Singapore was interested in founding a new college, along the lines of leading American liberal arts colleges, to encourage innovative and interdisciplinary learning. Yale President Richard C. Yale- NUS opened in and thrived across most dimensions: an innovative curriculum spanning Asian and Western content, a state-of-the-art campus designed as a community of learning with top students, dedicated faculty, and successful graduates.
The closure of the College was overdetermined. Primary among its many causes was the rise of nationalism and populism since As a former president and current member of the Governing Board of Yale- NUS , and as dean of Yale College, I must respect a duty of confidentiality, so I refer in this essay only to matters of public record, but I hope that my analysis of this successful if short-lived experiment will be useful to educators and administrators who attempt innovations in international education in the years to come.
The original idea for creating a liberal arts college in Singapore came in a report from an international committee advising the Singaporean government on educational policy. It proposed that Singapore, which has traditionally had a very strong but rather specialized form of higher education developed out of the British Commonwealth tradition, should introduce liberal arts education loosely based on the U.
It seems the committee originally envisioned a small, independent liberal arts college similar to Amherst, Swarthmore, or Pomona, but Yale- NUS resulted from a joint venture between two leading universities. The Singaporean Ministry of Education decided to house the College within the National University of Singapore, its flagship university.
NUS itself had evolved during the twentieth century from the merger of the Edward VII Medical School with Raffles College, the first undergraduate institution in the arts and sciences in Singapore, which had opened in with forty-three students. Some of my older colleagues in Singapore thought of Yale- NUS College as a rebirth of the intimate form of education enjoyed in the early days of NUS , which had subsequently grown to almost forty thousand students, not much smaller than the University of Michigan.
