-NUS, it was a sign that greed and naïveté had suborned Yale’s values.
Many were especially aggrieved by the disregard the decision seemed to show for Yale’s faculty. Anders Winroth, a history professor, told the Yale Daily News in 2012 that “he thinks the dissatisfaction some faculty members have with governance and decision-making processes at Yale underlies the debate on Yale-NUS.” The new institution became a proxy for tensions at home, and for a certain indignancy. “Do we need to go to Singapore to advance interdisciplinarity and a revival of the liberal arts?” Benhabib asked. “What exactly have been the obstacles to holding it here in New Haven?”
Such was the power of these concerns that even the American Association of University Professors joined the chorus, asking for answers about freedom of expression, queer rights, and political and civil liberties. “In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer,” they wrote in an open letter. “How Yale addresses these issues has implications not only for the Yale community but also for higher education as a whole.”
Even when it was clear that Yale-NUS was fait accompli, critics like Sleeper and Benhabib continued to pursue the issue — out of principle and concern more than anything else. Sleeper especially focused on the nature of the cooperation between universities and illiberal regimes. “American universities may be legitimizing such regimes more often than liberalizing them… by mistaking the ‘international’ or ‘global’ for the liberal and universal, they have committed themselves to regimes that exploit liberal education’s fruits but crimp its ways of discovering, preserving, and disseminating knowledge.”
All of this, in Sleeper’s view, was contributing to the decline of the liberal arts and the rise of a new force: the multicultural careerist. He said, “[There is] a more colorful global managerial elite that no longer answers to any democratic or republican polity’s moral code. It answers to the imperatives of the markets.”
As schools like Yale internationalized, to paraphrase one Levin-era report, they were losing the educational elements that made them great in the first place. Sleeper said, “Yale always tried to straddle that divide between power-wielding and religious truth-seeking, prophetic dissent and imposing order and law.” In Yale-NUS, both then and today, Sleeper and his compatriots saw the crumbling of that brilliant old order. “Americans are losing their mastery of the arts and disciplines of their own domestic nation-building and democracy promotion, along with liberal education’s great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit. Yale… has lost its way.”
In their fears of loss and destabilization, Yale-NUS’ American opponents are not so different from many Singaporeans. “A lot of the older generation especially,” according to Yuen, “they do not understand what the concept of a liberal arts education is.”
There is even a sense that such an education is meant to dismantle and destabilize the system. Sagna told me that “Yale-NUS is easily the most unpopular college, we have such a bad reputation. People think we’re all radical liberals.” The reaction to its establishment was lukewarm, and the reaction to its closing, especially online, almost ecstatic. “Look at these fake white liberals, their school is falling down. Yippee!” was how Asha Arora YNUS ’23 — who requested anonymity as an international in Singapore — characterized popular feeling.
“Generally, across Singapore, there is this sentiment that Yale-NUS is this elitist, ivory tower school,” Hoten emphasized. “[There is] this idea that liberal arts education is liberalism. It’s a very strange blurring of two things that are very different.” As a result, she and other students believe that Yale-NUS has been misunderstood by most Singaporeans. Davies added that a fair portion of the public sees the university as “the CIA putting Western ideology [into Singapore] to indoctrinate the wonderful Singaporean Confucian values. [Even though] Singapore doesn’t really have any Confucian values.”
In other words, Yale-NUS was a school the people of Singapore might never have wanted. It was a school many at Yale definitely never wanted. Its motivations were obscure, its purpose unclear. And yet: It persisted. And if it worked, in any way, it was the students who made it work.
Chasing a Dream
“It was the only school I applied to for university,” Hoten told me. “I wanted a liberal arts education,” said Sagna. “It was an opportunity for me,” said Daniel Soh YNUS ’23.
Every student I spoke to about Yale-NUS waxed almost rhapsodic about the college. “It felt human in a sea of institutions that were very robotic,” said Davies. “[The] education protects us in a way that we can explore the possibility of activism,” Hoten told me. “A lot of very popping people,” Sagna said, adding, “So many cool people who have actually changed Singapore. Whereas [at Yale], it’s people who will change the U.S.”
“My whole experience at YNC has been overwhelmingly positive to the extent that I would often question it: ‘Is this too good to be true?” Sharma told me. “It’s not some kind of utopia, but [it’s] far ahead of its time.”
