Once again, the liberal-arts college in Singapore to which Yale has given its name, prestige, energy, and talent finds itself dancing awkwardly with the government over a right that liberal education depends on and should foster: the right to show Tan Pin Pin's documentary film, "To Singapore With Love," which criticizes Singapore's way of turning political and artistic citizens into exiles.
Early this month, Pericles Lewis, president of the so-called Yale-National University of Singapore College, announced that a class in the college would exercise that right by showing the film. But last week Yale-NUS announced that it wouldn't, supposedly because Tan Pin Pin had withheld "permission."
Journalists at the Yale Daily News, an independent student newspaper in New Haven, are making clear that that's not the whole story. To understand why, first take a look at its context.
On April 6, 2012, over Yale University President Richard Levin's opposition, the faculty of Yale College in New Haven passed a resolution expressing concern about "the... lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore" and urging Yale -- which had undertaken a joint venture with that country to establish a college bearing Yale's name and that of the National University of Singapore -- to "respect, protect, and further those rights," which "lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as of our civic sense as citizens, and... ought not to be compromised in any dealings...with the Singaporean authorities."
Yale faculty had good reason to be concerned. The American Association of University Professors sent a public letter to the Yale community and 500,000 American professors expressing "AAUP's growing concern about the character and impact of the university's collaboration with the Singaporean government... In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer."
Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/for-yale-in-singapore-its_b_58...