Bulldogs Abroad

I was fascinated to read a brief note in The Chronicle on Monday, picking up on a long article in the Yale Daily News the same day, on Richard Levin’s announcement that Yale University had signed a nonbinding agreement with the National University of Singpore to establish a four-year liberal arts college to be named Yale-NUS College adjacent to the existing NUS campus. Yale is being cautious. Levin was careful to say that Yale’s participation would be dependent upon the consent (not yet sought) of the Yale faculty and the actual budget figures to be presented to Yale by NUS.

Apparently “NUS will pay for the new college down to the last cent,” with a tentative budget commitment to “provide for teachers’ salaries and other expenses comparable to those at Yale.”  NUS will also reimburse Yale for the salaries of Yale professors who teach in Singapore, although the plan is apparently not to use many regular Yale faculty (except for short courses in May and August, so as not to interfere with teaching during the Yale term).  The plan is to hire only about 100 new professors for Y-NUS. 

This is somewhat reminiscent of the new NYU campus in Abu Dhabi (which apparently approached Yale several years ago about establishing an art program.  Yale declined that offer since it did not want to grant Yale degrees to the Abu Dhabi students.  The Y-NUS students will receive NUS degrees “because Yale cannot ensure that the education on the Singapore campus will meet the standards upheld in New Haven.”  The new college will be structured by Yale as a mini-Yale College, with three residentail colleges (a major feature of the plan) and just three interdisciplinary majors (humanities, science, and social science).  The program will be directed by a very bright and able young Yale Physics professor (and humanist), Charles Bailyn (the son of my Harvard mentor, Bernard Bailyn).

The Yale Daily article correctly notes that there are real issues in such a plan, since Singapore is nobody’s idea of a democracy, and protects neither freedom of speech nor assembly.  Yale is nevertheless convinced that its faculty will have satisfactory intellectual and academic freedom.  The article points out that other American institutions, notably the NYU School of Law, have worked out successful agreements for protecting their programs at NUS. Yale’s ultimate defense of this initiative is that it can walk away from it if it does not work out—after all, the total expense of the project is to be born by the Singaporeans.

The analogy here is to the recent growth of American higher education in the Persian Gulf, where of course democracy is also hardly the name of the game.  It is not yet clear how successful NYU will be in running a full, stand-alone program liberal-arts undergraduate program in Abu Dhabi, but several smaller programs elsewhere in the Gulf are doing pretty well—I am associated with the Georgetown School of Foreign Service program in Qatar, which I think quite successful so far. 

What interests me is that the states of the Gulf all tried to get the Ivies to establish programs in the region, simply because of the prestige they would have brought with them, but the Ivies wouldn’t pop for the Gulf.  Now Yale has popped.  It’s an interesting decision at a time when Yale is just recovering from the Great Recession, and is poised to undertake a major expansion of facilities in New Haven.  I suppose we’ll soon find out if there is such a thing as a free lunch in southeast Asia.  I doubt it, but I’ll watch with interest to see what happens.