When the Yale College Faculty passed a resolution in April condemning the "lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore, host of the proposed Yale-National University of Singapore College" and urged "Yale-NUS "to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society," Yale's president Richard Levin declared that the resolution -- passed in his presence and over his objection -- "carried a sense of moral superiority that I found unbecoming."
Levin then unbecame what he ought to be as president of a liberal-arts university by going to Singapore and giving a speech at the end of last month, the same month in which that authoritarian corporate city-state had committed yet another of its abuses against basic civil liberties that have been monitored and condemned by many international observers and advocates -- liberties that, as the Yale faculty resolution emphasized, "lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as of our civic sense as citizens" and "ought not to be compromised in any dealings or negotiations with the Singaporean authorities."
When Levin gave his speech touting the appointment of the ill-prepared but energetically pliable Yale professor Pericles Lewis as Yale-NUS' first president, Singapore had only recently prevented Chee Soon Juan, Secretary-General of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), from leaving the country to give a speech of his own at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Not only wasn't Chee allowed to leave Singapore; the International human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam, counsel to the SDP and Chee's representative internationally, was detained and turned back at Singapore's Changi Airport when he tried to visit Chee on May 20, days days before Levin's visit.
So the Yale faculty resolution was right on target, and Levin's reaction to it was way off. Singapore's action prompted Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, to publish an open letter, here in the Huffington Post, to Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, urging the government to grant permission to Dr Chee to attend the event:
"In the last 20 years he has been jailed for more than 130 days on charges including contempt of Parliament, speaking in public without a permit, selling books improperly, and attempting to leave the country without a permit. Today, your government prevents Dr. Chee from leaving Singapore because of his bankrupt status.... It is our considered judgment that having already persecuted, prosecuted, bankrupted, and silenced Dr. Chee inside Singapore, you now wish to render him silent beyond your own borders."
According to the Associated Press, the Singapore "government's bankruptcy office denied Chee permission to travel to the conference because he has failed to make a contribution to his bankruptcy estate." But Singapore is infamous for prosecuting dissenters and opposition leaders for "defamation," thereby bankrupting them with legal costs and fines:
"Supremely confident of the reliability of his judiciary, the prime minister [Lee Hsieng Loong] uses the courts ... to intimidate, bankrupt, or cripple the political opposition while ventilating his political agenda. Distinguishing himself in a caseful of legal suits commenced against dissidents and detractors for alleged defamation in Singapore courts, he has won them all," writes Francis T. Seow, a former solicitor general of the country.
For example, as I've recounted here, the first opposition politician to win a seat in parliament after Singapore's independence in 1965, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, was soon charged with defamation in a suit that bankrupted him and forced him out of public life. His was only the first prominent case in a relentless tide of prosecutions that shuttle dissenters, including NUS faculty, out of their jobs and homes and into unemployment, prison, or exile.
Chee himself, who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia and once taught at NUS, was fired from his post there as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined the SDP party. When he attempted to contest his dismissal, he, too, was sued for defamation, bankrupted, imprisoned, and then barred from leaving the country.
When Singapore's apologists at Yale are forced to acknowledge such abuses, they explain them away as cultural differences or assure us that the country is changing. Yale astronomer Charles Bailyn, Yale-NUS' "inaugural dean," explains Singapore's bans on speaking at public demonstrations without a permit by saying. "What we think of as freedom, they think of as an affront to public order, and I think the two societies differ in that respect."
They differ in more ways than that: The SDP reports that "Chee declared bankruptcy in 2006 after he was unable to pay the fines imposed after he lost defamation suits initiated by Singapore's then-prime minister Goh Chok Tong and then-senior minister Lee Kuan Yew. He was also convicted on charges of libel during the 2006 General Election after both Lee Kuan Yew and the current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, sued him for implying corruption in an SDP newsletter. On top of not being able to travel out of the country, he has also been barred from standing for elections."
Amsterdam, the human-rights lawyer, has written a long white paper on such abuses by Singapore. Bailyn can't explain these away, but If he's still in doubt, he can learn more about the country's record and continuing practices from Yale student Luka Kalandarishvili, who wrote a paper on the subject for a seminar on "Global Journalism, National Identities" that I taught last spring.
