Making Cents of(f) Merger: A retrospective review of the motivations behind New College (Part 1 of 2)

Written by Ashley Chin and Alston Ng, edited by Danan Lee. With contributions from Ashley Tan, James Ham, and Kriti Andhare.

Cover photo by Joshua Vargas.

On the morning of August 27th, students and faculty at the University Scholars Programme (USP) and Yale-NUS College tuned in to a Zoom town hall meeting which was abruptly and unexpectedly called for by their respective college administrations. Despite the mirthful disposition of  NUS President Tan Eng Chye, the meeting was anything but cause for celebration for the unsuspecting crowd. The seemingly innocuous corporate slide deck that accompanied him was like a cypher to be decoded, with a message that spelt out the dissolution of Yale-NUS College. And with that, that townhall raised more questions than it gave answers: what exactly does ‘merger’ entail – what’s being preserved and what’s replaced? Why merger, and why now? 

As reasonable and as intuitive as the watchwords in red sound—“inclusive, accessible and affordable”, “broad-based interdisciplinary common curriculum”, “small group teaching”, etc.— they fail to explain why a merger—one option among many—is the logical next step in developing the two NUS programmes.  Between the resources and time that have been devoted to designing and iteratively modifying the curricula of each of the two programmes, the stumbles and struggles undergone to develop their individual college cultures and establish institutional identities, the cost of dismantling the two programmes seemed too steep to bear, too steep to set store by the proposition of a ‘merger’.  An “inclusive, accessible and affordable model of education” offering a “broad-based interdisciplinary” training indeed seems desirable, but up against alternatives like promoting intercollegiate collaboration or streamlining funding structures, the announcement of a merger raises more questions than answers. After all, that President Tan made it a point to foreclose the possibility of a “standalone liberal arts college” has been taken by some to suggest that the merger is less a marriage of two institutions than it is the dissolution of one.

Following the announcement, a variety of explanations was offered to rationalize and make sense of the seemingly insensible and inexplicable option of a merger: 

1. Cost and fiscal accountability: President Tan Eng Chye maintains that the decision was motivated by financial unsustainability.[mfn]The Octant – Yale-NUS College’s student newspaper – summarises President Tan Eng Chye’s tango dance about financials here: “NUS President Tan also reiterated that although financial sustainability was not the main consideration in the decision to close Yale-NUS, it was a major factor. However, during the town hall, he repeatedly responded by pointing to finances when answering parents’ questions on the actual motivations behind the closure.” Financial reasons were also cited in Tan Eng Chye’s Straits Times op-ed published 11 September 2021, titled “The new NUS: Amplifying the University Scholars Programme and Yale-NUS story“. The op-ed is also viewable on NUS news, without a paywall: https://news.nus.edu.sg/the-new-nus-to-amplify-and-not-diminish-the-university-scholars-programme-and-yale-nus-story/ [/mfn]Yeo, Ryan, and Xie Yihui. “Closure Was Accelerated While in a ‘Position of Strength’: NUS President Tan Eng Chye.” The Octant, September 18, 2021. https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/news/closure-was-accelerated-while-in-a-position-of-strength-nus-president-tan-eng-chye/.
2. Partnership of convenience: In Parliament, Minister for Education Chan Chun Sing argued that the merger was motivated by  ‘KPIs’[mfn]Regarding the use of KPIs, the response is viewable here https://youtu.be/saq4MQmaXnU?t=944 , but has not been transcribed onto the Ministry of Education website.[/mfn] and the completion of information transfer.[mfn]A transcript of Minister Chan Chun Sing’s reply, in part, is available on the Ministry of Education website: https://www.moe.gov.sg/news/parliamentary-replies/20210913-merger-of-the-yale-nus-college-and-nus-university-scholars-programme.[/mfn] 
3. Fear of student activism: On Academia.sg, Meredith Weiss suggests that the decision was a political one made by the ruling party, anxious about the potential for Yale-NUS student activism to be a genuine force in local politics.Weiss, Meredith L. “Liberal Arts, University Autonomy and Expectations of Activism: Yale–NUS in Context.” Academia.sg, September 12, 2021. https://www.academia.sg/academic-views/yale-nus-in-context/. This is corroborated by Academia.sg’s Cherian George, who suggests that Yale-NUS students “are more likely to express their political views and were better organised than their peers at other universities”The Economist. “Yale-Nus, Singapore’s First Liberal-Arts College, Closes Its Doors.” The Economist, September 4, 2021. https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/09/04/yale-nus-singapores-first-liberal-arts-college-closes-its-doors. 
4. Administrative incentives and the logic of control: NTU’s Scott Anthony suggests that rather than being a politically motivated decision, the ‘merger’ followed from a bureaucratic predilection towards “the massive expansion of centralised administrative control.”Anthony, Scott. “Administrative Empire-Building May Have Sealed Yale-Nus’ Fate.” Times Higher Education (THE), September 10, 2021. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/administrative-empire-building-may-have-sealed-yale-nus-fate.  

