So Long, Yale

Strangely enough, the Financial Times, a normally respectable newspaper, has offered up some commentary on education in Singapore, written by an actress. Her name, Mercedes Ruehl. Smoke on that one a bit-- an actress?

Ruehl reports the horrific fact--horrific to her, at least-- that the National University of Singapore has severed its connection with Yale University. Apparently, Yale’s reputation had preceded it to Singapore, where the authorities did not want their students to receive lessons in high wokery.

Naturally, Ruehl does not notice the point, but we have seriously predicted that America’s great institutions of public learning, having embraced woke politics and critical race theory and feminist musings over urinals, will inevitably sacrifice their reputations. Thus, we are not surprised to discover that Singapore no longer wants its academic institutions to cultivate such brain numbing nonsense.

As for Yale, you can only run the place on your sterling credit, and your past glories, before people are going to get the message. Dumbing down the institution will cause others to treat you as an inferior institution.

Whatever America is selling, and especially whatever the American academy is selling, people around the world are no longer buying. Apparently they have discovered that liberal arts education has become an indoctrination mill, more likely to turn out social justice warriors than people who are ready to take their place in the world economy. One suspects that the authorities at the Yale connected National University of Singapore want to nip the problem in the bud.

The students strolling around the lush green campus of the Yale-National University of Singapore, the city-state’s first liberal arts college, were unusually subdued one recent afternoon.

The Singaporean institution had suddenly announced on August 27 that it would end its partnership with the Ivy League university, leaving students and faculty in a state of shock as the new academic year began. NUS said its decision to end the relationship would pave the way for a plan to “deliver flexible, interdisciplinary education more accessibly, and at greater scale”.

Giulia, an Italian student in her final year, says she is still confident about her career prospects. What concerns her is the message that the move sends about the situation in Singapore. A city she has called home for years is heading down what she describes as a “worrying” path.

Yale-NUS launched in 2011 with the aim of bringing American liberal education to an illiberal city-state known for its exam-dominated curricula and rote learning.

As it happens, and as Ruehl does not understand, students who follow an exam-dominated curriculum and engage in rote learning generally do much better than students who are trying to find themselves in college, are learning how to express their feelings and who are suffering from bloated self-esteem.

Obviously, Ruehl, she of limited intellectual capacity, blames it on xenophobia. She does not consider that American woke culture looks very bad to the peoples of the world. Heck, even France, in the person of its government officials and leading intellectuals have warned against this mental illness.