The Global Fight for the Humanities: Why a Liberal Arts College in Singapore Matters

Last month—in a move that shocked unsuspecting students, faculty, and alumnae—Yale-NUS College announced that the Singaporean liberal arts college founded just ten years ago had admitted its final class of first-year students, and would be absorbed in 2025 by the National University of Singapore (NUS). Almost immediately, a leading Singaporean businessman and former member of parliament crowed, “The closure of Yale-NUS is a moment worth celebrating. American liberal values are incompatible with Singapore. Big mistake to start it.”

I have a stake in this because I was Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor in the Humanities at Yale-NUS College from 2017-2020, but I think we should all care because of what this closure illustrates about the fate of higher education around the world—including the US.

Although what is happening in Singapore is a peaceful administrative act, it is hard not to see it in the context of more aggressive attacks. Beginning in 2016, President Erdoǧan (whom Trump praised) purged university leadership in Turkey. Two years ago, Viktor Orbán’s government (a favorite of FOX News’s Tucker Carlson) managed to drive Central European University out of Hungary.  Last year, (alleged) Hindu nationalists attacked students at the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Last month, the Russian government effectively ended a joint program between Bard College and St. Petersburg State University.  In the US, politicians are currently trying to prohibit the teaching of Critical Race Theory (often without knowing what that is). 

Why do authoritarians care so much about a bunch of young people reciting poetry, reading dusty philosophical tomes, and arguing over the minutiae of convoluted social theories? The “problem” is that humanities and social science teachers are doing exactly what they are supposed to: encouraging students to think. As noted critic of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) explained in a famous essay, thinking by its very nature is intrinsically socially disruptive. Consequently, those who admire the status quo, and especially those who have fantasies of returning to some mythic past, are always anti-intellectual at their core.

Significantly, this essay by Arendt on the value of thinking was the final reading assigned in Philosophy and Political Thought (PPT), a year-long multicultural course required of all first-year students at Yale-NUS.  The immensely talented and dedicated Yale-NUS faculty created a course in which first-year students read Plato’s Republic side-by-side with the Confucian Mengzi, the Bhagavad Gītā beside Aristotle’s Politics, the Buddhist dialogue Questions of King Milinda along withthe Arabic philosophical novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, Nietzsche’s modernist The Genealogy of Morals with Gandhi’s neo-traditionalist Hind Swaraj. In short, courses like PPT managed to do successfully what other multicultural survey courses—like Stanford University’s former Cultures, Ideas, and Values—failed to achieve.

While at Yale-NUS, I was honored to be able to tweak the curriculum a bit, but I was mainly happy to be part of teaching a curriculum that was (perhaps) unique in the world to some of the brightest and most engaged students I have ever had.  And, as I have argued for many years, we need multicultural humanities for our increasingly multicultural world. The Yale-NUS Common Curriculum showed that this can be done, and it can be done exceptionally well. This paradigm of multicultural education is one of many things that will be lost with the closure of the college.

“If you liked Yale-NUS and Singapore so much, why didn’t you stay?” One of my main concerns was the administration.  Liberal arts colleges, which encourage students to learn about a variety of topics outside their majors, are a distinctively American institution; most students around the world specialize in one subject from the moment they arrive at a university. Singapore had tasked the founding faculty of Yale-NUS with creating precisely this sort of institution in their own country, but Singapore is a nation that has survived and thrived by (mostly) benevolent paternalism. Consequently, some (not all!) of the local administrators had little understanding of the importance of things like faculty governance in creating and sustaining the atmosphere that makes a liberal arts college flourish. The fact that even senior members of the Yale-NUS administration were unaware that their institution was on the verge of closing is part of a pattern, not an exception.

Administrators brought in from abroad, for their part, were frequently (not always!) amateurish. The Dean of Faculty once called me into her office to respond to reports that I was discussing problems facing the College with other faculty. Dwell on this for a moment: I was asked by a dean — who is tenured at Yale — to respond to the accusation that I, a faculty member, was discussing, with other faculty members, issues facing the College. After staring at her in incredulity for a moment, I cheerfully confessed that I had been doing so, that I planned on continuing to do so, and that it was absolutely ridiculous that we were having a discussion about the appropriateness of faculty discussing issues with other faculty. In the same discussion, the Dean asked me about a Facebook post in which I quipped that combining teaching and research was like being simultaneously a plumber and a bullfighter — I left it to the reader to figure out which is like which. When I asked the Dean what was wrong with my saying this, she earnestly explained: “I don’t know, but someone complained.” The same Dean once later responded to a morale problem with an email calling on faculty to show more gratitude.