Why is Yale disgracing itself this way? It's one thing for a business corporation to roll with the punches while dealing with clients, customers, and investors in countries that do things differently than ours does. It's also okay for a university to establish a small center or professional school that limits itself to transferring skills. It's quite something else for a liberal-arts college to transform itself, as Yale is already doing in New Haven, from the crucible of civic-republican leadership it has been into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a global managerial elite that answers to no republican polity or moral code.
A liberal education is supposed to show the young that the world isn't flat, as neoliberal economists like Levin think, but that it has abysses that yawn suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that require insights and coordinates far deeper than those offered by markets and the states that serve them -- as Singapore's state does to a fault.
Then again, Yale has been behaving as if it were a business corporation. As Amsterdam was being denied entry into Singapore last month, I was seated at a dinner in Germany next to a very high official of a European university who'd been to Singapore a few times himself. "There's $300 million for Yale in its deal with NUS," he confided to me.
"What? How do you know that?" I asked. "Yale claims it's not getting a dime from Singapore, although Singapore is paying all the costs of constructing and staffing the college itself."
"Oh, it's not a direct payment," my interlocutor explained. "It's what you call insider trading: Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund. These will be only investments, not payments, so there's some risk. But you'll Yale's endowment will swell by several hundred million in consequence of its getting in on these ventures."
This hit me with some force because, only a few weeks before, I'd written here that the real scandal in Yale's Singapore venture is Yale Corporation members' blithe assurance that they can do well by doing good, as long as they ignore the costs to republican liberty and the creativity and citizenship such liberty yields. When I think of Levin's envisioning the Yale-NUS arrangement, first at Davos, where it began, and then with his recent Yale Corporation members G. Leonard Baker, Charles Ellis (who maintains an investment business in Singapore and is married to the Secretary of Yale, Linda Koch Lorimer), and with Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV (once the CEO-designate of Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, now a member of the Yale Corporation) the European university official's comment sounds right.
Take a look at this short video of yet another Yale Corporation member and Yale-NUS champion, Fareed Zakaria, interviewing Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong at the Davos World Economic Forum last January, and notice the nuances of subservience: Zakaria, who would take to the pages of the Yale Daily News in April to disparage, as "provincial," those faculty supporting the resolution criticizing Singapore's abuses, never mentions Yale's venture with Singapore in the January interview, nor does he ask Lee about any of Singapore's human rights abuses.
The prime minister is a piece of work here -- British-educated, well-buffed and modulated, dispensing pellets of charm, a studied dignity in informality, and sinuous liberal bromides, with just the right hint of tempered steel behind the smile.In this, he is not unlike what Zakaria used to be, but study Zakaria's countenance and see the perfect mask of complicity and obeisance that recalls W. H. Auden's observation, in the Europe of the 1930s, that "Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face."
American college administrators, struggling to balance truth-seeking with power-wielding and wealth-making, are readily disarmed by operators like Lee and Zakaria. Our liberal arts colleges are vulnerable to market riptides, to putsches by would-be donors and moneyed interest groups, and to the stomach-turning descent of America's civic culture into brutal political speech, gladiatorial sports and degrading entertainments, all of it accelerated by those market riptides and the global capitalist wrecking ball. Small wonder that to the beleaguered Levin and his globe-trotting trustees, Singapore seems a port in the storm: The little city-state need "liberalize" only a little, and Yale need "Singaporize" a little, they think, for the fit to be as perfect as the mask that is Fareed Zakaria's face. They find the Yale College Faculty resolution "unbecoming" because it disrupts that fit and discredits that mask.
To its designers, the Singapore undertaking seems all the more harmonious convergence because, throughout Levin's presidency,Yale has compared poorly with other American universities in its support and practice freedom of speech, as I showed here at some length, and as Stephen Walt noted last week in a Foreign Policy post, "Yale Flunks Academic Freedom."
The Yale Alumni Magazine, which, unlike Harvard's equivalent, functions dutifully as a press office for Levin, finessing controversy after controversy to minimize its effects on his administration, has yet to inform Yale alumni that even though Yale-NUS graduates will not earn bona fide Yale degrees, they'll find the Yale name and logo on their diplomas and will be "fully integrated into the Association of Yale Alumni Network" -- a puzzling first, for reasons I've reported here.
