(Source: Alcan Sng, 2021)
Dear Reader,
The Diacritic has been on hiatus since the news on Friday 27 August of the merger of Yale-NUS College and the University Scholars Program into New College. No merger is painless, and in this case this merger has meant the closure of Yale-NUS College as an institution. This merger takes place amidst a series of other mergers that impact up to half of the National University of Singapore. What is common about the nature of these mergers is that the affected parties—students, faculty, staff—were only informed after the decisions were made, and were given no say in any of the decisions affecting their lives.
A petition #NoMoreTopDown has emerged in response to these mergers. It stands against long-standing issues of unilateral managerialism that permeate higher education around the world.
The Diacritic is predominantly run by Yale-NUS students: it was founded by a group of Yale-NUS students with a vision to take on the problems they saw in academia and scholarship, and it came into fruition over meetings in student suites, dining hall conversations, and classrooms. We have since grown into a community of scholars, with an ever-growing audience base and contributors from far and wide. We ask for your help in keeping this community together—to keep Yale-NUS, the roof over our heads, the house we have grown in—together. If not for Yale-NUS, we would never have met each other, and this beautiful showcase of what undergraduates can do would never have happened.
If you have enjoyed our content, if you believe in our core mission to tackle rampant problems in academia, stand with us and the #NoMoreTopDown petition. You can help spread awareness of this issue by interacting and sharing on social media platforms.
Signed,
Ashley Chin, Editor in Chief (AY21/22)
On behalf of
The Editorial Board of The Diacritic
