The Story of Panopt
Joyan Tan
Class of 2017
Panopt had humble beginnings. We started out as an academic newsletter under the Office of the Vice-Rector, as initiated by then-Saga Vice-Rector Eduardo Lage-Otero. During Orientation, Vice-Rector Lage-Otero had put out a call via email proposing the creation of a newsletter which would comment on events and happenings on campus, include interviews of students and faculty, and so on. I think the idea back then was in support of building community and a Yale-NUS culture, as with many other initiatives during this time.
Spandana Bhattacharya ’17 and I responded to the call and were chosen to be the first co-editors of the newsletter. (Till today I don’t know if anyone else aside from us responded to Vice-Rector Lage Otero’s call.) I had not officially met Spandana before then, and our first meeting at the Vice-Rector’s office was filled with equal parts hesitance over working with some stranger and excitement over what we had the potential to create. Over time, I came to think of us as having complementary roles in Panopt (we were, in truth, very different): Spandana was the dreamer and I was the do-er. She dreamed about all that Panopt could be and pushed us to break new ground. I helped set her feet back on the ground and worked to make the realistic dreams come true.
As with most new initiatives, Spandana and I took on our new ‘jobs’ with much gusto. We immediately got to work: brainstorming possible columns, asking students and faculty for contributions, deciding on the design details. I remember e-mailing Indrani, who worked in the Vice-Rector’s Office, our finalized PDF designs and then rushing down with Spandana to collect the fruits of our labor. Those glorious A3 pages printed in full color (we had decided on a blue and orange color scheme which was totally original) filled us with joy and accomplishment. We carried them with care, puffed up with some pride, and thumbtack-ed the A3 pages to the bulletin boards on every floor. We might even have put some up in the elevators for the community’s reading pleasure as they went up and down RC4.
As some time passed, we began to dream differently. While Panopt had thus far been a space for the Yale-NUS community to share and express their thoughts, feelings and opinions, we were bugged by the persistent questions of: Who are we? Who do we write for? Who are we accountable to? We called ourselves an academic newsletter yet rarely discussed anything academic or academics-related. We considered ourselves to be under the Vice-Rector’s Office when he only contributed to a column for a few issues and otherwise let us run free with very little supervision. We dreamed of a Panopt that would continue its legacy long after we had left the college, and for that to happen, change needed to occur.
So as Yale-NUS turned 2 and a new cohort of bright-eyed YNC-ers entered, Panopt underwent a transformation. We increased our staff size from 2 to 14. We thanked the Vice-Rector’s Office and made our exit. We came together and re-envisioned ourselves as “an autonomous school newspaper that is committed to free speech and critical discourse.” This transformation had not a few consequences. For one, our newly recruited Designer, Angela Ferguson ’18 radically revamped the newspaper’s look. (I take full credit for its earlier gaudy design with poor color choices and no credit at all for Angela’s wonderful work in creating a much classier design for Panopt.) In a nod to “free speech” enshrined in our mission statement, our articles became spicier, more provocative, controversial. Panopt also came under much fire for our chosen name, Panopt.
The name Panopt had not gone by without comment earlier. When our first issue had been published, many immediately saw a connection between Panopt and the panopticon, first introduced by Jeremy Bentham. Our winning entry (in Issue 2) for interpreting the name Panopt further stated, “The ‘pan’ in Panopt is Greek for ‘everything’ like in a panorama, panacea and pandemic. ‘Opt’ has the same root as ‘optic’, of or related to sight. Panopt can thus be translated to “that which sees everything”. For an emerging liberal arts college that already receives much criticism worldwide for its ill-chosen home of authoritarian Singapore, how could we further align ourselves to Bentham’s (and later picked up by Foucault) system of control, especially in the very medium whose aim is to promote free speech and critical discourse? Criticisms came fast and furious, many of them with renewed vigor given our recently published mission statement.
While the connection to the panopticon had not been lost on me, I had personally found the irony appealing and the implications satirical. Nonetheless, many members of the community expressed their concerns over such an approach given the precarious position of the college in those early years. We held a forum, conducted a poll, and eventually decided in an internal staff meeting to make the shift towards a less intentionally provocative and contradictory name, The Octant. While some part of me still thinks back upon Panopt with much nostalgia, this shift ultimately allowed for the community to move on from the paper’s name itself to engage with deeper and more meaningful conversations in the later years.
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