The Yale Daily News has allowed its reporter covering the Yale administration to serve as a press officer for the administration, failing to report any of the irregularities in the Yale-NUS venture. (Find the section, "A Telling Default," in this long post.)
And the Yale Law School, of all places, has been obdurately, shamefully silent about the abuses by Singapore that I've mentioned. The law school can redeem itself by inviting Chee's lawyer, Bob Amsterdam, and Yale alumnus Bo Tedards, the global democracy activist who's been writing to Levin about the Singapore regime, to speak to what I'm sure would be a capacity crowd in the Yale Law School auditorium. Will it issue the invitations? If not, what is the law school for?
The Singapore venture has compromised Yale deeply not because Singapore is such an evil place in the larger scheme of things - it's an authoritarian, corporate city-state with a well-educated, prosperous populace that may surprise us someday by curbing and licensing its governors -- but because Yale itself has been led so crudely, cluelessly, and prematurely into this place where it need not have gone and where, pedagogically, can ill afford to go right now.
In his nearly twenty years as president, Levin has been invaluable to Yale as the pilot of its enhancement fiscally, physically, and in town-gown and labor relations, and just last September, I congratulated him for an address to incoming freshmen, whom he implored to be true to liberal education's skepticism of dogmas and over-simplifications. But now I think that I missed the note of desperation in his address: It was almost as if he were imploring 18-year-olds to save Yale from itself -- and perhaps from what he has done by choosing the Singapore venture as a way to make his mark and seize the future. He has been a very good manager with a very bad sense of liberal education's purposes and stakes and of what courage and choices are necessary to vindicate them in this world..
In the 1950s, Yale's president A. Whitney Griswold crusaded for liberal education against both McCarthyism and Communism, no easy task for a university president in those dark years. Levin has outsourced the equivalent challenge of our time by presuming to bring liberal education to Singapore, which becomes a laboratory for the decorous prostitution of liberal education to market riptides here at home -- all while enhancing Yale's brand name and market share, of course. The real cost is already being felt in the Singaporization, not cosmopolitanization, of Yale.
A sentence in this post that had stated, "Then again, Yale is a business corporation" has been altered to meet Yale's objection that the statement was not literally true.
Kathy Buckworth: Amsterdam: Land of a Thousand Bicycles
Yale's tie-up with NUS is purely profit driven at its core. The University needs money to fund research and academics, and it's willing to compromise on its ideals, ever so slightly, to get it. There is nothing more at stake, and I don't really see how Yale's reputation is being tarnished by this collaboration.
In the end, the author seems to think that by rousing the ire of the internet community, he might be able to draw enough attention to the tie-up for it to be suspended. However, Singapore will not bend to foreign sentiment. Any changes our country goes through will be by our hand, not on puppet strings pulled by the West or anyone else. Every son takes up arms to defend our country agains physical invasion, and not I think it's time for us to defend against unwanted, and erroneous, foreign opinions. We will not be bullied into submission.
The 'champions of international liberty and freedom' are welcome to try.
And you know what, it works, and the people like it. Even with the large number of blunders the PAP has made in the last few years, people still trust them over the empty demagogue that is CSJ and the unknown future that results in a Opposition government. To be honest- the opposition is rubbish. Sure, they might have a few good figureheads, but they lack the army of economists and trained professional politicians to govern a complicated state, and thus they are only entrusted with a few unimportant wards.
This is a Hobbesian argumen: Singaporeans (and some Americans) look at chaotic, dangerous conditions in the U.S. and envy Singapore's order, cleanliness, and prosperity, as well as its brilliant instrumentality. But its intellectual and cultural sterility prompt a brain drain that draws young Singaporeans to college abroad, never to return. Yale-NUS is designed to stop the drain.
Singapore is a city-state of 6 million people on territory smaller than New York City. That makes it amenable to "father knows best" governance, a term that covers too much evil, as my post begins to show: Punishments of public figures like Chee prompt wide self-censorship -- including, perhaps, by the writer of this comment. Singapore is no model for anywhere else, and the question I've posed is not what's best for Singapore but why it serves Yale's collegiate mission to establish a new "Yale"-affiliated college there. One needn't be "liberal minded" in the sense this writer means to question Yale's venture and regret the steady stream of falsehoods being put out by Yale press spokesman Tom Conroy, as I've make clear in comments below.
