The History of the Campus

Traditionally, liberal arts colleges are residential, meaning that the students live and study on campus. However, as Yale-NUS was an entirely new college, the campus had not yet been built when the first students arrived in 2013.

In this story, we follow the history of the construction of the campus from groundbreaking in 2012 to the inauguration in 2015. We start our journey by looking back to the College’s earliest years, before the campus was constructed, to see how and where the inaugural students, faculty and staff lived and worked.

Beginnings at RC4

While the Yale-NUS College campus was under construction, the first two batches of students were housed in Residential College 4 (affectionately known as RC4).

Situated next to the new campus construction site, RC4 was a temporary home remembered fondly by many of the students, staff and faculty who lived and worked there in close proximity for the College’s first two years.

At that point we were in RC4, and so we were just in one building and there was just this little sign that said Yale-NUS.

When Laura Severin, Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid, first saw RC4 she was shocked by its small size.

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Oral History Interview

Laura Severin describes how the inaugural community blossomed at RC4.

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It was a very kind of laissez-faire college because [there were] so few students.

The small community allowed for a more relaxed approach, and also facilitated direct communications, as noted by Executive Vice President (Academic Affairs) (and later the College’s second president) Tan Tai Yong.

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By the time we got to May of 2015 we were pretty jam-packed into our temporary location at RC4.

Inaugural Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis on how the student population—over 300 in the second year—had outgrown RC4.

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It didn’t feel as cozy, it wasn’t everybody in one building, now we’re separated.

With the new campus complete by mid-2015, it was time to leave RC4. However, as Laura Severin notes, some of the students were concerned that the unique RC4 community would be lost.

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The Construction Process

At over 63,000 square metres, and consisting of five residential towers, multiple venues including lecture theatres, classrooms and laboratories, performance spaces, workshops, dining halls, a library, sports facilities and offices, as well as extensive grounds, constructing the campus was a major undertaking.

Some delays were caused by shortages of foreign labour and environmental factors, such as haze pollution and a major dengue outbreak that stopped work for five weeks in August 2014.

We had hoped to move into this new campus in January of 2015, but we wound up moving in in May to August of 2015.

Professor Pericles Lewis describes delays to the construction of the campus.

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Despite the delays, the campus soon began to take shape.

Students also organised The Legacy Project, an exhibition held during the inauguration of the campus in October 2015 to celebrate the over-1200 people who had been involved in the campus construction.

While we celebrate our beautiful new school, let us remember what came before.

Our team realised that the archives of photography, film, and interviews had much to offer not only in raising the technical understanding of our campus, but also in telling the stories of the people who had put so much into building the space we now call home… The curating team felt that it was apt to pay a tribute during the campus inauguration weekend.

— Legacy Project member, Tan Heng Yeng (Class of 2018)