That journey started with the class of 2017, Yale-NUS’ first. “They took a real leap of faith,” Bailyn recalled in his interview. “They were more committed to the vision than we were” — to the extent that a rock band formed by members of the class called itself “A Community of Learning,” after one of the college’s early mission statements. It was that inaugural group that shaped Yale-NUS’ culture into one that attracted a self-selecting group of students who cared about ideas — not the usual fare of Singaporean education.
Hoten explained that, in Singapore’s depoliticized society, Yale-NUS is an aberration. “There’s this belief that students have voices.” At Yale-NUS, topics verboten at other Singapore universities are not just allowed, but openly debated. “We never felt a boundary to the kind of student life we could have,” Hoten said. Issues like sexual assault responses, mental health, and queer rights were openly advocated for, in sharp contrast to other Singaporean universities. “There was this sense that if we argue our point, we can get it.”
As Yale-NUS pushed for change in many ways, Singapore took notice. Students’ climate change activism, peer mental health counseling, and LGBTQ+ student organizations were replicated on other university campuses and across Singapore. At NUS, the approach to student life problems like sexual assault was wildly divergent. As Davies put it, “He’s got a 3.9 GPA, he’s a good boy, why you gotta blow this up so much?” was what sexual assault survivors would hear. At Yale-NUS, Sharma said, that wasn’t the case. “People would act to solve problems.”
Students also spoke of a kaleidoscopic array of personalities and cultures on the Yale-NUS campus, which was consistently around 40% international students and 60% Singaporeans. “At Yale-NUS you’re always introducing yourself as ‘Oh, I’m from this country,’” Arora said. Yuen described the environment in which she grew up in Singapore as “monolithic,” a sort of “engineered diversity.” “Yale-NUS was true diversity.” The campus culture could come as culture shock, said Yuen, but it also distinguished the college from anything else in Singapore.
Key to this culture was an academic experience oriented around the Common Curriculum, a shared roster of courses in philosophy, sociology, literature, and the sciences that every Yale-NUS student takes over their first two years. “Very, very intentionally designed… a powerful shared experience for us” was how Sharma described the program. Davies said, “We read Marx for a while… we read Foucault, which [is] ironic, [since we live in a panopticon].”
Every student I heard from described the Common Curriculum as the keystone of Yale-NUS. Soh said, “I think a lot of our difference can be attributed to how the Common Curriculum is structured — we have 10 classes where we’re just thrown into a random mix of classmates… The texts are very varied, and there has been significant thought in generating a diversified curriculum that integrates regional culture.” Hoten emphasized that the experience of examining the vast dimensions of human culture and society that begins with the Common Curriculum is a vital thread throughout the Yale-NUS education. “We’re exploring what it means to be human. That’s what made it worth saving.”
Sarah Chiang ’22 said that “A lot of the students were people who cared deeply about issues in their world.” This was especially apparent in Yale-NUS’ impact on queer life in Singapore. The college was home to Singapore’s first gay rights group, The G Spot, which has shaped the national conversation about queer rights and sparked the foundation of similar groups at other university campuses. Hoten stressed that Yale-NUS was a place for “really authentic self-expression… in terms of being able to be queer. Just straightforwardly queer.”
It was surprising to me how much of the initial vision for Yale-NUS has persisted over the years, despite well-publicized incidents around dissent and censorship in Singapore, as well as the day-to-day stresses of mental health and overwork. Yale-NUS undergraduates from India, Singapore, Britain, and Vietnam referenced the same cultural touchstones — a liberal arts tradition, an incredible sense of community, a campus that felt free from restraint even as it fought against oppression — that faculty dreamt of in 2012. Bailyn said, “It was a real shock to see the thing come to an end. Because it didn’t come to an end because it had failed… The vision survived reality, which doesn’t always happen.” There was a sense I felt, as I listened to the students talk, that they were part of a tremendous effort that had succeeded, in spite of its ephemerality, in doing something special. On this, Arora said, “Yale-NUS is the model of what a liberal arts education should look like.”
Reflecting on Yale-NUS, Davies said, “It was a way of cementing Singapore as the most forward-thinking, innovative country in Asia, one that was willing to expand into new horizons and embody a more nuanced and critical form of education. That’s good PR. That achieves Singapore’s goal of being the most advanced, the most innovative nation in Asia.”