I fully recognise the value of such opposition in previous arguments raised. However, I take issue with Dr Sleeper's account for these reasons:
- Factual inaccuracies, a couple of which he has had to backtrack and correct
- Another factual inaccuracy on which he has remained silent (see rchan13's earlier comment)
- Suggestions/accusations implied in the article, for which he has had to clarify what he intended to suggest in the first place
- Ad hominem-esque description of PM Lee / Zakaria (implied, but very clear implications nevertheless)
Ironically I might be guilty of the ad hominem fallacy by casting doubt on the credibility of Dr Sleeper's article here.
Instead of pursuing my point further -- which is simply to point out that Singapore is not "such an evil place in the larger scheme of things - it's an authoritarian, corporate city-state with a well-educated, prosperous populace that may..." -- I implore the discerning reader to explore the wealth of cyber-resources to find out for themselves what Singapore is all about.
And I would respect your intellectual independence by not pointing you to any specific partisan sites, but suggest that you look through the variety of resources and draw your own conclusions.
To zoom in on such nits, as Yale spokesman Tom Conroy does, is typical of a business corporation anxious only about dodging larger truths that might damage its brand name and market share. It's a tactic unworthy of a university, and it would be wrong to recycle it. Any suggestion that I alleged a quid pro quo or special arrangement is rebutted in my reply above and in TODAY. http://www.todayonline.com/Print/Singapore/EDC120612-0000009/Yale,-NUS-rebut-Huffington-Post-story
I agree with Lionel Lye that it's wrong to go "ad hominem" as I did with Zakaria, and, somewhat, with the P.M. But thank you for recognizing that it would be wrong to impugn my credibility on the basis of my tone. My primary interest has not been in the "sins" of Singapore or of any individual, real or imagined, but in the challenges facing liberal education and American colleges that are dodging or displacing those challenges in ventures abroad.
NYU faculty's atomization is well-known. Yale’s faculty is awakening. Absent scandal or student upheaval, Yale-NUS will be a successful career-training center and for a global elite answering to no polity or moral code. Liberal education should nourish citizen-leaders who challenge powerful conventions, as liberal arts colleges once did, but their ventures abroad highlight hollowness at home. In this post I first called Yale “a business corporation” although I know it’s non-profit; I've changed the wording, but not my warning about its direction. Yale protests that its former trustee Charles Ellis keeps no "investment business" office in Singapore. I'll check. I never wrote that special Yale investments exist, only that someone who'd know predicts them.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/01/general_mcchrystals_leadership_lessons_for_yale_students
But there's a galloping culture of self-censorship at Yale that subverts liberal education, making Yale too "perfect" a partner with Singapore.
"TRUST AND RELATIONSHIPS,” McChrystal wrote on the board the first day of his first Yale class, the only one allowing an outside observer. “A seminar is like a team,” he said, encouraging students to call him "Stan." He meant to temper their celebrity-worshiping adulation, but did they look “Stan” in the eye and promise not to tell what he teaches about his counter-insurgency strategy, judged a failure by many colleagues in the military -- and by me when he was directing it? http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=311
McChrystal hasn’t answered friendly overtures from faculty seeking to share their papers and thoughts. Commanding officers don't consult those not on “the team."
Of course, students should exercise tact and not turn seminar exchanges into public debates. But Yale, way too self-censoring, hires too many former power-wielders --Tony Blair, John Negroponte, Stanley McChrystal -- to overawe undergraduates with war stories. That should be exposed, as I did here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/henry-kissingers_b_1093835.html
Dr. Chee is a man of character, who has lost much personally, in monetary terms because of all the lawsuits by the government based on trumped up charges. His reputation has been ruined because the government has chosen to demonize him. Dr. Chee is a man of intelligence, conviction and passion who believes deeply in the rights of Singaporeans. This is the kind of citizen that the government is most fearful of. So what does the government do to a man like Dr. Chee? Demonize him through state controlled media, sue him, bankrupt him, make certain he cannot stand for elections, cannot have a voice, cannot leave the country to tell the world what really is occurring in Singapore where political and human rights are concerned. Yet, Dr. Chee continues to fight for his rights and the rights of Singaporeans.
