Singapore, a wealthy, mostly English-speaking, former British colony, has developed in the half century since its independence an excellent educational system, including some of the best secondary schools in the world and several excellent universities. NUS, the result of a variety of mergers of earlier educational institutions, including the King Edward VII Medical College (founded 1905) and Raffles College (founded 1928), has come to be regarded as one of the best in Asia on many measures. Although it always had some distinction in the arts and sciences generally, it was mainly known in the late twentieth century for teaching engineering, medicine, and law. These professions were the main areas in which the founders of the nation wanted to invest, and the number of places at the University in various subjects is, even today, subject to central planning by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Early in the twenty-first century, NUS determined to start a program in the liberal arts.

By the late twentieth century, NUS began to rise in the rankings of research universities, around the same time that it adopted American-style tenure and academic titles (replacing the old British titles). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Singaporean government decided to grant its universities autonomy. In practice, the Ministry still exercises considerable control since (as in many Commonwealth countries) a large majority of the universities’ budget comes from the government. But the universities have independent governing boards and can develop their own priorities, and they can raise private funds to support those priorities. In fact, the government provides generous matching funds and tax advantages to encourage private philanthropy. At the graduate and executive education level, Singaporean universities can also attract foreign students, but at the undergraduate level, the number of foreign students is capped at between 10% and 15%. This makes more places available for Singaporeans but limits the ability of the universities to become international leaders in undergraduate education. Bringing in international students diversifies the learning experience and helps build a community through conversations, fostering skill at cross-cultural communication.

Over the decade-plus since the universities were granted autonomy, NUS has been notable for its entrepreneurial attitude, forming the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in partnership with the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins, the Duke-NUS Medical School in partnership with Duke, the University Town residential campus, and many other impressive programs. The past President of NUS, Tan Chorh Chuan, one of the most impressive academic leaders of our time, fostered this entrepreneurial spirit. His great personal modesty did not disguise the high ambitions he held for his university. Under his leadership NUS set on a course to broaden the learning in higher education beyond information transfer. For example, the career office became the Centre for Future Ready Graduates, and the Institute for Application of Learning Science and Educational Technology was established to offer a course for all students on “learning to learn.”

The founding of Yale-NUS College resulted from what seems to be a typically Singaporean investment of energy and funds in a bright idea proposed by an international panel of advisors to the government. The International Academic Advisory Panel of the Ministry of Education, chaired by future Singapore President (and former NUS Vice-Chancellor) Tony Tan, recommended in January 2007 that Singapore consider founding a small private liberal arts college. In October 2007, a delegation, headed by Minister of State for Education Rear Admiral Lui Tuck Yew, visited nine small colleges in the United States, plus Northeastern University and Yale University. During the course of discussion, it was decided that rather than an independent college, the liberal arts college should form part of one of the existing universities. The then NUS Provost (now NUS President), Tan Eng Chye, presented a proposal for a liberal arts college within NUS to an MOE working group in March 2008. The university felt that such a college would have greater opportunity for success within a strong existing institution. Later that year, the proposal received approval in principle.

The proposal for a collaboration between Yale and the NUS first arose in a conversation between Tan Chorh Chuan, then President of NUS, and Rick Levin, then President of Yale, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2009. President Tan was looking for a US partner with expertise in undergraduate education. A year later, as chair of the humanities committee for the new college, I learned that many Asian universities had begun investing in a more integrative type of education, using small classes and active learning, modeled on American liberal arts education. In November of 2017, the launch conference of the Association of Asian Liberal Arts Universities, at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, demonstrated this in full force, as dozens of institutions were represented, and 14 joined the association. Presidents Tan and Levin planned Yale-NUS College to be a pioneer of this type of education, and one of its central goals was to “foster the habits of mind and character needed for leadership in all sectors of society. In this way, Singapore’s MOE, and NUS, demonstrated a clear commitment to fostering habits of life-long learning in undergraduate education.

