Many Yale-NUS faculty found it “slightly nauseating” to see Yale colleagues fly into Singapore to teach short courses without building deep ties or having any meaningful academic responsibilities, according to former Yale-NUS philosophy professor Jay Garfield. Garfield, who taught at the school from 2013 to 2016, has since returned to his previous post at Smith College.

“There was always this stream of faculty members from Yale flying in for short visits, giving a few lectures or a short course, being lauded as these deities coming from New Haven among us and then flying back out,” Garfield said. “The short courses were pretty useless and were there mostly to reinforce the idea that Yale was a truly great university, and that you should be really glad to have these soles of the feet of Yale people tread our stones.”

As of this week, a substantial majority of the Yale professors who are listed on the Yale-NUS website as visiting faculty taught in Singapore for two weeks at most. At least four Yale professors listed as visiting faculty online have not yet visited Yale-NUS, while several who remain listed have long since returned to New Haven.

Lewis, the former Yale-NUS president, said that about 20 Yale faculty have spent a semester or full academic year in Singapore, while close to 100 have taught at Yale-NUS for only a week or two. There is no graded work for these short courses, which do not count toward students’ major requirements.

And while Yale faculty interviewed said they left Yale-NUS with a positive impression, some at the University, such as emeritus law professor Peter Schuck, said they had not spent enough time in Singapore to develop connections to the institution or its community.

“I was favorably impressed by the program and faculty there, but my impression is superficial due to my limited time there, much of which was jet lag,” Schuck said.

While the two-week and week-long courses offered by Yale faculty were not offered earlier this fall, they remain of high value to the school, a Yale-NUS spokesperson said. The College is in the process of re-evaluating the course program to draw more value from the short visits, Lewis said.

But to Garfield, the short courses are emblematic of Yale’s superficial and condescending approach to partnering with Yale-NUS.

“Yale-NUS is a really good college with really good approaches to international education and interdisciplinarity, and Yale could learn a lot from that,” Garfield said. “But I don’t see Yale as an institution that’s interested in learning from Yale-NUS as much as it is interested in playing with Yale-NUS, and I think that’s sad.”

Criticism of the Yale-NUS venture extends beyond the short courses offered at the Singaporean college, though.

Computer science professor Michael Fischer said Yale is losing out in a zero-sum game — however minimal, the amount of time and effort spent by University administrators and professors in Singapore over the years would have been better spent dealing with pressing issues in New Haven, he said.

Furthermore, Fischer said he remains skeptical that the academic innovations in place in Singapore will be implemented anytime sooner in New Haven because of Yale’s ties with Yale-NUS.

Longtime Singapore resident Michael Montesano ’83, who taught at NUS between 1999 and 2008, said he was pained to see Yale’s administration behave in what he termed an ignorant and slapdash manner by agreeing to partner with NUS.

“The Singaporeans have a very studied approach to their education system, and they know what they are doing. They wanted this, they built it — more power to them,” Montesano said. “What bothered me most was that Yale had no idea what it was getting into.”