The initial conversations for a new East-meets-West liberal-arts college were held, fittingly, at an annual meeting of global political and business leaders in Switzerland.
It was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in January 2009, that Richard C. Levin, president of Yale University, and Tan Chorh Chuan, president of the National University of Singapore, began discussing what has become a deep-seated collaboration between the two institutions to create the first liberal-arts college in the island nation.
But three years after that first handshake, Mr. Levin faces vocal campus resistance to the project, which is known as Yale-NUS College. In April, members of Yale’s arts-and-science faculty approved a resolution expressing concern over Singapore’s record on civil and political liberties. Administrators have maintained that faculty don’t get an up-or-down vote on the project because Yale-NUS College will neither offer Yale courses nor award a Yale degree. So the resolution served as a proxy for their displeasure.
“I don’t think the president has the authority to create something called Yale,” says Michael J. Fischer, a professor of computer science. “If there’s going to be another institution called Yale, I think we need to have a real discussion.”
The discomfort of faculty members like Mr. Fischer stems from the question: What exactly is Yale-NUS? If it’s part of Yale—a branch campus of Yale-New Haven—then shouldn’t they have a say? And if it’s not, then why does it bear Yale’s name?
No one thinks, however, that Yale and NUS will pull back from plans to create the pathbreaking liberal-arts institution. As the tempest in New Haven was making headlines half a world away in Singapore, job offers were going out to the new college’s first faculty hires; a president should be named by summer. An initial round of hopefuls, teenagers now fulfilling Singapore’s national-service requirements, have already applied to be part of the Class of 2017. And work on the college’s interdisciplinary, cross-cultural curriculum continues.
In a commentary in the Yale Daily News, the resolution’s author, Seyla Benhabib, a prominent political philosopher, acknowledged the project is a fait accompli. Still, she wrote, “even if a train has left the station, it’s important to be clear about what may go wrong with the journey—especially if one is already on the train!”
As more universities venture overseas—at last count, nearly 80 have full-fledged branch campuses, while many more have shared degree programs, offer graduate or professional training abroad, or serve as advisers to foreign institutions—Yale’s experience serves as a cautionary tale about the hurdles other colleges could encounter as they chase international ambitions.
Critics of Yale-NUS are troubled, to be sure, about the Singaporean government’s record on civil and human rights.
But the true point of contention seems not so much academic freedom as academic prerogative: Should faculty members have a say in overseas partnerships, particularly in countries with different values than their own? If scholarship and research is the foundation of institutional quality, ought professors weigh in when their reputation could be at stake? As international work comes to be regarded as a core university mission, who shapes global policy? In the end, who decides when and how and where an institution’s brand and, in Yale’s case, its name, are used abroad?
“One of the pressing questions in internationalization is, who owns the institutional brand?” says Jason E. Lane, a co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York at Albany. “What is Yale? Who gets to use the name? What does the name mean when it’s used elsewhere than New Haven?”
Charting a Global Path
Mr. Levin, who earned his doctorate at Yale and taught economics there, assumed the university’s presidency nearly 20 years ago with a solidly domestic agenda. His early years on the job were focused, quite literally, on getting Yale’s house in order, overseeing a $3-billion-dollar campaign to renovate its deteriorating campus and build new facilities. Under his watch, the university, which had been in the red, regained its financial footing, and he worked to repair its relationship with the city of New Haven.
In recent years, however, Mr. Levin has been seeking a more global legacy. He has strengthened Yale’s longstanding presence in China and, in 2008, committed to spending $30-million in endowment money to build course offerings, programs, and faculty expertise in India. Every Yale undergraduate is now guaranteed an opportunity to study, work, or intern abroad.
Still, unlike some of his contemporaries, such as New York University’s John E. Sexton, Mr. Levin had resisted expanding Yale’s footprint overseas, spurning an offer to open an arts institute in Abu Dhabi only a year before talks with Singapore began.
Singaporeans, meanwhile, were coming to terms with the need to transition to a fully knowledge-based economy. In the last decade and a half, the island state has started two universities of its own, Singapore Management University and the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and lured powerhouse institutions from around the globe to offer specialized degrees and programs, among them Cornell University’s hospitality program and Insead, one of the world’s top business schools. “A truly good liberal-arts college was next on the list,” says Janice Bellace, a Wharton professor and the former founding president of Singapore Management University.