The idea of a liberal education emerges from ancient times, when it described the kind of education appropriate for a free citizen, which is to say that it excluded slaves, foreigners, women, and in fact anyone who had to work for a living. We continue to work on the access to such an education today, but the liberal arts are closely aligned with freedom—the autonomy to pursue intellectual questions, the freedom to debate issues of common concern, freedoms that prepare a young person for full citizenship—even though the boundaries of that freedom have long been contested. The ancient world contrasted the liberal arts with the servile arts, that is, what we would call today vocational education. In Latin, the word “arts” refers to both the arts and sciences, and the middle ages recognized seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Today a liberal arts education spans the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. When people talk about a liberal arts education, they are generally referring to undergraduate education that stresses broad study of the arts and sciences rather than pre-professional training in such subjects as business, law, medicine, or engineering. They also emphasize a collegiate form of education, in which students and faculty pursue many disciplines together in the context of a shared community, a theme addressed in the next section.

Citizenship is the most commonly cited reason to pursue a liberal education, and it is a very important one. By developing their critical reasoning skills, and by practicing the arts of discussion, collaboration, and compromise both inside and outside the classroom, students should become better able to debate matters of public importance and to arrive at a reasoned agreement, or reasoned disagreement, with their peers in the political or civic sphere. There are at least four other good reasons to pursue a liberal education and to provide one for our young people. A second reason, also valid and perhaps more significant to some parents and governments, is to shape more innovative contributors to the economy and society. This is an issue particularly important to Singapore’s economic and social development. Technical education is extremely important for the development of industrial society, but in the post-industrial world, employers value softer skills such as creativity, the ability to think outside the box, and openness to multiple perspectives. Liberal education fosters these traits, and this is why liberally educated students have opportunities to join the ranks of the global elite. These skills will arguably become all the more important as artificial intelligence replaces human workers in many technical fields.

Third, certain forms of liberal education also prepare students well for life in a multicultural or cosmopolitan society by making them aware of a variety of cultures and the need to communicate effectively across cultural differences. This is done through a living and learning environment in which students must learn to engage respectfully with ideas that make them uncomfortable or with which they are unfamiliar. They learn to evaluate new ideas with evidence, and formulate opinions, not make assumptions. Fourth, and more fundamental than any of these, perhaps, is the ethical case for liberal education, the case for character. Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living….” Liberal education makes us aware of the importance of examining our own prejudices and assumptions by fostering habits of self-awareness and self-criticism. Finally, and most intangibly, liberal education allows the individual a greater enjoyment of life, whether it is in appreciating a work of art, understanding an argument in philosophy or an equation in mathematics, or exploring the diversity of the natural world.

The second President of the United States, John Adams, was perhaps not the most democratic of the founding fathers, and his reputation is tainted by his enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Nonetheless, his opposition to slavery, his dedication to a republican form of government—a “government of laws, and not of men”—and his relationship with his remarkable wife Abigail Adams are among the reasons for his enduring appeal, which has only increased in recent decades. A Harvard graduate from a modest background, Adams had a particular view of the role of liberal arts education in developing citizens for the new republic. 

In other words, Adams thought that there were certain virtues associated with being a gentleman regardless of a person’s background, and that an education in the liberal arts and sciences was the prerequisite for being a gentleman in this sense. At least since the time of John Adams, one of the goals of liberal education has been cultivating character and citizenship. In Adams’ time, those who received a liberal education were by definition part of a small elite, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries access to undergraduate education expanded rapidly. For example, Mount Holyoke was established as a liberal arts college for women in 1837, followed by several others during and after the Civil War. (Yale admitted women to graduate programs in 1869, but the college remained all-male until 1969.) This trend not only developed in America, but also in Asia, for example with the establishment of the precursor to Doshisha Women’s College of the Liberal Arts in 1876 in Kyoto, Japan. But early streaming regardless of more inclusive policies has remained the norm in many parts of the world. Ideally, all citizens would receive some kind of education in the liberal arts and sciences. Although American high schools have a mixed record, they do in fact pursue a broadly academic curriculum for most students and avoid the early streaming of some students into purely vocational tracks that is common in Europe and Asia.