When Wee Yang Soh was considering his degree options, he felt his choices were limited. The Singaporean had been offered a place to study chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS), but he was wary of accepting. 

In his experience, school had felt like he was simply being “trained” to pass exams. “I didn’t want my university education to be like that,” he said. Soh liked the idea of liberal arts education but couldn’t afford the hefty tuition fees charged by the US colleges offering those programmes. 

So when, in 2011, NUS announced it would be opening a liberal arts college – the first of its kind in Singapore – in partnership with Yale University, Soh jumped at the chance to apply. He was part of the inaugural cohort of students enrolled at the college, graduating in 2017. 

Four years later, NUS suddenly declared that it would no longer be continuing the partnership, with plans to close the college once all existing students had graduated.

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While Yale-NUS College is not the only international partnership in Singapore that has come to an abrupt halt – having helped develop Singapore University of Technology and Design’s curriculum, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shown the door in 2017 – it is among the most talked about. This unexpected announcement drew just as much attention, if not more, as the opening of the college had, with rumours swirling about the reasons for the decision. 

Today, as the college enters its final semester before shutting its doors for good, can liberal arts live on in Singapore? And are international partnerships off the table in a country increasingly embroiled in debates about national identity?��

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Singapore’s government first began discussing the prospect of a liberal arts college in 2008. Policymakers saw the establishment of one as having multiple benefits – reducing the number of local students going abroad, diversifying pathways within the country’s higher education system and contributing to Singapore’s ambition to become an international education hub.

So when Yale-NUS College opened in 2013, it seemed like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, this synergy didn’t last. 

“The context changed,” said Jason Tan, associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s National Institute of Education. “For one thing, there’s no longer any official talk about establishing Singapore as an international education hub.”

Although Singapore launched the Global Schoolhouse Project in 2002, an initiative that aimed to recruit 150,000 international students by 2015, by the mid-2010s, the numbers remained far below targets and talk of the scheme quieted as public debates around immigration heated up. 

Writing in academic journal  in 2024, Pericles Lewis, the founding president of the college, suggested that things had gone a step further: “Singapore has not been immune to the forces of populism and nationalism that have affected most parts of the world,” he wrote. 

For a college in which international students represented about 40 per cent of the student population, this was a problem. 

Throughout the college’s life, the governing party “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”, Lewis wrote. 

The institution also became central to debates about academic freedom in Singapore, with the last-minute cancellation of a course focused on protest generating backlash. To some, the college was a site of rare political activism and freedom in Singapore, which was both welcomed and feared, depending on your point of view. 

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However, Linda Lim, professor emerita at the University of Michigan, argued that the college had little impact on the state of academic freedom in Singapore more widely. 

“From the beginning it was understood and even explicitly acknowledged that Yale-NUS College would practise and experience academic freedom only within the college walls and premises,” she said. 

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“Yale may have flattered itself, or argued to mollify dubious faculty in New Haven, that Yale-NUS College would help advance academic freedom in Singapore – a naive and neo-colonialist attitude.”

Moreover, Soh believed claims of heightened student activism at the college were exaggerated, with intense media attention fuelling public ire towards the institution. 

“From the first year, the Singaporean public and the government were already pretty afraid that politically motivated actions on campus would pose a problem for Singapore,” he said. “And they kept a very close eye on the college activities to the point where it felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

At times, small incidents on campus, such as disagreements over new course curricula, made national news, he said. This “reinforced the idea that the students were political or dangerous and all of that stuff, when, really, everything that happened in college felt, at least to me, incredibly mundane and incredibly small and silly”.

NUS College, a US-style undergraduate honours college for NUS students, was established in 2022 in place of Yale-NUS College. While this new institution offers a residential experience, small class sizes and some shared curricula, it is a far cry from a traditional liberal arts college. 

Today in Singapore, “there’s more focus on interdisciplinary learning”, said Tan. “Across all of our universities, in one form or another, there’s this concern about future economic needs.

“The future problems will require all those buzzwords – critical thinkers and flexible, adaptable people and people who possess this interdisciplinary pool of knowledge and so on. 

“That trend has pretty much superseded the excitement over having a liberal arts education for our undergrads.” 

For Lim, the closure of Yale-NUS College was 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 continued, “is the quality of the students it educated and graduated”.

Soh is currently undertaking a PhD in the US and credited the college and his professors for inspiring him to do so. 

“I hope to teach in the future as a professor,” he said. “I want my students to be able to treat education as not a stepping stone to grades or to credentials, but as a way to reformulate how we think about and relate to this crazy world that we live in today.

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“I think the legacy lives on in me, but I can’t say that it lives on in Singapore or in NUS for sure. But I hope it does.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com