Davies added, “I’m not sure what changed along the way.”
Failure in Success
“When it was first announced,” Sagna said, “we were all up in arms about the [closure].” Yale-NUS students and alumni mobilized to publish letters, sign petitions, and lobby the highest echelons of power for answers. “We brought some questions to parliament as well, two weeks after the announcement,” Hoten said. “That’s kind of unprecedented.”
Hoten was one of several students who helped form #NoMoreTopDown, a movement that united Yale-NUS students with other students in disbanded NUS programs seeking answers. “There were people who were very sympathetic… then the sympathy started to turn into ‘Why are you so angry?’At that point it was much harder to make a public appeal.”
In addition to longstanding hostility to Yale-NUS as a bastion of elitism, liberalism, and Westernism, both NUS and the Ministry of Education pushed a narrative that cast doubts on the enduring value of Yale-NUS as it was. Hoten said, “[There’s this] increasing insularity about Singaporean identity, and I think that has fed into how Yale-NUS has been perceived as a foreign college.” There is something to this perception. It was, after all, founded by emissaries of the Ivy League on a beautiful campus isolated from the rest of the city, almost like a colonial mission. Even if its students are very different from the architects, those nuances are often lost to the casual observer. Hoten used a bit of Singaporean slang to describe popular opinion of the college by the time the closure was announced: “there are lots of ang mos in the school.”
Ang mo, a word used to describe white people or Westerners, was pegged from the beginning to Yale-NUS’ identity — a fact the Singaporean government used to its advantage. In advertising the establishment of the “New College” and shutting down criticism, the authorities stressed a new equality in the works. “The argument was that it was to expand education,” Sagna explained. It was an argument that found justifiable currency among Singaporeans unsure of Yale-NUS’ purpose and wary of its position as a place where students could drink, think, and link.
But there has always seemed to be more to the closure than the simple bullet points of fundraising problems and equity concerns. “NUS made it clear that it was a financial decision, and that the size of our endowment was insufficient to sustain our continuous operation,” Soh told me. “I think that’s a fair point, but it raises the question of whether sufficient runway was given for us to raise the necessary funds. Our fundraising was compared to liberal arts colleges in the U.S. that have had hundreds of years to develop a sizable endowment.”
Chiang doesn’t buy the financial argument either. She said that she thought the idea for NUS College had been gestating for some time. “They felt like having Yale-NUS around would be too much.” The announcement, in Hoten’s view, was a way for NUS to define itself as a great global university — alone.
Even more than that, there were personal, political and cultural motives behind the end of Yale-NUS, all mixed with an overweening concern, from the highest levels, about what effect the liberal arts were having on Singapore.
Some of Tan Eng Chye’s recent comments, and the number of articles he’s written about interdisciplinary education, lend credence to theories that the merger was really about controlling how and what people learn. Hoten told me — in a comment that rings true — that interdisciplinary and liberal arts have started being used interchangeably in official statements. She also recalled one town hall where Tan told a questioner, “‘You are very perceptive. I don’t think this kind of American liberal arts education can exist in a Singaporean framework.’”
Tan’s prominence and power have evoked especially strong criticism from some students. “[The closure] was this power trip that one man was going on. ‘I am making this historical change because this is my dick-measuring move,’” Arora said acerbically. “Even the vice provost of NUS didn’t know this was happening.” Nor did anyone else.
At first, both Davies and Sagna remember being furious with Tan Tai Yong, the then-Yale-NUS president. But, despite criticism of his handling of the decision, they agreed he was largely not to blame. “Every semester we’d meet three times for breakfast,” Sagna said. “He completely was blindsided by this. I remember he was as shocked as I was… He didn’t know anything about it until July, or that’s what he told us, and I believe him.”
With even Tan in the dark, Yale-NUS faculty were equally clueless. Two weeks before, they had published a report incorporating student feedback on updating the Common Curriculum. The report drew on months of time and energy. They never knew.
All this, according to the students I spoke to, points to decision-makers much higher up than Tan — and possibly outranking even the Minister of Education, Chan Chun Sing, who explained the decision to close Yale-NUS in parliament and has been something of a rabble-rouser against foreign influence in Singapore.