In the first part of a two-part series, The Diacritic will examine the explanations offered by NUS President Dr. Tan Eng Chye and Minister for Education Mr. Chan Chun Sing. Finding that these answers alone are insufficient at warranting a merger, we proceed to explore alternative hypotheses in Part 2. 

One question looms large: if indeed the explanations tabled by Dr. Tan and Mr. Chan make no sense, why offer them in the first place? What do these dismal rationalizations indicate in their very being dismal? A retrospective review of these techniques of legitimation may not forestall the closure of both programmes, but calling attention to the irrationality of governing rationalities is nonetheless crucial in the struggle for accountability, sense, and reason.

The ‘financial (un)sustainability’ argument reconstructed (or: The Unsustainability of the Fiscal Sustainability hypothesis)

As the Octant astutely observes, NUS President Tan Eng Chye seems to be of two minds about the significance of cost and fiscal sustainability in relation to Yale-NUS’ closure and the necessity of a ‘merger’: 

NUS President Tan also reiterated that although financial sustainability was not the main consideration in the decision to close Yale-NUS, it was a major factor. However, during the town hall, he repeatedly responded by pointing to finances when answering parents’ questions on the actual motivations behind the closure.Yeo, Ryan, and Xie Yihui. “Closure Was Accelerated While in a ‘Position of Strength’: NUS President Tan Eng Chye.” The Octant, September 18, 2021. https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/news/closure-was-accelerated-while-in-a-position-of-strength-nus-president-tan-eng-chye/.

From what we know, there are three sources of funding that go into the Yale-NUS College budget: government funding, endowment, and tuition fees from students.[mfn]For a more in-depth understanding of Higher Education Financing, consider “Higher Education Finance”. In obo in Education, https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/document/obo-9780199756810/obo-9780199756810-0260.xml[/mfn] 

Government funding 

• Yale-NUS College currently receives “premium funding” from the Ministry of Education. According to Mr. Chan Chun Sing, Yale-NUS College received SGD 48 million in “premium funding” in the Financial Year 2020. 
• The original agreement with the Ministry of Education was that this “premium funding” was slated to transition to “normal funding” in March 2022 (at the end of the current Academic Year 2021/22). We can assume that “normal funding” refers to the funding provided to other NUS faculties such as the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), which is half the amount of the “premium funding” given to Yale-NUS College. 
• The decrease in funding amounts to about SGD 24 million per year. 

Endowment[mfn]University ‘endowment’ refers to financial gifts and donations to the university. To stay private, some universities and colleges invest their endowments. For instance, Harvard’s endowment fund is managed in-house by Harvard Management Company.[/mfn]

• The goal: to secure SGD 300 million by 2030, which, with government matching, would amount to an endowment of SGD 1 billion 
• As of 2021, only SGD 87 million has been raised (29%) 
• Fundraising for the endowment has largely been left to Yale-NUS College. 
• Yale University has agreed that it will not raise funds for Yale-NUS College. 
• NUS has played a significant role in fundraising for Yale-NUS College, raising 72% of the abovementioned SGD 87 million.  
• While Yale University did offer to help at some point, Dr. Tan argued that Yale’s assistance is insufficient  to bridge the widening funding gap. (NUS President Tan Eng Chye in September Townhall, The Octant). 

Tuition fees

• Neither Yale-NUS President Tan Tai Yong nor NUS President Tan Eng Chye discussed the possibility of raising tuition fees to compensate for both the reduced government funding and underperforming endowment donations. We can assume there is a general reluctance by both Yale-NUS and NUS administrations to raise school fees any higher than it currently stands. 
• For a student body of approximately 1,000 students, individual school fees would need to increase by $24,000 just to cover the reduction in government funding. 
• Private universities would typically consider admitting more international students (who pay unsubsidised fees) to bring in more tuition fee revenue. However, this would go against the desires of the state, who would prefer to see their funding to the school directly benefit local students. Yale-NUS is, after all, not a private liberal arts college. 

