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So, the guiding question was ‘What does the student need to thrive in the 21st century?’ So, basically, first of all they have to understand cultures, they have to understand where we all came from as humanity, right? And what shaped our thinking, what shaped the way we live, our civilisation. And that comes in a form of understanding through literature, through arts, and philosophy. And then, how are our lives governed by institutions? Why are these institutions here? Why do we have government? Why do we have parliaments? Why do we have economic structures that function the way they do?

So, those are the kind of key knowledge they need to have. And of course, understanding how scientists think, and not so much what you need to know in a particular branch of science, but basically ‘How do you know what we now know?’ So, it is actually the idea of preparing them, laying a foundation for the kinds of learning that is going to happen later on. But these are not introductory courses, these are broad-based courses that provoke them to think about issues, and then try to connect the dots across many disciplines.

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The students spend four years studying broadly. Usually the third or fourth years are fairly focused, and even in the second year they’re choosing a major, but none the less, roughly speaking, they’re spending a year to a year and a half on broader study, and even in the following year somewhat broader study than under the more British system which is more specialised, which is also the system in most of Europe. I think that it makes sense for people in the current economy whether it’s in Singapore, or in the U.S., or pretty much anywhere, certainly in any developed economy, to have that extra time because the skills that are needed in the future, particularly with so much work, even high level work, being automated or done by computers and artificial intelligence, the skills that are needed require breadth and an ability to see a problem from multiple angles, what President Tan Chorh Chuan refers to as the ‘zoom-in’ and ‘zoom-out’. And that contextual thinking is what liberal arts education is very good at teaching. And the more specialised education that’s typical of some other systems just doesn’t offer that as much.

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So, we deliberately set this place up without departments, but with divisions, in a way to try to encourage everyone to think about your role here on the educational side is to support the mission of this College, which is so interdisciplinary and broad in its perspective on undergraduate education. But if you look at liberal arts colleges in America, increasingly the faculty—and this is true in research universities too—faculty tend to relate more to people in their own department, and more to outsiders in other universities in their own discipline, than to their colleagues in their own school. And, we’ve set this up deliberately to try to work against that, but that is a global trend, and we’re leaning against the wind there. And so, creating a culture here that continues to resist that pressure toward segregating by discipline and relating more outside than inside, we’re doing a pretty good job so far of combatting that.

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Now, we organise things a little bit differently because instead of departments we have divisions: Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. And that means that a given faculty member is not beholden just to their department but contributes to the whole division. And so, in a division that has many overlapping subjects, particularly Social Science where we have Global Affairs, and PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics], Environmental Studies and Urban Studies where there are many overlapping courses, the faculty member in a way is contributing to multiple majors, which is a good thing. And it also means that the interdisciplinary majors like Global Affairs or Environmental Studies are on the same footing as the disciplinary majors like Economics and Psychology, whereas at a large university often the resources belonged to the department. Certainly, it was the case at Yale that the interdisciplinary majors were of great interest to the students, but the faculty were in departments, and so they tended to control who taught what, and it made it hard for a programme like Environmental Studies to get together enough courses, and the right courses and so on. So, I think that’s an improvement as a result of the way we organised things.