In pursuit of that goal, Yale was not the only institution Singapore courted. For one, it held “pretty serious discussions” with the Claremont Colleges, a California consortium of five liberal-arts colleges and two graduate institutions. But negotiations fell apart, according to David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, over issues of control. Rather than a “subsidiary” of the National University of Singapore, Claremont leaders believed the new college should be “truly independent, with its own pathway to autonomy,” Mr. Oxtoby says. “We wanted to create a new member of the Claremont Colleges.”
Several months after his initial meeting with Mr. Tan in Switzerland, Mr. Levin, along with Peter Salovey, Yale’s provost, and three faculty members, traveled to Singapore for exploratory conversations about working with NUS to design a new college. They liked what they heard. In the fall of 2009, three committees, of about 20 Yale faculty members, began planning in earnest, sketching out potential approaches to curriculum, residential life, and faculty development. Companion committees began work at NUS.
Haun Saussy, a scholar of comparative and Chinese literature, was a leader of the curriculum committee. He still thrills when talking about the process. “We really got to think about liberal education, and what it means, in a new context,” says Mr. Saussy, who now teaches at the University of Chicago. “It wasn’t simply, ‘How can we transport New England liberal arts to Singapore?’”
The following spring, the planners reached out to a larger group of about 50 Yale colleagues, soliciting feedback. And on September 10, 2010, during a visit to New Haven by Singapore’s minister of education, Mr. Levin signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding. In it, Yale agreed to be a full partner, not mere adviser, in the new college.
Two days later, Mr. Levin and Mr. Salovey sent a “prospectus” to all Yale faculty members, outlining plans to jointly create a new liberal-arts college with the National University of Singapore. In describing the partnership, they harkened back to Yale’s early history, noting that Yale scholars and graduates were the founders or first presidents of more than 30 American liberal-arts colleges, including Dartmouth, Middlebury, and Swarthmore Colleges.
“By collaborating in the development of an entirely new liberal-arts curriculum for an emergent Asia,” they wrote, “Yale could influence the course of the 21st century as profoundly as it influenced education in the 19th century.”
The fledgling institution would have its own faculty and curriculum (although Yale professors could hold visiting appointments), the two men said. Each founding university would name members to a governing board. NUS and the government of Singapore would pay all costs, and for Yale, which is being reimbursed for its time and expenses, the project would be “revenue-neutral.” And while the word “Yale” would appear in the institution’s name, the National University of Singapore would award the degrees.
Levels of Engagement
At the end of their written pitch, Yale’s administrators invited faculty members to one of two town-hall meetings to discuss the Singapore plan. Everyone acknowledges that those were poorly attended.
The planners went back to work, framing a curriculum that melds Eastern and Western academic traditions and blurs disciplinary boundaries. Negotiations with Singapore continued. Six months later, in March 2011, the new college was approved by the Singaporean government and the Yale Corporation, Yale’s board of trustees. (The trustees’ support has been questioned after it came to light that several members of the Corporation board have business ties to Singapore; Mr. Levin has said there were no improprieties.)
Could proponents have done more to make the case for the partnership? Some observers think so. “There are levels of involvement: There’s consultation, there’s participation, there’s engagement,” says Alan Ruby, a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in international education. “What would it have cost the administration to truly engage the faculty? Nothing.”
Christopher L. Miller, a professor of African-American studies and French, was one of the few early, outspoken campus critics. He believes Yale should work overseas, he says, but as a gay man, he questions the university’s involvement in a place where homosexuality is illegal and other civil liberties are circumscribed. “The Yale-NUS venture raises troubling questions about the translation of academic values and freedoms into a repressive environment,” he wrote in an essay in The Chronicle.
Despite his very public misgivings, Mr. Miller says no one at Yale has ever reached out to him to talk to him about the plan. “I’ll never again trust the word ‘consultation,’” he says. “The administration dealt with this like the rollout of a product.”
Other faculty members had a different experience. Stephen L. Darwall, a professor of philosophy, says he was skeptical about the proposed partnership when he attended an information session. Starting a campus abroad, he worried, could distract Yale’s leaders from their work in New Haven. But he found himself persuaded by the possibilities. “I came to feel that the opportunity to help create an excellent liberal-arts college in Asia was too good to pass up,” he says. “It seemed to me there were all the right motives.”