Tightening Yale-NUS’s financial budget

• Concerned about managing costs, Yale-NUS leadership revised its need-blind policy for the AY21/22 intake, to become need-aware. 
  • “Need-blind”/ “need-aware” are terms referring to admissions practices used in the United States: to be “need-blind” means that applications are evaluated without taking into consideration whether the student requires financial aid. By contrast, to be “need-aware” means that the admissions office takes into consideration whether an applicant requires financial aid and if so, by how much. Being “need-aware” implies that the college will spend less on financial aid and accept fewer students who require financial aid, in a bid to drive down costs. 
• This transition has meant that the percentage of students on financial aid or merit scholarships has gone down from 57% for the class of 2024 (admitted AY 20/21) to 39% for the class of 2025 (admitted AY 21/22), according to Director of Admissions Jasmine Seah.Yeo, Ryan, and Xie Yihui. “Closure Was Accelerated While in a ‘Position of Strength’: NUS President Tan Eng Chye.” The Octant, September 18, 2021. https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/news/closure-was-accelerated-while-in-a-position-of-strength-nus-president-tan-eng-chye/.
  • Contrary to opinions of Yale-NUS college as an ‘elite institution’ only for the wealthy, Yale-NUS’s financial aid plays a significant role in supporting students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds afford a Yale-NUS College education. 
• From Yale-NUS President Tan Tai Yong’s correspondence with The Octant, we know other measures the Yale-NUS leadership had presented to the Yale-NUS Governing Board include:Yeo, Ryan, and Xie Yihui. “NUS President: University-Wide Restructuring to Include School of Computing; Yale Offered to Help Yale-NUS with Fundraising.” The Octant, September 30, 2021. https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/news/nus-president-university-wide-restructuring-to-include-school-of-computing-yale-offered-to-help-yale-nus-with-fundraising/.  
  • further budget cuts;
  • reducing the residential tenure for students;
    • Yale-NUS College requires that all students stay on campus for all eight semesters of their enrollment, effectively meaning that the typical student would spend all four years staying on campus. 
    • Exceptions have been made due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where local students may opt for a “residential waiver” (a reduction in residential fees) and commute to campus from their own residence due to a housing shortage. Other exceptions include international students who cannot return to Singapore due to evolving travel restrictions and students on exchange. 
    • By reducing the residential tenure (pushing kids out of the nest), the college can expand the cohort intake. 
  • Increasing Yale-NUS’ cohort size to about  500 students per annum to enjoy economies of scale. (As it stands, Yale-NUS has one of the smallest cohorts globally for a liberal arts college, and doubling the current cohort size would put Yale-NUS in the league with most other liberal arts colleges). 

Dr Tan Eng Chye contends that the gulf in endowment and the rolling back of government funding have created a fiscal existential threat for Yale-NUS College which cannot be remedied. He ruled out the possibility of reviewing and rationalising Yale-NUS’s expenditure, characterizing such compromises as “dilut[ing]”the Yale-NUS experience. But is the fiscal untenability of Yale-NUS truly unnegotiable? 

Popular sentiment isn’t buying it:

But it’s not only the numbers that do not add up. Given the Singaporean leadership’s attunement to the sacrosanct principle of fiscal prudence, it is difficult to imagine that the Yale-NUS venture would have been approved without NUS and MOE scrutinizing its costs. Idealism is a luxury we cannot afford in this land of accounting pragmatists. In any case, the very invocation of fiscal sense quickly makes a mockery of itself: the urgency of addressing fiscal unsustainability in the here and now—and to do so in as abrupt and haphazard a manner as a surprise announcement—must suggest that previous administrations had failed to exercise any measures to keep Yale-NUS fiscally sustainable. 

But the numbers do indicate the possibility of a way-out. For it is certainly not beyond the state’s means to afford continued ‘premium funding’ even as COVID-19 puts a strain on its coffers: with its sovereign wealth fund returning $18.6 billion each year, the government could easily reach the required endowment of $1 billion in one fiscal year, and more than easily negotiate a recalibrated financial plan to reach financial sustainability for Yale-NUS.Choy, Natalie. “Singapore Budget 2020: Breakdown of Revenue and Expenditure Estimates.” The Straits Times. The Straits Times, February 18, 2020. https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2020/02/singapore-budget-revenue-and-spending-breakdown-2020/index.html?shell. If Yale-NUS is indeed, as Dr. Tan claims, a “great success”Tan, Eng Chye. 2021. “The new NUS: Amplifying the University Scholars Programme and Yale-NUS story” The Straits Times. https://news.nus.edu.sg/the-new-nus-to-amplify-and-not-diminish-the-university-scholars-programme-and-yale-nus-story/, would it not stand to reason that a more intuitive and cost-effective solution to its supposed financial woes would be to address precisely those putative financial troubles, as opposed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater by scrapping and building a new college from scratch? 