The President of Yale has stated that he was “informed” of the decision to close Yale-NUS by the President of the National University of Singapore, and that Yale “would have liked nothing better than to have continued” with their collaboration.  The Yale President also felt it necessary to add that “the College’s policy on academic freedom will remain in place through 2025.” This last comment reflects the fact that the decision of Yale to be involved in a liberal arts college in Singapore was always controversial.  Singapore is a remarkable success story, heroically breaking free from British and Japanese colonialism and forging a peaceful, multicultural, multi-party democracy with a high average standard of living in just a few decades. However, as the Yale Daily News reported, there have been accusations that academic censorship is occurring at Yale-NUS, and this raises suspicions about why the college is being closed.

Ironically, one of the thinkers featured in PPT is the Confucian philosopher Huang Zongxi (1610-1695), who argued that the state must create and defend institutions that allow intellectuals to openly criticize government policies and officials. Huang claimed that the fall of the Ming dynasty to foreign invaders was due in large part to the “eunuch-like” willingness of the educated to simply accept the status quo and unquestioningly carry out the whims of those in power. Yale-NUS seems like just the sort of critical “academy” that Huang saw as essential to the political health of a society.

In fairness, I know that some of the situations at Yale-NUS that have been a cause for concern (like the cancellation of a course on “Dialogue and Dissent”) are more complicated than they appear to outsiders. And US citizens should refrain from ethnocentric self-congratulations about our political freedoms given the recent spectacles in the US of attempts to overturn a democratic election, police violence against peaceful protestors, and ongoing efforts at voter suppression. By many standards, Singapore is a bastion of due process and respect for democracy.

In addition, students at NUS and the other excellent universities in Singapore have had and will continue to have meaningful engagements with great thinkers and texts. But I am reminded of the Monty Python sketch in which the chair of a philosophy department introduces a new colleague with the remarks: “I’ve told him he’s welcome to teach any of the great socialist thinkers, provided he makes it clear that they were WRONG.” In contrast, I was always happily amazed by what I experienced in lectures and seminar rooms at Yale-NUS: debates over Mill’s On Liberty in a nation where public protest is limited to one park; using Singaporean historical documents to illustrate how race is artificial rather than a natural kind; arguing over Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity in a state where offending the religious sensibilities of others is punishable by law; open discussions of Marx in a society that arrested and held without trial over a hundred suspected Communists in Operation Coldstore of 1963; explanations of the social construction of gender in a country where gay sex is still illegal. One of my colleagues even organized a conference that (among other things) discussed the exploitation of migrant workers in Singapore.  

It’s not just outsiders who worry about the political implications of the closure of Yale-NUS. Singaporean activist Kirsten Han said she has “… been pleasantly surprised by what has been possible and what has been done at Yale-NUS. … And their effects HAVE been felt beyond the school gates — student organising on issues like LGBT equality, sexual violence and climate change have not confined themselves to the campus, but fed into the wider civil society network and made an impact on public discourse on a national level. … The sudden announcement of the impending demise of Yale-NUS is an indication, for many of us, that this relative autonomy is coming to an end.”

If the closure of Yale-NUS as a distinct institution is not about exercising greater control over the teaching and research of the faculty, what is the reason? Part of the official NUS explanation (here and here) is that the merger “builds on the success and strong legacy of the Yale-NUS partnership, and brings together the most distinctive and successful elements of both the University Scholars Programme and Yale-NUS College. It will offer a new educational experience and deliver an outstanding interdisciplinary liberal arts education more accessibly, and at greater scale.” This is a paradigm of absolutely vacuous corporate-speak.

In a recent op-ed, the President of NUS suggested that the merger was necessary for financial reasons.  However, the fact is that, already by 2015, Yale-NUS had its own endowment comparable to that of many US liberal arts colleges. Its endowment has grown steadily since then, and is currently well over SGD 400 million (USD 300 million).  My current institution, Vassar College, has one of the largest endowments of any liberal arts college at a little over USD 1 billion—and this is after 160 years of fundraising; Yale-NUS was founded in 2011. Yale-NUS also has its own impressive physical plant, with a gorgeous campus, dining halls, library, and high-rise dormitories that most liberal arts colleges can only covet.  As for talk of achieving “greater scale,” the fact is that you cannot “scale” a liberal arts education any more than you can “scale” a string quartet. Some things only succeed when done in small groups.

Still others have suggested to me (privately) that this is simply the incoming president of NUS scuttling his predecessor’s pet project to make room for his own. Perhaps every factor I have mentioned is a partial cause. Whatever the reason for its closure, Yale-NUS will not, and should not, be remembered as a failed experiment. The nine classes of students that will have graduated from Yale-NUS received a unique and world-class liberal arts education that will prepare them for leadership positions in our complicated and rapidly changing world.  Perhaps most importantly, Yale-NUS showed that a multicultural humanities curriculum is not only possible but crucial in an era in which people of different religions, politics, and ways of life must live and work together.

Bryan W. Van Norden

Bryan W. Van Norden (@bryanvannorden) is a professor of philosophy at a liberal arts college, and the author of several books, includingTaking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. He has concealed carry licenses in both New York and Florida.