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I think also the College has had an impact, I wouldn’t know how to measure it, but since the idea of liberal arts is new to Asia, and relatively new, and new to Singapore, that it’s become an opportunity for administrators, faculty, parents and young people to learn about this kind of education and whether it might be suitable for them. So that’s another impact that it’s had.

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I know that, from talking to people associated with other experiments in liberal arts in Asia, that we’re kind of regarded as the leader. I’ve talked to people connected with NYU Shanghai, with the Duke Kunshan project, with Ashoka University in India which was kind of modelled on Yale-NUS, with a couple of other innovators in India. And I think the reputation is very strong.

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You know, as you said earlier, the College is really quite young, right? We’re not even a decade old, and yet I do think we’ve had an impact already in Singapore. I think we see it in the establishment, just this month [August 2021] of the NUS College of Humanities and Sciences, including their Common Curriculum. That certainly has been influenced by what we’ve done here and, in a sense, brought to scale, or bringing to scale. I think also the second example is the educational system in Singapore, like many other places in the world, has had more of a focus on early specialization, for example, choosing a major field of study prior to entry of college. And a liberal arts education provides more breadth including knowledge and skills, providing a stronger foundation for later learning both in college but also across the lifespan. So, I think in those ways, in less than a decade, we’ve really had, it’s a sort of pebble in the pond, we’ve had this big ripple effect.

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So, I think that we have has a very strong impact. And even in terms of curriculum, you see a little bit more flexibility in curriculum at places like SMU [Singapore Management University] and SUTD [Singapore University of Technology & Design]. You hear more conversation about, well you have student choice, and you don’t have to go one path, maybe you want to do Engineering with Literature, you know, more options are opening up at some of the other institutions. Again, I can’t say 100% that it’s because of us, maybe it would have happened anyway, but I’d like to believe that, if nothing else, we accelerated that in happening.

And in terms of the educational landscape, it’s interesting you know, we’ve seen some of the things that we’ve implemented here moving out into some of the institutions in Singapore. So, it’s hard to know is it because we did it or would it have happened anyway if Yale-NUS didn’t exist? So, for instance, we have a grade-less first semester, so the students don’t receive grades that end up on their transcript. Now that’s available at NUS, it wasn’t before.

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If nothing else, I hope that at least some of the things that we have collectively accomplished at Yale-NUS will filter out into the rest of the NUS ecosystem. I’ve been somewhat involved in the sexual misconduct process here at Yale-NUS and I know that some of the work that my colleagues who built that process did actually is now affecting some of the ways NUS is more broadly handling sexual misconduct and if something like that can happen, that’s wonderful, it’s really good news.