Besides, going by the prevailing metrics of graduate outcomes, it is inconceivable to label the Yale-NUS program as anything but a resounding success. Presently, Yale-NUS students add to the prestigious ranks of investment bankers, consultants, software engineers, and lawyers across the world. If indeed the university is an institution that prepares individuals for productive employment, Yale-NUS’ success in this department underscores the apparent irrationality in NUS leadership’s decision to turn its back on the college, or, more precisely, on an already viable formula in its late-industrialist logic of employee-production. By almost every graduate outcome KPI, Yale-NUS has outperformed itself: [mfn]These statistics are available here: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/about/facts/, under “Alumni”.[/mfn]

• Contrary to popular notions of liberal arts students as “unemployable”, 90% of Yale-NUS students gain employment within six months of completing their exams. Further, the median salary for Yale-NUS students is S$4,038, split between an average of $5,350 for Bachelors of Science and $3,890 for Bachelors of Arts students. Yale-NUS College. “Nine in 10 Yale-NUS College Graduates Secured Employment in 2020.” Yale-NUS College website, February 20, 2021. https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/newsroom/nine-in-10-yale-nus-college-graduates-secured-employment-in-2020/.
• The remaining 10% of Yale-NUS graduates have gone on to pursue Masters and PhD programmes at top graduate schools like Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, Oxford University, The University of Cambridge. 
• Yale-NUS students have obtained prestigious scholarships like the Knight-Hennessy scholarship to Stanford, the Schwarzman Scholarship to Tsinghua, and the Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. 

‘Fiscal discipline’: Wherefore art thou? 

Until further details are furnished and the exact calculations provided,[mfn]Honestly, just come out and give us the facts and I’ll happily roll over like a doormat.[/mfn] President Tan’s invocations of fiscal discipline appear to be less a sincere motivation for the ‘merger’, than a discursive sleight-of-hand. But if reasons demonstrating fiscal unsustainability are so manifestly contestable, why then would Dr. Tan call upon the logic of ‘dollars-and-cents’ to rationalise his decision to shutter Yale-NUS? The puzzle here is not whether the true motivating rationale for Yale-NUS’ closure is any less palatable than a half-truth like ‘financial unsustainability’, but why that principle of fiscal discipline was nonetheless selected as the opening statement and primary defense in NUS’ case for ‘merger’. The Diacritic asks: Why?

The reason why the principle of fiscal discipline, of ‘having the right model’, of ‘just dollars-and-cents’ has the currency that it has, is because the logic of making cents=sense pervades the present moment like the air that we breathe. President Tan Eng Chye’s argument exemplifies the recognisable neoliberal answer to higher education in all its well-worn banalities, vapid excuses, and startling incongruities. That is, if Dr. Tan’s justification strikes one as vaguely reasonable, it is so because it coheres with the larger culture of neoliberalism that we are deeply embedded in. 

The term “neoliberalism” has come to be largely associated with deregulation, privatization, welfare cuts, and rugged individualism. In theory, it represents an ideology and roadmap for political and social action, one that organises itself around its unyielding belief in the efficiency of the free market. As Thatcher memorably puts it, under neoliberalism, “there’s no such thing as society”The Guardian. “Margaret Thatcher: A Life in Quotes.” The Guardian, April 8, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-quotes.—only individuals, families, and the market. But more than a governing paradigm for Politics (with an uppercase P), neoliberalism, as Fredric Jameson intimates in Postmodernism and the Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), is a Weltanschauung[mfn]German, “worldview”.[/mfn] that has transcended the economy. It has come to be the very language and lens through which life, community, sociality, art, values, and so on are viewed, mediated, and modulated. Or, as David Harvey argues, neoliberalism elevates “market exchange as “an ethic in itself’” and seeks to “bring all human action into the domain of the market”. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

It should come as no surprise then, that neoliberalism has had its fingers on the throat of higher education. But what does that—the neoliberalisation of the university—entail? 

• Employers displace students as the true customers of higher education.Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. “The Neo-Liberal University.” New Labour Forum, 6, Spring – Summer (2000): 73–79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40342886. Students submit themselves to disciplinary training in the hopes of being made more ‘employable’ by the university—what they learn is ultimately determined by what employers want. Employers, in turn, benefit from skilled and eager potential employees who make  good workers. 
• Strategic plans are pegged to the demands of the market. As Yasmin Ortiga illustrates in the Philippine higher education landscape, neoliberal universities are committed to maximizing their adaptability and flexibility to global labour market demands. This posture has in turn led to rapid turnovers in faculty recruitment and retrenchment, as well as thoughtless executed reallocation of resources.Ortiga, Yasmin Y. “The Flexible University: Higher Education and the Global Production of Migrant Labour .” British Journal of Sociology of Education 38: 4 (2017): 485–99. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.1113857.
• Rising precarity for academic staff as full-time faculty positions are replaced with short-term, low-cost adjunct contracts.Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. “The Neo-Liberal University.” New Labour Forum, 6, Spring – Summer (2000): 73–79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40342886. This is a problem especially pronounced in the United States and the United Kingdom. 
• The adoption of business or corporate frameworks and structures for university management. Seal, Andrew. “How the University Became Neoliberal.” Chronicles of Higher Education, June 8, 2018. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-the-university-became-neoliberal/.