Mr. Darwall agreed to serve on one of three search committees for Yale-NUS faculty, in the humanities. In all, about 75 faculty members have been actively involved in planning for the new college, and, in an e-mail to the Chronicle, Yale administrators detailed meetings with groups of specific faculty, including one with senior professors and another with faculty members concerned about gay rights.
Some professors who have been deeply committed to the project, spending months drafting curricula and vetting job candidates, clearly feel blindsided by the opposition. There was no real outcry when the partnership was first announced, nor when the deal was inked, they note. “This work has been going on for a long time. It’s hardly been under a bushel,” says Deborah S. Davis, a sociology professor and China scholar who led hiring in the social sciences.
Adds Ms. Davis, one of the faculty members who took the initial trip to Singapore with Mr. Levin: “Why doesn’t the excitement transfer? What is it that gets in the way?”
Indeed, it is difficult to assess the breadth of the current dissent. Just 170 of the roughly 900 arts and sciences faculty members voted on last month’s resolution, raising questions about the rest: Are they supportive, opposed, or indifferent?
What’s more, the skirmish over Singapore comes amid wider-ranging disputes over governance at the university, including faculty frustration over recent decisions on the budget, the graduate school, and shared services, such as computing. It can be difficult at times to tell how much of the uproar is specific to Yale-NUS and how much is reflective of a broader sense of disempowerment felt by some Yale faculty members.
Mr. Fischer, the computer-science professor, has saved old e-mail messages about the partnership, minutes from faculty meetings where Mr. Levin gave updates on the new college’s progress. He had misgivings all along, he says, but he didn’t feel the need at the time to speak out because he assumed the project would come before Yale faculty for a vote.
As for administrators’ contention that no vote is needed because Yale degrees won’t be awarded, he points out that faculty members have had a say in other nonacademic matters, such as the decision to reinstate ROTC on campus.
Mr. Fischer worries, he says, about the “Yale name being dragged into something we don’t understand.”
The Power of a Name
Jason Lane, the Albany professor (and a Chronicle blogger), agrees. “The use of the Yale imprimatur muddies the water—a lot,” he says. Yale-NUS gets lumped in with branch campuses, like NYU’s outposts in Abu Dhabi and (soon) Shanghai, but that’s a mistake, as the liberal-arts college will have a separate curriculum, faculty, and diploma.
Other universities that have put their names on overseas programs have done so because they are awarding academic credit and granting degrees, either on their own or jointly with a foreign institution, says Gabriel Hawawini, a former dean of Insead who has written extensively about international partnerships. The reason Yale balked at working in Abu Dhabi, in fact, is because Mr. Levin did not want to offer Yale degree programs there, Mr. Hawawini notes.
Mr. Hawawini calls the Yale-NUS model “an elegant approach,” but it leaves others scratching their heads. “Why is it called that? What are they trying to say with the name?” asks Penn’s Mr. Ruby, no fewer than a dozen times in a brief conversation.
Other universities, including Mr. Ruby’s own, work as consultants to start-up institutions overseas, helping set majors and courses, hiring faculty, and occasionally even populating the initial governing board. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, has played a role in establishing universities around the world, including Singapore’s newest. But that institution will be called the Singapore University of Technology and Design—not MIT-Singapore.
Mr. Levin says Yale’s name on the institution “reflects our strong involvement in its design and ongoing governance.
“Yale has never awarded degrees that are not earned in New Haven.”
Shaun Zhi Ming Tan, who is studying for a master’s degree in international relations at Yale, also thinks he has an answer. Mr. Tan is from neighboring Malaysia, and his undergraduate degree, like that of many of his contemporaries, is a professional one, in law. Students and parents in Southeast Asia, he says, don’t get the value of a liberal-arts degree, but they do understand the worth of an Ivy League education. “They flock to a prestigious brand,” he says. “In Yale-NUS, those four letters—Y,A,L,E—make all the difference.”
The View From Singapore
If the liberal arts are underappreciated abroad, they are, as Mr. Levin and Mr. Salovey noted in their prospectus, at the heart of what Yale does.
