Twelve years in Singapore

Yale-NUS College

Members of the Yale-NUS College Class of 2025—the final cohort of graduates from the liberal arts col- lege—at their commence- ment on May 14. View full image

The ninth commencement ceremony at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, held on May 14, looked much like the previous eight. Regalia was worn, speeches were made, awards were presented, and many pictures were taken.

But this commencement was distinguished by the fact that it was the last one. The college, a joint venture between Yale and the National University of Singapore, officially closed in June after twelve years in existence. The closing brings Yale’s most visible foray into international education to an end.

“You will take what you have learned here and embed it into the new communities you will join and create,” President Joanne Roberts told the 247 graduates in the Class of 2025. “In this way, I know the legacy of Yale-NUS will endure. A story, a legend, written and told by each of you in your own lives.”

Yale-NUS began as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to paint the ideal undergraduate education for the twenty-first century on a blank canvas, with no strictures of existing departments, no constituencies to satisfy, no traditions and customs to uphold. It would be a chance to create a community of learning, one that fluidly crossed disciplines and fostered deep scholarship and creativity, in a way that might even inspire a rethinking of liberal arts education at home. And it would establish Yale as a beachhead in Asia for Western-style liberal arts education and further cement its stature as a university of global consequence.

Best of all, for Yale’s joint venture with the National University of Singapore (NUS), which opened in 2013 on the NUS campus, Singapore was footing the entire bill. If the tiny island nation had built itself into a massive commercial hub, facilitating trade and transactions between the East and West, there was one thing it wasn’t moving around much: ideas. Its system of education had students narrowly streamed into educational paths, with a premium on memorization—in short, one right answer to each question. 

To remain relevant—to equip itself to face the complex challenges of climate change, urbanization, public health—government and corporate leaders in Singapore decided they needed a college that pushed students to think outside the box, to appreciate and synthesize different perspectives, to widen the lens. They needed to produce the next Singaporean Steve Jobs. They needed Yale, with its experience as a research university with an embedded liberal arts college, with its marketable name, to get them there. 

It was, in short, a win-win deal. The government of Singapore would cover the cost of building the college, as well as the operating costs. Yale would make Singapore an international hub of education and innovation.

Or maybe it was a little too perfect. Yale’s partnership with an authoritarian government levying heavy restrictions on free speech and assembly was incompatible with the academic and political freedom necessary for a liberal arts education, critics maintained. If there was any reputation Yale was reinforcing, it was as “wealth-making, truth-seeking, power-wielding,” former Yale lecturer James Sleeper ’69, one of Yale-NUS’s most persistent critics, told The Politic. Because of the self-censorship practiced by academics and university administrators alike, one Singaporean critic opined, it was “just a matter of time before an issue blows up directly in Yale’s face.”

Issues did arise—most notably, the last-minute cancellation of a 2019 course, Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore. Dire predictions notwithstanding, the consensus, at least among students, faculty, and administration, is that Yale-NUS not only thrived in its 12 years of operation; it exceeded all expectations.

“Without question we were delivering on all the goals of Yale-NUS college in terms of teaching, research, and service,” says Jeannette Ickovics, the Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health, who was Yale-NUS dean of faculty from 2018 to 2021. 

It was a “community of learning,” she says, on a village-like campus with public spaces “intentionally designed to promote contact and interactions between faculty, students, and staff,” with faculty from different fields sharing space and ideas. Key to the academic experience was the Common Curriculum, a shared roster of courses in philosophy, sociology, literature, and the sciences that every Yale-NUS student took over their first two years. It was a setting that fostered creativity and engagement between faculty and students, whether in the classroom or at a dining table or on a bus trip to a remote location. Its student body, which at its peak numbered 1,000, was variously described as a “kaleidoscopic array of personalities and cultures,” and a “cohort of trailblazing pioneers from 26 countries on six continents.” 

All in all, there was a “collective effervescence” to the place, as Yale-NUS founding president and current dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis put it in the academic journal Daedalus. “People felt that they were engaged in a great endeavor.”

Then, in the summer of 2021, in a decision that stunned students, faculty, and Yale itself, NUS informed Yale of its intention to end the partnership. It would be merged with NUS’s University Scholars Program to become NUS College. Yale’s name would be removed from the institution. 