In practice, according to Harvey, the doctrine of neoliberalism has only been invoked retroactively to legitimate what was “from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power” for the rich, a means “to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites”Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.. One should not expect more from a neoliberal university either. The point we aim to raise here, however, is not that the merger serves the interests of the economic elites, whoever they may be, but to highlight the simple fact that the ideological currency of neoliberalism is, and has always been, a lie from the outset. That is, financial rationale is only applied after the fact to disguise what may otherwise appear as ethically compromised, politically illegitimate, and quite possibly unconscionable.[mfn]Andrew Seal, summarising Harvey: “Neoliberalism’s only purpose, he argued, was to restore immense power to economic elites; unlike mid-century liberal capitalism, it required only compliance, not assent, and ignored questions of long-term stability. Harvey pointed at the beginning of his book to the Iraq War as an example of neoliberalism in action. The course of the war, with its brutal “shock and awe” tactics, brazen profiteering, and incompetent planning, seemed only to confirm his broader argument.”[/mfn]Seal , Andrew. “How the University Became Neoliberal.” Chronicles of Higher Education, June 8, 2018. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-the-university-became-neoliberal/. In similar fashion, appeals to corporate-management-speak and statements about financial costs are applied after the fact to conceal other motivations (that tipped the needle from tightening the budget to full-on closure) less palatable to stakeholders and the general public. 

Indeed, in his public statements since the announcement, President Tan has spoken in a McKinsey-ite register to pitch ‘merger’ as a necessarily rational course of action. “We haven’t got the right model,” he explained, conjuring terms like “financial sustainability’, “cost structures”, “strategic considerations”, and KPIs used to naturalize Yale-NUS’ demise and possibly obscure the animating impulses for ‘merger’.Yeo, Ryan, and Xie Yihui. “Closure Was Accelerated While in a ‘Position of Strength’: NUS President Tan Eng Chye.” The Octant, September 18, 2021. https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/news/closure-was-accelerated-while-in-a-position-of-strength-nus-president-tan-eng-chye/.

At the same time, this is not to say that neoliberalism is all rhetorical bluster—it’s not just a convenient excuse that managers can apologetically point to for letting you go. Neoliberalism is a disciplinary force that turns universities into business entities which gladly sacrifice their educational role at the altar of university rankings and institutional Key Performance Indexes (KPIs). The neoliberal university is an enterprise dogged by simple questions like “Will this make good money?” and, for its administrators, “Will this look good on my CV?”. Here, Scott Anthony’s bureaucratic imperialism hypothesis affords a partial explanation for the leadership’s ‘merger’-frenzy, from the formation of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences—the unholy progeny of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science—to the proposed formation of the College of Design and Engineering—a sibling to the New College, drawn from the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Design & Environment. One might perhaps notice a family resemblance between NUS’ merger-fetish[mfn]Some proposals for NUS admin: Dentristry/Medicine = College of the Complete Body (with teeth!); Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music/Centre for Language Studies = College of Sounds; Business/Law = College of Snakes.[/mfn] and the wave of corporate downsizings, mergers and acquisitions, and hostile takeovers led by Wall Street investment banks. The sinister underbelly of Wall Street’s incessant corporate restructuring and routine oscillations between Expand & Acquire and Trim & Liquidate is that it benefits, at the expense of everyone else, only the consultants.Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Perhaps the same holds true for NUS’ mergers: ‘merger’ is not about providing quality education at scale or encouraging interdisciplinary learning, but simply about going through the motions of changing something for its own sake, or of putting on a show of institutional ‘innovation’ and ‘dynamicity’. 

I will now return to our contention that President Tan’s cost-driven rationalization exemplifies the neoliberal response both at its most potent and at its most incongruous: 

• However questionable and specious its claims, President Tan’s argument capitalizes on the managerial purchase of the neoliberal logic of cost, efficiency, and market-driven productivity, on the unremarkable mundanity of its market-oriented ethic in everyday sensibilities and discourse; 
• That ‘merger’ is presented as a logical course of action, a technical outcome of simple computation and organisational mathematics (a new frontier for Dr. Tan’s mathematical expertise) underscores the neoliberal tactic of depoliticization and its marketized/monetized reductionism towards questions of ‘value’; 
• Despite its putative rationality, the exact calculations that led to the verdict of financial unsustainability are nowhere to be seen, illustrating the opacity and unaccountability of decision-making, as well as the very possibility that appeals to cost-benefit calculi are exactly neoliberal in its being a mere ad-hoc legitimation; 
• Much as neoliberalism in practice has never been about the realization of virtues like ‘efficiency’ and ‘market freedom’, the existing cost-benefit calculi that we presented above indicate the vacuity of managerial considerations like “cost structures” and “financial sustainability”, giving lie to claims of efficiency and fiscal prudence; 
• Most importantly, if it were indeed a question of cost, fiscal prudence, and long-term sustainability, it remains to be seen why establishing a new college—no doubt a herculean effort—would be more cost-effective than addressing existing pecuniary issues within Yale-NUS. In other words, even by its own lights, the logic of fiscal prudence fails. 