I was like some of the people here who evidently believe the government’s assination of Dr. Chee’s character, until I read his books and when I met the man himself. Dr. Chee is one of the most gracious, selfless, and courageous man I have ever met. With regards to Dr. Chee, the PAP, and our state controlled media, the words of Malcom X have never rung truer.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”.
After all you have met him and any points made could be countered by "you haven't met him have you?".
Speaking of the apparent rise in the corruption of universities, in the US and beyond, don’t even get me started on Confucius Institutes….! This also responds to groland’s quite correct observation that it would be even worse to be getting in bed with China.
Finally, it is not a question of people needing to agree with any of his specific policies, or for that matter to vote for his party. The main point, as ghormax rightly highlights, is the extent to which the Lee clique is paranoid about him. If his views are really “marginal,” as another commenter said, what difference would it make to just let him speak? My feeling is that, in addition to the depth of personal hatred Lee has towards him, they have demonized him so thoroughly and consistently that they would lose face by giving him a break now. On a broader level, he serves the useful purpose of “killing the chicken to scare the monkeys” (pour encourager les autres). In other words, if they were to ease the pressure on him, it is quite likely that more activists across the range of fields would emerge and existing ones would step up their campaigns.
Furthermore, I wonder whether the commenters so happy to engage in character assassination have ever met with Dr. Chee and talked to him. I have, and the sincerity of both his convictions and his love of his country is utterly apparent. The idea that he would flee Singapore if allowed to speak overseas is simply absurd.
It is worth pointing out that, when he has to apply for permission to travel, he does not apply to any agency of the government, but rather to the agent representing the persons to which he owes money. That is, the determination whether or not he may travel is made by Lee Kuan Yew, et al. in their personal capacity. No prizes for guessing what criteria they use. There is no state interest involved, so the references to the kind of laws which all countries have to prevent criminal suspects, etc. from absconding are not relevant.
First, I agree that Yale Law School’s silence is shameful; it should certainly sponsor more discussion on this issue, since it is close to their area of expertise. But, as much as I appreciate Prof. Sleeper’s vote of confidence, I am certainly not qualified to lecture on the legal system of Singapore, or indeed of any other country, not being a lawyer myself. I suggest YLS should start by inviting the eminent Singaporean lawyer Francis Seow to give a lecture. This would be a very useful counterweight to the pro-government students who have been trying to monopolize the right to speak for Singaporeans in New Haven. Could hardly be easier to arrange, since last I heard he was living in Massachusetts.
As for international discussants, if desired, Robert Amsterdam would indeed be a fine choice, and so would any of the main authors of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute's 2008 report on Singapore ("Prosperity versus Human Rights," http://www.ibanet.org/Article/Detail.aspx?ArticleUid=0081C460-4B39-4ACB-BB40-8303FCEFDB31).
Many people forget how fast Singapore has developed in less than 50 years. Many of the strongest supporters of the Men in White saw the growth of a nation from a neglected colonial backwash to a nation that boasts an unemployment rate of 2%. Freedom of speech be damned if they can ensure that they, their children and their wallets can remain plump. This is a generation that went from writing complains about students holding hands in public in the 80s to having to deal with Glee on TV.
The good thing is that younger Singaporeans are not saddled with a lot of the mental baggage that came with living through poverty and race riots, and the lack of higher education in Singapore allowed them to experience liberalism abroad. Their pioneering efforts forced the government to recognize that times are a changing, but more needs to be done, not just about civil liberties and freedom, but how to wield them responsibly.
For this reason, I hope that the Yale-NUS venture can help to challenge and groom the future thought leaders, to think of how they can take reigns of Singapore's future and steer it towards greater liberalism, irregardless of how ignoble the inception.
However, as the law would have it she is being charged with vandalism. Vandalism is considered a serious crime here which carries a caning (whipping) mandatory penalty.
This is something the Yale faculty must take serious note of. Let's not get distracted by the mention of Dr Chee in this article.