How do you create a liberal-arts curriculum for a new century, one that reflects the model’s Western antecedents while respecting the academic and philosophic heritage of its location, in Singapore?
It’s a complicated but exhilarating business, agree professors from the National University of Singapore and Yale University who have been working for nearly three years to craft a course of study for the new Yale-NUS College, which will open in fall 2013 in the Southeast Asian city-state. Rather than merely tinker around the edges, as many reform efforts do, the Yale-NUS planners have been free to take a fresh approach.
“We opened the doors to everything and then came back down to earth,” says Bryan Garsten, a professor of political science at Yale.
Like Mr. Garsten, who has worked with the Teagle Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to rethinking arts-and-science education, many of those involved in drafting the new college’s curriculum have a background in undergraduate-education reform. One was a longtime leader of the curriculum-review committee at Yale; another worked on a redesign of humanities education in a previous position at Stanford University. Still another, a Singaporean graduate of Smith College, has been involved in the start-up of two liberal-arts institutions for women in Asia.
Debates over whether Yale ought to work in Singapore, given its human-rights record, and how much say faculty ought to have in such an arrangement, have dominated the public conversation. Even so, participants call the planning process intense but largely free of contention. There has been broad agreement among the planners on the general structure of the curriculum: Unlike most Asian universities, where students are immediately tracked into specific majors, students will spend the first two years taking broad interdisciplinary courses, team-taught by professors from different disciplines. Small-group seminars and student research will be the norm from the get-go. Although students will declare early on whether they plan to study in the sciences or not, they will be asked to be omnivorous learners, tackling subjects such as quantitative reasoning, concepts of the individual and society, and great writers across different literary traditions.
After getting feedback during meetings last summer with outside academics with expertise in liberal-arts education, the drafters decided to add historical immersion and contemporary issues courses that students would take in addition to their major coursework in their final years. For example, students might take a course on a specific time period, like the French Revolution, or India in the 19th century, that would examine events through historical, scientific, and philosophical perspectives. As a model for the contemporary issues courses, planners point to a multidisciplinary course on HIV already taught by a National University of Singapore professor, George D. Bishop, who will join the Yale-NUS faculty. It examines everything from microbiology to public-policy responses to AIDS.
“We want to say that the common core isn’t just a kind of hoop to jump through to get to the major, but that the interdisciplinarity and broad immersion needs to continue,” says Pericles Lewis, a professor of English and comparative literature at Yale. Mr. Lewis, who played a central role in the planning, was recently named the new college’s first president.
Some specific planning has gone into particular majors, like environmental studies, but Charles D. Bailyn, a Yale astronomy professor who will be inaugural dean of the faculty at the new college, says that those working on the curriculum have had to be careful not to go too far in prescribing what will taught at Yale-NUS. Hammering out the details is up to those who will teach at the new institution, which will have its own faculty and governance.
“It’s very tempting to sit down and write a syllabus,” says Mr. Bailyn, who has led hiring in the sciences. “But I think of this as an iterative process. We need to understand enough about the curriculum to figure out who to hire—but it’s their curriculum to design.”
Many of the 30 initial faculty members will spend the 2012 academic year in New Haven working on that task (although some more senior hires will remain at their current institutions). In doing so, they will confront significant outstanding questions. For example, although leaders at National University of Singapore and Yale have said from the outset they want the curriculum to marry Eastern and Western academic, cultural, and philosophic traditions, it’s unclear at this point how that will actually be realized in courses: Should the curriculum be structured chronologically, with thinkers from comparable time periods taught in concert? Could they be arranged by theme, like the rise of monotheism or the development of certain technologies? Or might the organizing principle be one of encounters between East and West, such as the implications of Marco Polo’s travels to China, suggests Andrew Hui, a Princeton-educated Renaissance scholar who is one of the inaugural faculty members.
In sifting through nearly 2,500 applications, the search committees were looking for academics with a strong interest in undergraduate teaching like Mr. Hui, who has spent the last three years running Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities program. They also were seeking senior academic leaders at liberal-arts colleges and those with a strong personal or professional interest in the region. The goal, Mr. Bailyn says, wasn’t to hire experts in specific areas—indeed, the new college won’t even have academic departments—but to bring together a group of scholars who complement one another.
To do that, the search committees took a somewhat unorthodox route, inviting groups of prospective faculty to workshop sessions where they had the opportunity to present their research interests and to engage in roundtables where they brainstormed about the curriculum with potential colleagues and faculty from Yale and NUS. “You got a sense of who would be great at curricular development, who would be a powerful teacher, who was fired up,” Mr. Bailyn says.