It’s probably no accident that the vast majority of overseas branch campuses and joint ventures are professional or graduate programs, from a branch of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar to a planned medical school affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University in Malaysia, says Richard J. Edelstein, a research associate at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. “Institutional culture may be more open” to technically oriented partnerships, he says. “Engineering doesn’t raise the same political questions, the same values questions” as political science. In fact, Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies approved a joint program earlier this year that will allow Yale-NUS students to earn a master’s degree in environmental management or science from the forestry program. The vote was unanimous, says David K. Skelly, the school’s associate dean for research.
Faculty critics such as Mr. Miller worry whether liberal-arts values can be safeguarded in Singapore. He points to comments made by Kay Kuok, a Singaporean businesswoman and chair of the Yale-NUS College governing board. Students and faculty members at the new college, Ms. Kuok said, will have “freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.”
“Everyone has a right to express himself,” she said, by way of explanation. “It’s a question of expression in the right way, within certain norms in society.”
That’s antithetical to the very idea of the liberal arts, says James Sleeper, a lecturer in political science. “The world is not flat. It has abysses,” he says. “Liberal education is what plumbs the abyss.”
Yale leaders say that provisions ensuring academic freedom and nondiscrimination at Yale-NUS were written, at their insistence, into the agreement with NUS and the Singapore Ministry of Education. But official Singapore has a relativist notion of academic freedom, says Michael Montesano, a Yale alumnus who used to teach at the National University of Singapore. “Academic freedom is conceived of as what allows people to pursue their profession,” he says. “Academics in Singapore have to stay in their lanes.”
Other Singaporean professors, however, say Yale critics have a dated idea of the academic and political climate in the city-state. George D. Bishop is an American-born, Yale-educated professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore. He’s also a gay man who lives openly with his partner, and his academic expertise lies in potentially sensitive areas like the cross-cultural differences in the understanding of illness.
Mr. Bishop says much has changed since he came to NUS two decades ago. Last year he began teaching a multidisciplinary course on HIV, covering topics from microbiology to epidemiology, governmental responses to AIDS to the portrayal of the disease in the arts. One of his guest speakers, a lawyer critical of Singaporean policy, warned him, “I’m going to bitch about the government.” Mr. Bishop’s reply: “Bitch away.” There were no repercussions, he says.
“There’s a part of me that’s pleased the Yale faculty is concerned about the Singaporean gay community,” says Mr. Bishop, who has taken an active role in Yale-NUS planning. “But it seems to me that much of it is overblown.”
The debate on the Yale campus has received close coverage in the Singaporean press. Koh Choon Hwee has written columns about Yale-NUS in The Kent Ridge Common, an independent student newspaper at the National University of Singapore. “I’m always open to insightful critique about how Singapore works,” Ms. Koh wrote in an e-mail message, “but so far most of what I’ve read on this [Yale-NUS] debate are just ill-informed, keyword-trigger-happy criticisms underpinned by a superiority complex of some sort.”
“In theory I think a liberal-arts education is a great thing,” she added, “but did we really need to spend all that money to get Yale in here to Singapore?”
Built for International?
In their letter to Yale faculty, Mr. Levin and Mr. Salovey wrote, “We do believe it is inevitable that the world’s leading universities by the middle of this century will have international campuses.”
If that’s the case, are universities ready?
Certainly, much of the debate over Yale-NUS is specific to Yale’s academic culture and Singapore’s political climate, as well as to the is-it, isn’t-it structure of the new institution. Because leadership from the top drives overseas deals, a president’s personality and management style will always shape the discussion.
It may give Mr. Levin cold comfort, but he is not alone among university presidents getting pushback for their global ambitions. Mr. Sexton at NYU and Richard H. Brodhead at Duke University have also been challenged on their campuses in the Persian Gulf and China, respectively.
As universities move from being domestic institutions to transnational ones, they face fundamental tensions. Not only will they have to balance differing local values and cultural norms, but if their leaders seek to make international endeavors core to their mission, they will have to engage faculty, who may not see the value in—or could be outright hostile to—such a vision. As of yet, the mechanisms for doing so are imperfect, as the Yale experience shows.
Universities “aren’t necessarily built for it,” says Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. “In a way, it’s a positive thing that these brouhahas come up, if, in the longer run, international decisions will be on firmer ground.”
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