Yale-NUS was never fated for legacy: the ‘Information Transfer’ argument 

Minister Chan Chun Sing paints another portrait of the closure of Yale-NUS: that Yale-NUS was a project for ‘information transfer’ from Yale University to the National University of Singapore, and its closure marks the point at which NUS has acquired all the knowledge from its foreign partner. In response to Ms He Ting Ru’s question on how the closure of Yale-NUS might affect future possible educational partnerships, Mr Chan Chun Sing supplies a different portrait of the closure of Yale-NUS: 

First, we must make sure that we continue to learn from the best. … So I think we must take a very open approach to considering partnerships with others to make sure that we continue to learn from them, and to take the best aspects from these partnerships.

Now, on the other hand, as I’ve mentioned, when we go into a partnership with any foreign university, we must also bring value to other people, and we cannot just copy on the basis that they are better for us. Even if we try to learn from others, we must be prepared and be confident to chart out our way, own unique value propositions[mfn]Perhaps the ultimate evidence of the infiltration of neoliberalism into the political and ideological sphere is that our education minister – a former general and Economics graduate – invokes the business language of ‘unique value propositions’, in the context of discussing education – a social good. In true neoliberal fashion, the state is first and foremost to be an economy managed by the government for continued growth.[/mfn], and that is how we will continue to go forward.

So at this point in time, I don’t think this partnership, coming to its natural checkpoint, will have any implications for any of the other partnerships that we are in or exploring with others. And I’ve mentioned, as I’ve mentioned in my PQ reply, actually, for every partnership we have milestones to check to make sure that both parties find it mutually beneficial for both of us to continue that relationship. And at times when it comes to a natural conclusion, we must be prepared to chart our own way forward, develop our own unique value proposition so that we can even be more attractive to other partners who want to work with us and that we must continue to work together.

Minister of Education Mr. Chan Chun Sing

Mr Chan frames the closure of Yale-NUS as the natural conclusion of a mutually-beneficial venture, in which Singapore was to acquire pedagogical knowledge from Yale University. If so, the instinctive reaction as a student at any foreign-local partnership is to be anxious about sudden collapse, as soon as either partner has decided to end the venture, with little regard for its past and existing students and faculty. In the case of Yale-NUS, even if the ‘information transfer’ partnership of convenience argument stood, one cannot discount how upset the faculty and students deserve to feel, having been lured by the promise of building a community with legacy. In Today’s coverage of the statement by Yale-NUS faculty, faculty members expressed genuine feelings of betrayal by the announcement of merger: 

“We were even starting to discuss plans for the 10-year anniversary celebration, and also in the process of sending out invites to speakers and donors for an international symposium,” one member of the faculty said.

Another veteran professor said that the execution of the Yale-NUS and USP merger is worse than any corporate mergers that he has experienced or studied.

“This feeling of a breach of trust is pretty widespread among the faculty now, because people have invested a lot of time into building the college, but from what we know so far, there is no intention of keeping anything intact for the new college.”

Yale-NUS faculty to Today Ng Jun Sen. “’Breach of Trust’: Yale-NUS Faculty Members Break Silence, Slam Decision to Close College.” TODAYonline, September 22, 2021. https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/breach-trust-yale-nus-faculty-members-break-silence-slam-decision-close-college.

But even if we accept the ‘information transfer’ argument, it seems that neither NUS leadership nor the Ministry of Education actually understand the concept of ‘liberal arts education’—the very ‘information’ they were supposed to have extracted through the partnership. In brief, Liberal Arts Education is premised on the belief that

the advancement of civil society and the success of a nation required deep and personal engagement with the full range of human knowledge and experience. If specialization was desired, it should follow after a liberal arts degree.

Doing Liberal Arts Education the Global Case StudiesNishimura, Mikiko, and Toshiaki Sasao. “Foreword.” Essay. In Doing Liberal Arts Education the Global Case Studies, vii-ix. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2019.

Liberal Arts Education stands in opposition to pre-professional degrees: it actively encourages students to delay specialisation and to explore multiple disciplines. It normatively believes that the preparation of students for citizenry requires them to have a background across several disciplines, in order to acquire the necessary competencies for the contemporary world. Liberal Arts Education, however, has a particular understanding of interdisciplinarity that does not seem to be completely understood by the leadership espousing ‘interdisciplinarity’: taking classes across different subjects is multidisciplinarity; synthesising connections between subjects is interdisciplinarity. The difference can best be understood between tokenistic and meaningful invocations of different disciplines. The leadership, however, has mandated a merger and a curriculum, but left the real important labour of making  token multidisciplinarity into interdisciplinarity to the faculty, and given them an impossibly short runway to accomplish the task. 

