Thread by @jamuslim

Last week, @yalenus announced that it would be taking in its final class of students. The college—one of the first liberal arts schools in Asia—is set to close its doors in four years. It marks the end of a bold experiment. (1/n)

I suspect most Singaporeans would be apathetic to this development. While Yale has an easily recognizable brand name, it is, after all, an elite institution, which by definition caters to a very limited few. (2/n)

The idea of the liberal arts is also alien to most Asians. Asian universities tend to focus most on science, technology, and other professional fields that are perceived to contribute most to economic output (and yield jobs for graduates). (3/n)

The college itself has also, in the past, featured in the news for having a class on dissent (led by local playwright @alfian77 ignominiously cancelled. Incidents like this led some to believe that the uni was a hotbed for dissident, far-left thinking. (4/n)

So while some may rue the loss of a fancy cobranded school—which raises the country’s profile in seeking to be a global educational hub—I believe that the average Singaporean would not regard Yale-NUS’s closure as a big deal. Que será, será. (5/n)

I think some of the resistance to a liberal arts education as either useless or inherently left-leaning is misplaced. The liberal arts is as much an approach to scholarly enquiry—premised on a multidisciplinary framework and critical thinking—as it is a curriculum. (6/n)

Undergraduate education at the University of Chicago—one of America’s premier conservative-leaning tertiary institutions—is centered on the liberal arts (albeit with a “Great Books” emphasis). Most liberal arts colleges do not exclusively teach modernist leftist ideas. (7/n)

The liberal arts mindset has also given rise to amazing innovators. Steve Jobs, famously, had a liberal arts rather than tech background, and the beauty of Apple’s products are a function of his sense of aesthetics and style. (8/n)

I believe it is impossible to wrest such creativity from rigid, technically-oriented training. In my view, the best ideas emerge from unplanned cross-fertilization of wildly different disciplines, forged through Socratic challenge/critique, rather than forced cohabitation. (9/n)

Some will point to the formation of the interdisciplinary College of Humanities and Sciences as an upgraded replacement. A “new college” will also absorb the erstwhile University Scholars Programme (an “honors track” deal), but it’s unclear if these are the same thing. (10/n)

Anyhow, this argument—that it is possible to successfully engineer genuine interdisciplinarity—is itself premised on a top-down mindset. The liberal arts did not emerge by forced design. It evolved from Greek and Latin philosophies of dialog and debate. (11/n)

Incidentally, humanism was also pervasive in the Chinese philosophical tradition (during the Hundred Schools period), before it became excessively dominated by Confucianism. And Indian philosophy has long birthed diverse intellectual thought, through robust argumentation. (12/n)

Small liberal arts colleges (disclosure: I taught in one for a year) can be amazing crucibles for fostering a love for learning. The flat structure and small interactive classes—similar to the British tutorial system, still in practice at Oxbridge—isn’t easily replicable. (13/n)

Of course, as an educator and Singaporean, I very much wish for the new endeavor to succeed. But if I had my druthers, I would have rather seen the two institutions side-by-side. That’s how competition in ideas gets refined and enriched. (14/n)

So the bottom line is that I find the loss of Yale-NUS regrettable, not only because it represented a tiny beacon of diversity locally, but also because we now have one less avenue for informed debate (not to mention the poor students having their alma mater wiped out). (15/n)

Given my inherent interest (and the import of this for local higher ed), I will be posing a number of questions in the upcoming sitting of Parliament on the matter. Hopefully we will gain more insight on the decisionmaking process behind the closure. #makingyourvotecount (n/n)

Postscript: after submitting these questions, I had to modify the specific language of some to comply with the standing orders that PQs not pose hypotheticals. But the spirit of the questions remain unaltered.