Guest written by Daryl Yang

Yale-NUS College has not been without its critics, having attracted criticism since its inception. I was thus not surprised to read the recent Quartz article by Amy Wang on our college’s low acceptance rate and surrounding controversies around our college’s short six-year journey. In this piece, I hope to first correct the factual inaccuracies that Wang made in her article before clarifying the oft-repeated myth that the liberal arts are at odds with Singapore’s supposedly conservative political culture.

The history of Yale-NUS College

It was unfortunate that Wang misunderstood the history behind Yale-NUS College. Unlike satellite campuses such as NYU Abu Dhabi or the University of Nottingham’s branch campus in Malaysia, Yale-NUS College is not a branch campus of Yale University. Instead, the Charter of Yale-NUS College clearly states in its very first paragraph that Yale-NUS College is an autonomous college of the National University of Singapore.

This is a critical difference because Yale-NUS College is not a Yale export as Wang and like-minded critics may believe; we are our own project to engineer a new way of education to meet the demands of the new global environment. This is reflected by the time and effort invested by world-renowned academics from both Yale University, NUS and other institutions into developing our novel curriculum that brings together diverse intellectual traditions beyond the conventionally Western experience in the most prestigious universities.

Yale-NUS Professor Anju Paul described our peculiar endeavour best in a rousing speech she gave at the commencement for the Class of 2020 last year: “We are not Yale in Asia, and we are not NUS-lite. We are more than comfortable in our liberal-arts-college-in-Singapore skin. In our difference and diversity, we find freedom and richness. In our intimacy, we find the opportunity to learn from one another.”

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In light of this ongoing pedagogical project that is Yale-NUS College, it is inevitable that there will be some who find that they prefer the road more travelled. It is no secret that we have classmates who transfer to other universities for more specialised or professional degrees but context is important. The article that Wang cited reported a 3% drop-out rate, which in absolute terms, is 10 people. To conclude that the Yale-NUS curriculum is superficial and fails to deliver based on such a small sample seems extraordinarily myopic. While I agree that there is always room to improve which the college recognises and has consistently sought to do, it seems unfortunately uncritical to take such criticisms at face value.

In the first place, Yale-NUS College was never meant to be the solution and the answer; it is and will always remain an ongoing project that faculty, administration and students are constantly working together to make better. As the pioneering batch prepares to graduate at the end of this semester, I am sure that we must be doing something right as they head off to graduate school and meaningful careers ahead.

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