There is little to suggest that the leadership behind the merger decision completely understand the disciplines affected by the mergers:

During the town hall’s Q&A, participants questioned whether interdisciplinary majors from Yale-NUS like Urban Studies could still be pursued in NUS. Shawn elaborated, “The NUS administrator that answered, I think he has good intentions at heart. But it felt like they didn’t spare any concern for the loss of these specific majors in YNC when they transferred us immediately, as they suggested Real Estate as an alternative to Urban Studies even though they’re very different subjects.

The Octant, “Baffled, Cheated, and Frustrated, But Trying to Hope: Yale-NUS Deferred Matriculants Share Their Perspectives on “Merger” and New College”

Real Estate is the discipline that assesses the financial value of land, with the hopes of making wealth from it. Urban Studies, on the other hand, is the interdisciplinary field that combines a variety of perspectives from geography, sociology, architecture, and more, to enquire into urbanisation, urban living, and the cultures that inhabit the urban city. The former is interested in wealth generation, the latter, is a disinterested observational social science. The very norms that underpin these disciplines are fundamentally different. 

To pun, perhaps the mistaking or substitution of social science for wealth-generating disciplines is the very neo-liberalisation of education that appropriates knowledge for profitable ends, from liberal to neo-liberal arts.[mfn]he pun comes from the title of Shawn Hoo’s piece for The Octant, “The Neoliberal Arts”, https://theoctant.org/edition/issue/allposts/opinion/the-neoliberal-arts/[/mfn]

Merger Reconsidered: Non-cents/sense

To make sense of merger is to realise that it makes no sense: it is neither a merger, nor does it make any cents.

To make sense of merger is to realise that it makes no sense: it is neither a merger (if anything, the proposed college is more akin to an acquisition), nor does it make any cents (the financial cost argument is contestable). Neoliberal logic conflicts cents for sense: it rationalises the world through dollar-and-cents. Therefore, for merger to not make any cents is for it to make nonsense even on the administration’s neoliberal terms. We have shown how the rationalisations provided by leadership—unsalvageable financial unsustainability, information-transfer partnerships—are actually irrational upon closer inspection.

If merger is illogical on neoliberal terms, why then was the language of neoliberal logic invoked in the very first place? The answer: audit culture and the turn from accountability to accountancy (or, the cult of the KPI). We have to return to the origins of the very terms that Tan Eng Chye and Chan Chun Sing throw around liberally—terms like “financial cost”, “having the right [business] model”[mfn]Tan Eng Chye’s “having the right model” is an appropriation of the concept of “business model”, one that has to be ‘right’.[/mfn] originated as a form of book-keeping in bureaucratic structures. At the turn of the 19th century, Max Weber provided the sketchings of an emerging organisation of authority that differentiated itself from traditional authority: bureaucratic authority. Bureaucracies, importantly, developed their own quantitative metrics: 

“Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated to functionaries who have specialized training and who by constant practice learn more and more. The ‘objective’ discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons.’ 

…
The second element mentioned, ‘calculable rules,’ also is of paramount importance for modern bureaucracy. The peculiarity of modern culture, and specifically of its technical and economic basis, demands this very ‘calculability’ of results. When fully developed, bureaucracy also stands … under the principle of sine ira ac studio.[mfn]Latin,“Without anger and passion”.[/mfn] Its specific nature, welcomed by capitalism, develops the more perfectly the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.” 

Weber Weber, Max. “Economy and Society.” Essay. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans-Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

The development of quantitative metrics was originally intended to eliminate arbitrary and personal decision making. And this was good: Weber argues that bureaucracies were more technically efficient than its traditional predecessors, owing to its techne.[mfn]Used in the Foucauldian sense of ‘techne’, it refers to the mastery over technological knowledge.[/mfn] The watchword is accountability, a concept seemingly ethically innocuous and value-neutral in its rationality. 

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse accountability with accountancy. According to Marilyn Strathern and Chris Shore, the conflation of accountability and accountancy is symptomatic of a larger problem of “audit culture”, where “auditing as a method of checking,” regulation, and discipline extend beyond the financial sector and invade even the most intimate and mundane spaces of everyday life.Shore, Cris. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3 (2008): 278–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499608093815. Audit changes what it touches, encouraging individuals and organizations to “measure themselves and their personal qualities against the external ‘benchmarks’, ‘performance indicators’ and ‘ratings’ used by the auditing process”. To be accountable is to be transparently and visibly productive. 

The exact balance of costs and benefits that led to Yale-NUS’ (and USP’s) closure may remain a secret, but it is telling that Minister for Education Mr. Chan Chun Sing outlined his hopes for higher education in the managerial idiom of “KPIs”. His parliamentary reply to Mr. Shawn Huang is worth quoting at length (emphasis ours): 

… I usually try to have no more than three KPIs for the organizations that I work with, but it is a serious question. What’s my […] definition of success for NUS, and what’s my definition of success for NUS students. I would say, three, for NUS, and three, for NUS students. 