“Chan Chun Sing is also a mouthpiece,” Hoten argued, citing his ignorance of basic facets of the Yale-NUS education during the parliamentary standoff. “An unspoken thing among Yale-NUS people, there is a sense that this decision came from the very, very top people in the [People’s Action Party],” Singapore’s autocratic, permanent ruling party. “It’s a top political move, but there’s no way to prove it.”
Davies summed up the reasons for the closure with two words. “Deviation and defiance… The powers that be were unsatisfied with the nature of YNC and what it was propagating and what it was allowing… The school was eventually going to shut down. I personally thought it was going to take 10–15 years.”
“The belief that students have voices,” in Hoten’s words, was Yale-NUS’ animating spirit. That spirit was simply incompatible with what Singapore wanted the college to be.
In the news of the closure and the resulting developments, writers like Sleeper have seen a validation of their early prophecies that a liberal arts university in bed with an authoritarian single-party state was never going to last. In a piece following the announcement, Sleeper cited “Kenneth Jeyaretnam, former secretary general of Singapore’s opposition reform party, who tells me that ‘The Singapore Government thought that it could have the trappings of a world-class liberal arts college without the freedom that goes with it, and that it could be tightly managed and spun to show the superiority of Asian values. It didn’t work out that way.’”
Sleeper advocates for renewal at home, where liberal values are already in danger, rather than expansion abroad, where it is likely to leave schools like Yale with black eyes they can ill afford. “We’ll need to renew our own civil society’s institutions, including its colleges, as ‘places of revelatory stimulation,’ where the experience of liberal education is ‘made manifest’ more vividly than it has been in most of our lifetimes,” Sleeper wrote. In other words, the same promise as Yale-NUS, but at home.
There are still innumerable ambiguities and nuances to the merger, closure, end — whatever you choose to call it — of Yale-NUS. What does seem clear, from my conversations with faculty, students, and writers around the world, is that there is no single factor here, no overwhelming cause. Politics, personal and national, created an atmosphere of hostility. Funding and equity provided a useful pretext. And the power of education — the same thing everyone comes back to, whether they’re a sixty-something Yale professor or a young woman from Western India — was the core claim all these issues revolved about. But, as Sagna reminded me, there’s likely to be something missing. “There’s no trust. If you tell me ten different reasons for something happening, most likely none of them is the real reason.”
The school was a success, but not the success Singapore wanted. It failed, but not as its critics expected. In the end, the students drove it, and the students lost the most.
And then there’s Yale.
Father and Son: The Worth of an Education
“Yale-NUS is the bastard child of a father who abandoned it and a mother who never wanted it,” Davies joked. The extent to which that is true is debatable, but it’s an emotion felt keenly around Yale-NUS’ campus. In spite of Yale’s hands-on role in Yale-NUS’ founding — most of its initial senior leadership was drawn from the Yale faculty — by the time the students I spoke to were at the college, the school had become an entity of its own. If there was a parental relationship in the near vicinity, it was between Yale-NUS and NUS itself. “We had so little contact with Yale for so long,” Davies explained. “It would have been nice to see Yale fight a little more [for us].” Parents, after all, should be there when they’re needed. Instead Yale simply seemed to fade away — or worse. A year before the announcement, Sagna wrote an article sharply dismissive of Yale’s role in Yale-NUS’ upbringing. “We must stop viewing Yale as a solution to any of our problems,” he exhorted his readers, “and start viewing it for what it really is: a self-interested institution which birthed Yale-NUS solely to extend its brand in Asia, showing up on our campus often to criticise, but rarely to help.”
Many of the students I spoke to weren’t quite as vitriolic as Sagna. But whether we’re talking about criticism or neglect, almost everyone agreed both were par for the course. For most of the past five years, Yale played little role in Yale-NUS’ quotidian existence. Sharma said, “There isn’t a very huge relationship between the two schools in your day-to-day life at Yale-NUS.”
And Yale-NUS played an equally minor role in Yalies’ routines. But the question Fischer said remained unanswered is one that still matters. There was a lot of talk about Yale sending to Yale-NUS, Arora said. But she thought the opposite might have been more appropriate: The question should have been, “What is Yale learning from Yale-NUS? What is the point of building something like this when you’re still listening to old white men? A general desire to learn and humility from Yale’s stature would have been good to see.” A liberal education, in the view of many I spoke to, is about conversations. That never seemed to take place between Yale and Yale-NUS.
