What Does a Liberal Arts Education Mean to You? To Singapore?
When I decided to come to Yale-NUS College to pursue an education in Political Science, I never really expected the broader political climate of Singapore to affect or concern my education. I could not have been more mistaken. Upon entering the college, suddenly I was intricately involved in a community where questions about the validity of this liberal arts education, our academic freedom, and the role of Yale-NUS in Singapore’s broader political development are debated relentlessly.
At first, I was perplexed and annoyed by the frequency and complexity of these debates. There were times when I wished Yale-NUS was a bubble, completely detached and irrelevant to the rest of Singapore. But time and again, that has been proven unrealistic and naive.
Our student body, with over half of them Singaporean, is inevitably connected to everything outside of Yale-NUS, be it the Singaporean way of life, social norms, or even political ideology. We are inside Singapore, after all. Suddenly, I felt foolish to have expected this community to be some sort of enclave and to even have hoped to avoid endless conversations about these complex issues.
We are bound to have these conversations. Conversations about whether liberal voices within Yale-NUS are silencing less liberal viewpoints, about how our community should and will eventually interact with Singapore’s wider political situation, and so much more. Holly, who just recently graduated from Yale-NUS College, shared:
When I was choosing a college to attend, I knew I was interested in broadening my knowledge of the world beyond the US. I had a hunch that actually living in a new country and learning alongside students who had grown up there would beat an American professor’s estimation of what that country was like — the ever-evolving opinions of Jim Sleeper continue to show me that I was right to trust that hunch.
There is a statement of his from a 2015 interview that I find particularly misleading. “The way Singapore handles liberal education,” according to Sleeper, “is that it doesn’t; it puts it in a bubble and doesn’t allow it anywhere off campus.” At first glance, this criticism appears well-founded. It is true that there exist laws limiting free speech and assembly in Singapore, and it is true that Yale-NUS has a charter with some vague clauses about freedom of speech on campus being more protected than in Singapore at large. These are not trivial issues. But after four years of liberal arts education and especially after attending my classmates’ impressive capstone presentations, I can’t help but think that no Yale-NUS student would make a statement so…oversimplified.
We write about how the government constructs discourse, how individuals negotiate cultural norms, how artists create space, and more — unfolding, ongoing, always contested, never finished activities. And this is the nature of Yale-NUS’ relationship with Singapore — it exists in the Facebook threads with new comments, the town halls that run over time, the posters in the lifts with sticky-note replies.
When Yale-NUS students comment on Singaporean politics, it’s not from a distant “objective” perspective, it’s from here, in Singapore, where the majority of our students have lived their entire lives and where the majority of international students will remain to work for several years. This is why Yale-NUS could never have been a bubble of liberal exception in illiberal Singapore. Not only because it was never designed to be (though maybe was erroneously pitched as such); not only because “illiberal Singapore” is a figment of Western imagination (see Soh and Babcock 2018); but because it is made up of individual students, each with our own trajectories.
We each came from somewhere and are going somewhere and have maintained our connections to our many somewheres throughout our college lives. These connections burst any idea of a bubble — the conversations we have on campus, the revelations, the emotions, the ideas, the criticisms, the new modes of thinking and analysis leak out all over the place.
We don’t want to be a liberal bubble of exception because we have greater things to do. And if these things draw us into the scary sphere of a Singapore with laws against un-permitted assembly, so be it — this is where we’ve always been.
Holly is a graduating student from Yale-NUS College’s Class of 2018. She is originally from Boise, Idaho, USA and currently lives in Singapore.
Apart from defending the value of a liberal arts education in Singapore, Yale-NUS students also struggle with questions about the value of a liberal arts education in general. What kind of community should students build inside a liberal arts college? And what does a liberal arts education say about the community’s political leaning? Winnie from the Class of 2020 shared:
“All liberal arts students are liberals,” my high school friend from the US told me after he voted for Trump, “you will never understand why I voted for him.”
When I asked my classmate whom he would be voting for in the upcoming USU.S. presidential election, it was out of genuine curiosity. But my friend ended our conversation without giving me a chance to explain. To him, my identity as a liberal arts student prescribes my political affiliation, and my assumed liberal stance determines that I could never empathize with him. What I never had a change to explain to my friend was that it is exactly because I am a liberal arts student that I can understand his choice. In our philosophy and sociology classes, we read Shantideva, who urges us to have compassion for everyone because we are all fundamentally connected; we also read Weber, who examines the three types of political legitimacy and explain why individuals subscribe to them. Whether or not I have a different opinion does not prevent me from empathizing with my friend. What defines a liberal community is the willingness to have a conversation, and the unwillingness to do so is what truly hurts the heart-to-heart understanding.
Winnie Li was raised in Beijing and Shenzhen, China. She is interested in history and political science. She loves to eat and swim.