The deal that created Yale-NUS gave either party the option to end the partnership in 2025. NUS said it decided to announce its plan in 2021 so current Yale-NUS students could finish their degrees. 

Among the factors cited in the decision was the cost of operating Yale-NUS. The Singaporean government was spending twice as much per student at Yale-NUS than elsewhere at NUS. Yale-NUS was working on raising an endowment to cover more of that cost, but the $320 million it had raised was less than needed.

That generous financial aid “may trouble the median Singaporean voter,” Lewis wrote in Daedalus, considering that only 42 percent of college-age Singaporeans even qualified for admission to the six state-supported universities in 2021. 

It also might have concerned a governing party that, as Lewis put it, “has not been immune to the forces of populism and nationalism”—one, moreover, that “has showed itself to be highly sensitive to complaints about benefits reaped by foreigners, and to concerns of middle-class Singaporeans about the accessibility of higher education.”

Yale-NUS wasn’t just unpopular among parents of college-age Singaporeans. Many citizens, unsure of its purpose, regarded Yale-NUS as an “elitist, ivory tower school” that promoted a mode of education designed to dismantle and destabilize the system—even as a way for the CIA to indoctrinate students with Western ideology. 

Wee Yang Soh, a Singaporean in the inaugural class of Yale-NUS, told Inside Higher Ed of his belief that “claims of heightened student activism were exaggerated, with intense media attention fueling public ire towards the institution.” He recounted “small incidents on campus, such as disagreements over new course curricula, ma[king] national news,” he said, which “reinforced the idea that the students were political or dangerous.” 

For Linda Lim ’73MA, an emerita business professor at Michigan and a Singaporean national, the closure of Yale-NUS College is a “cautionary tale” for international higher education institutions “who think they can be a beacon of light in authoritarian countries by collaborating with autocratic governments.” The college’s chief legacy, she told Inside Higher Ed, “is the quality of the students it educated and graduated.”  

Ickovics agrees with Lim’s comments about the students, recalling a class she led on global mental health.  For the final project, students worked in small groups, some with the Singapore Health Promotion Board, developing a systematic literature review for their national guidelines on mental health. Another group worked directly with the National Gallery Singapore’s stART program (short for “strengthening through art”) creating a rigorous evaluation plan for the museum program using art to help youth explore their emotions and improve their mental health. “Dedicated, and smart, truly extraordinary,” was her description of the students.

Now, Yale-NUS exists only as a body of alumni and as a “legacy” initiative that aims to “document and celebrate the history, achievements, and day-to-day life of Yale-NUS,” as its website reads. Projects include digital archives of the college, an oral history project, a sculpture, as well as the website, which features a virtual tour of the college, a range of curated stories, and photographs documenting Yale-NUS history.

There is, in addition, a living legacy, according to Ickovics. Former faculty members have moved on to Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, and London School of Economics, she says, and “we are all carrying forward the many things we learned from being in community, the way we learned from each other and broadened the discourse in respectful ways, the way we learned the importance of a global perspective. All of us, the students, faculty, and staff, will take these experiences and continue to bring them to life.” 

Brendan Walsh, Yale’s recently appointed senior associate provost for global strategy, says that Yale-NUS did show how international education still constitutes among the most powerful tools for connecting people across divides. “Scholarly inquiry throughout the world may be at the highest level in the history of higher education,” he says. “There remains strong interest for universities to partner to solve some of the world’s most pressing and vexing problems.” 

Lewis sounds a similar refrain. “Existing international partnerships continue to thrive,” he says, “and we continue to pursue smaller-scale exchanges, dual degree programs, and international research partnerships.” 

That said, Lewis concedes that “the current environment does not seem promising for very large-scale international projects. Because of increased global tensions around trade, around intellectual collaboration, we might have to wait until another period of international relations before doing something of this type again.” 

David Post, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who served as Yale-NUS dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs, agrees. “I do expect that institutions like Yale will take some lessons from the closing of Yale-NUS by creating new partnerships, but I think they’ll be more cautious,” he says. “Maybe the halcyon days of expansionism in higher ed are gone, but new opportunities are likely to emerge, maybe in unexpected places.”