For many of us teaching in the liberal arts colleges and universities that have opened in recent years across Asia, the Yale-NUS split came as a shock.
On 27 August, the National University of Singapore announced that Yale-NUS College – a 10-year collaboration with Yale University – would close and be merged into a new interdisciplinary honours college within NUS called New College. From 2025, Yale will have only an “advisory” role.
The announcement, which was widely reported around the world, brought a jolt of historical irony. Back in 2015, I’d heard Peter Salovey, then the president of Yale, speak on liberal arts education in Asia. At the time, I was in the process of moving from California to Delhi, to be part of the early cohort of faculty at the new Ashoka University and to set up a department of creative writing. After Salovey’s talk, hosted in Delhi by Ashoka, I asked him why Singapore, a state not particularly known for free thought, was collaborating on the American model of liberal education. His response struck me as prescient: the government of Singapore knew that a messy kind of democracy was coming to the country soon and that a liberal arts education was the best way to prepare its citizens for it. There was a new excitement for innovative liberal arts education in Asia, and I felt a part of it myself.
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More specifically, I recognised a culture of interdisciplinary creativity such as I’d seen in my previous institution, Stanford University, translated into a new Asian demand for innovative, multidisciplinary education. At the heart of this demand were the professional needs of rapidly evolving knowledge economies. It was the kind of interdisciplinarity that went beyond the narrowly technocratic or financial aptitude that is the core mandate of specialised schools of business or technology. It entered a broader domain of human thought, behaviour and knowledge. It evoked the human-centred business models of Peter Drucker, who, back in 1959, coined the term “knowledge worker”, predicting that the future corporation would have to balance significant social, economic and human dimensions.
This liberal arts model, with obvious corporate enthusiasm behind it, was inevitably elite and expensive. It was generously supported by philanthropic entrepreneurs from Asia’s new digital economy. It evoked suspicion as well as differing levels of enthusiasm within the larger Asian landscapes of colonially structured, government-directed higher education systems of raggedly uneven quality. But it was fairly clear why an economically ambitious and technologically progressive state such as Singapore was interested in it – and why it also appealed to the forms of private philanthropic higher education emerging around some of the major cities of India.
To understand the contradictions that have begun to disrupt this trajectory and to examine the sustainability of liberal arts in Asia today, it helps to take a quick look at how this form of education developed across different nations over the past few decades.
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The most striking success story comes from South Korea. In a significant discussion published in the New Republic in 2010, Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, argues that the foundation of this success lies in the country’s long-held Confucian tradition of humanistic education. Japanese domination in the 1940s represented a violent onslaught against this tradition, when Koreans were limited to low-level vocational education and schools were only allowed to use Japanese. The crucial recovery of national identity involved an invocation of Confucian humanistic education, but in a newly democratised form that made space for women and the working classes. American missionaries played a deeply constructive role in helping this modernising process.
Although the educational success story of South Korea is also driven by government initiatives, such as universal secondary education, Nussbaum ascribes significant credit to what she calls “a productive synergy between Confucian nationalism and American progressive education”. The result, she writes, “has been the widely democratized, pluralistic, and market-driven education system that obtains today”.
Take Hong Kong. Since the handover in 1997, the city has been moving away from the British system of single-subject degrees towards a more broad-based liberal education. The most obvious reasons were those I have already described: the country’s projection of itself as a service- and knowledge-based economy and an economic mediator between the East and the West, which called for a population with a more well-rounded education. This was what attracted the support of business figures such as Po Chung, the co-founder of the Asia-Pacific branch of the shipping giant DHL.
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But the introduction in 2009 of “liberal studies” as a mandatory subject in Hong Kong’s secondary education, with the specific aim of promoting critical thinking, has been intensely controversial. While some have lauded it as an exemplary curriculum which broke away from the rote learning of the mainland, pro-China leaders have criticised it as an instigator of student unrest – especially since the pro-democracy protests of 2014. It is interesting that liberal studies was introduced by a Beijing-controlled regime, but as Robert Spires, now an assistant professor of education at the University of Richmond, has pointed out, it may have been intended as a minor concession to deflect attention from larger forms of administrative authoritarianism.
Last November, it was announced that liberal studies at school would be renamed and recast to include more content about mainland China and less about current affairs. Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam blamed the education system for fuelling the 2019 pro-democracy protests by teaching children “false and biased information”.
If we look at Asia more generally, it is clear that the liberally educated graduate, as opposed to one professionally cast in a single direction, has great appeal for employers in the 21st century, in which many skills and careers seem to be ephemeral. But, as the Hong Kong situation aptly demonstrates, “liberal” is a troublingly expansive word that refuses to stay within an apolitically conceived disciplinary framework.
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We can see some of the contradictions when authoritarian regimes seek to institute liberal arts education for various reasons of their own. In a 2019 article for Indian newspaper
, Anushka Prasad, an MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, describes a conversation with Gan Yang, a dean at Tsinghua University, who pointed out that the Chinese government’s investment in liberal arts education was not intended so much to produce active citizens or independent critical thinkers in the Western sense as to cultivate and promote traditional Chinese culture and thought in the Confucian tradition.
That view is endorsed by Walter Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker distinguished professor of Romance studies at Duke University, which has a campus in Kunshan, near Shanghai. “China wants to know what the West already knows and to take advantage – not to be converted to liberal education but to appropriate Western liberal education in order to set up their own system of education, " he says. “It is clear that the government is not westernising.”
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Ethnic chauvinism is also obvious in the Indian BJP-led government’s invocation of a tradition of liberal arts rooted in classical Hinduism in its 2020 National Education Policy. Indeed, debates about the meaning of free speech and the right to dissent on university campuses were exploding just at the time when disciplines were opening up to another kind of freedom in elite higher education spaces. While student protests and brutal state suppression raged through the public Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi in 2016, I could not help wondering, in the pages of this magazine, what right there would be to such dissent on the new private campuses. Little did I know that Ashoka, that very summer, would be bitterly split over a petition about military activities in Kashmir, leading to the resignation of some of those involved.
The stark opposition between economic openness and political restriction in parts of East and South-east Asia – and now, increasingly, in South Asia – explains the contradictions experienced by the project of liberal arts education in these countries. Looking further west, the Gulf countries have also seen substantial investment in liberal arts education and collaboration with American universities. There, we find not so much the direct suppression of free thought and speech – against which at least the American overseas campuses are more or less protected – but various other kinds of unfreedom which reflect the political climate, as well as a certain traditional and bureaucratic mindset about education.
In these countries, too, access to liberal arts education in the newly opened universities is largely limited to the elite. They are, according to Shafeeq Ghabra, professor of political science at Kuwait University, “colleges for the privileged”, partly because “profit-based universities have limited scholarship opportunities and do not offer student loans”. A significant insulation from life outside their rarefied campuses – a consistent feature of the new liberal arts universities across Asia – is possibly also what maintains a certain freedom within these institutions and protects them from social prejudices and governmental restrictions.
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“We are in a bit of a Washington bubble, ” he tells me, “our VPN [virtual private computer network] on campus is set to Washington! And I’m not sure I’ve had any interference that I’ve
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