Several of the issues that were really important in deciding whether we should proceed with the liberal arts programme included issues like whether we would be able to attract sufficient numbers of the right quality of students. This was a major focus of the feasibility study. This is because liberal arts education was not well known at the time in Singapore and the region, and the preferences of the best students were for professional programmes like medicine and law. I think what the feasibility study by Professor Lily Kong found was that there was sufficient JC [Junior College] students and parents who knew enough about liberal arts education in Singapore that would form a base of local students, and that while the knowledge of liberal arts education was not extensive in our region, there appeared to be sufficient interest.

The second major issue was whether we would be able to develop a truly distinctive curriculum that could marry the best traditions of the West and the East, and what would be the distinguishing elements of that curriculum. I think that was something that we had really very intense discussions with many colleagues in Yale, and we also ran many workshops involving leaders in liberal arts education in the US to help us think about that. So, the curriculum and its distinctiveness was another really important factor we had to look into.

The third was whether we would be able to attract a founding set of faculty who would be enthused and able to deliver such a curriculum, because at the end of the day, I mean it’s the faculty which will decide whether or not the educational vision could be translated into an actual educational process that would work.

And finally, of course, liberal arts education is extremely expensive, because it is centred around small group, intensive seminar-style interactions, it’s therefore a very costly model, and therefore the financial sustainability of this over the long term was also an important consideration.

Who is going to pay for this college, right? And is this going to be an additional pot of money or is it going to be from the same pie, which means that something’s got to give?

When news got out that MOE [Ministry of Education] supported, and we were raising funds, there were endowments and all these, I think people felt more assured that they were not losing out, yeah.

So, you set up a liberal arts college. You have an Arts and Social Sciences [faculty] that teaches similar things: Philosophy, History, Literature, Economics, Psychology. And from the Sciences, you have Life Sciences, Physical Sciences. So, what does that mean? Does that mean duplication?

The fear that Yale-NUS would draw away top students from these two faculties, or more: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty of Science, Business School. Because the college is going to be so special and exclusive that top students would gravitate towards Yale-NUS, and these would then be students who would have otherwise gone to one of these colleges.

In the end, I guess, people felt that the ecology was large enough and that people or students who chose to come to Yale-NUS may not have given up places in Arts or Sciences but they could have gone overseas to a liberal arts college. So, the idea of Yale-NUS was to draw these students into Singapore. And just below half of our population are international students anyway so we did have a catchment area that was quite different from the catchment pool for these faculties, which were essentially Singaporean. So, I think people got assured that I think there is enough space for Yale-NUS to be established in Singapore.