She’s also realistic about what Yale-NUS means now that it’s gone. “I need a 300-year-old institution attached to my name after coming from a failed startup college.” Whatever it was, Yale-NUS still wasn’t complete. “We’re an institution with a lot of growing to do,” Davies said, his voice pained. “[Now] I have a degree from a university that doesn’t exist.”
One infinitesimal change Yale has made since the closing, though, is increasing the numbers of Yale-NUS students it takes as “exchangers.” In the spring 2022 semester there are 28 Yale-NUS students at Yale on exchange, up from around 16 in most years. For some, the experience has been striking — and frustrating.
“I think that now that I’m here I understand the similarities between our institutions,” said Sagna. “The dining hall signs — it’s the same sign. When you come here, it really reminds you of NUS [especially in] the way Yale and Yale-NUS look after their students… Now that I’m here, I’m so disappointed by what Yale hasn’t done. Not by what it has done, but what it hasn’t done. I think Yale isn’t being transparent. I think there were definitely some conversations about Yale moving to a higher level of commitment, and Yale moved away from that… Yale imported the ideas of how to run an institution to Yale-NUS.”
Chiang didn’t completely agree. “[Yale-NUS is] very distinct from Yale. It’s not a mini-Yale by any means.” But still, she felt that much of what makes Yale, Yale, appears to have manifested itself in its Singaporean offspring. “It’s more of a Yale thing than an NUS thing,” Yuen said. She described a landscape of butteries, residential colleges, and dining hall furniture purportedly imported from Yale. “Down to the hand sanitizer dispenser it’s exactly the same.”
The difference, Yale-NUS’ founders hoped, would be that Yale-NUS would do certain things better. If not the hand sanitizer, maybe the curriculum. “Initially, I think the thought was that what was developed and learned at Yale-NUS was a two-way street,” Fischer said. But from her perspective, Yale didn’t get all they hoped for either: “it’s unclear to me what it’s meant for Yale in the long term. It was not clear how any of this would be carried over and incorporated.”
Lewis, despite his pivotal role at both institutions, didn’t seem to know either. When we spoke, he talked about nearly 200 professors who had benefited from overseas postings, about the chance to try out new ideas. But what, really, had Yale learned? What did its students now know that they had not? “I put Asian books in my class that weren’t there before,” Lewis told me. Small steps. If Yale has learned anything, it might have been what Sleeper feared most: the bureaucratization of education, the sucking dry of the spirit of the university.
And yet: Despite that blurry vision and those trenchant concerns, the founders may have succeeded in their goals of renewal, revival, and restoration. Sagna certainly seemed to think so. “I’m not convinced that the education at Yale is that much better than it is at Yale-NUS.”
Fischer said that one of the things that a lot of people who believed in Yale-NUS and the universal of the liberal arts will be looking at is how much of Yale-NUS is left in the new college. “Of all this effort, all this time, all this commitment, [what’s left?]”
The next four years will begin to show the answer, as Yale decides what the end of its grand overseas adventure means for itself and NUS College is molded and formed. But I’ll attempt to offer some early prognostication. What Yale-NUS was for Singapore will not be repeated — not in NUS College, not for some time. Nor will Yale embark on such a ship easily — there will be too much skepticism, too much fear, too little courage to rethink anything here or at home. But there is a legacy that will be passed down. The conversations that were had about the purpose of education, whether they were critical or euphoric, will be part of that. And the students, more than anything else, will be the evidence of that — embodiments of the liberal arts tradition wherever they go.
Yuen remembered entering Yale-NUS as an unquestioning patriot. Now she’s less certain that Singapore is the place for her. “I do enjoy having my thoughts heard once in a while,” she told me. For Yuen, and for thousands of other students, Yale-NUS did what college is supposed to do: It changed their lives.
That is perhaps the greatest victory and the greatest tragedy of this whole saga. Even as Yale has often failed in its mission, Yale-NUS did what Yale has sought to do for the last 50 years: prove that a liberal arts education matters. And that’s what killed it.