First, to me, in time to come, I will consider it a success if NUS produce [sic] quality graduates that are much more global in their perspective, able to connect the east and the west, the north and the south. That these students will be able to provide unique solutions in response to challenges that Singapore faces, and if possible, to make a contribution to the rest of the world. So first is the quality of our students in being able to be an integrative force for the world.

Second, NUS will continue to be successful if NUS continue [sic] to remain humble and learn from the best in the world, while at the same time being confident to chart out its own way forward. That NUS is not just copying from the best in the world, but in the process, create [sic] something new, create [sic] something better. That in itself becomes a value [sic] partner to the rest of the world. 

Third, that NUS as a university will help to reinforce Singapore’s standing in the world because we stand for openness, integration, inclusivity, that we provide solutions in context for the world, just as we provide for ourselves.

Minister for Education Mr. Chan Chun Sing

Leaving aside the fact that these goals are not strictly speaking KPIs, Mr. Chan’s reply may be read as a euphemistic reflection of his interest in bolstering the brand-name recognition of local universities. For its students to be an “integrative force for the world” and for the university to “reinforce Singapore’s standing in the world” is to ensure the continued marketability of the university and its products. 

Audit culture is responsible for the leadership’s invocations of neoliberal logic despite violating its own logic. And this is why there is meaning in this article’s enterprise to examine the logic of the official reasons given about merger: because the decision-makers contradict themselves. The deepest contradiction is that the official statements present Yale-NUS as a project fated to collapse—whether as an unsalvageable financial model, or an ‘information transfer’ partnership that was never intended for longevity—yet, the leadership itself is so fragile that they can’t even get their stories straight. The first month after the merger announcement was a flurry of contradictions between Tan Eng Chye’s public appearances and Chan Chun Sing’s parliamentary responses: a back-and-forth between whether financial costs was the main reason for the closure.

To return to Weber, there is a distinction that needs to be understood between rationalisation, and being rational:

Furthermore, each one of these fields [economic life, technique, scientific research, military training, law, administration, etc.] may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture.

WeberWeber, Max. “Economy and Society.” Essay. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans-Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

To rationalise (in the verb form) is the act of reasoning—it is the application of a systematic or methodological approach to arrive at a conclusion. But to rationalise does not automatically mean that the conclusion one arrives at is rational (in the adjective form): “what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another”. The gravest mistake to make is to misrecognise the official statements given as rational. 

The veneer of rationality—between ‘financial unsustainability’, ‘strategic concerns’, ‘value propositions’, to make an even more ‘inclusive, accessible, affordable mode of education’—masks the fact that the leadership remains absolutely clueless about the very things affected by their decisions (mistaking Urban Studies for Real Estate, having an unrealistic expectation of a transition timeline which makes achieving their lofty goals of true and meaningful interdisciplinarity impossible—at no fault of the overworked faculty). 

To attempt to make sense of merger and to realise it makes non-sense, is to first laugh at the absurdity of it all, but then to be even angrier.

To attempt to make sense of merger and to realise it makes non-sense, is to first laugh at the absurdity of it all, but then to be even angrier. The staff, faculty, and students (past and present) have been rationalised to bear the brunt of merger—to lose everything they’ve invested their labour into all for the sake of ‘the (rationalised) greater good’—those glamorous promises typed in red of an “inclusive, accessible, affordable model of education” that New College will be. The argument that this is the only logical solution fails on its own logic.

There is a case to be made that the decision needed to be more sensitive, empathetic, and compassionate to its stakeholders. Even corporate marketing professionals believe that the merger fiasco failed to care about its stakeholders: the whole fiasco was turned into a case study by Marketing Interactive: “How the Yale-NUS merger announcement could have been better handled”.

As Benjamin Goh opines for the Octant, consultative-not top-down-leadership is urgently needed at NUS. Most recently, President Tan Eng Chye announced NUS Well-being Day on Nov 5th, cancelling classes for the day and instructing the NUS community to spend the day taking care of themselves. Rather than tackling systemic issues of burnout and overworking the community—especially by giving already-taxed faculty the additional task of curating an interdisciplinary curriculum on top of their existing teaching and research duties—Well-being Day abrogates systemic responsibility onto the individual, implying that the individual is solely responsible for their well-being (self-care!). 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CVxwFjWB0AF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/CV4ZBplIuth/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Leadership urgently needs to care about its real customers (students) and its employees. This has been a known fact since Tembusu College students had to find out about the sexual misconduct case with its own professor from news outlets at the same time as the public. This is an argument that has already been made, many times over. 

But the leadership also needs to make itself make sense from its own neoliberal logic that it invokes, if it ever wants to gain the respect and trust of those under its care. 

This is part one of The Diacritic’s reflections on the Merger(s) occurring in NUS. Part two, which speculates on the role of the state, will be published on a later date. If you would like to support us, please follow our Telegram channel, Facebook page, and Instagram page to stay connected.