Let me “unload” more than a bit with this longer-than-usual introduction to thematic sections on this website, in this case a section containing pieces about what’s happening to the American public sphere in which I’ve worked (and which I’ve criticized) for decades.
American newspapers began dying years ago, not mainly because of the sins of journalists (although there are plenty), but owing to seismic shifts in technology, ownership, marketing, reader demographics, and the civil society from which journalists come and which we claim to strengthen, even when we’re also serving ourselves. The shifts I’ve just mentioned are transforming civil society and “the public” into a kaleidoscope of fragmented consumer audiences, assembled and dis-assembled by media corporations on whatever pretexts — ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist — will draw more consumers’ eyeballs and, with them, advertisers, and, with them, bigger profits and shareholder dividends.
As publishers and editors dumb down the news or tarted it up on such pretexts, newspapers and news programs deserve the deaths they’d been dying through not fault of their own. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” warns The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder and outer-space bounder Jeff Bezos. But democracy dies also in a deluge of glaring, cacophonous messages that treat citizens as impulse-driven consumers or worse. “The challenge of journalism is to survive the pressure cooker of plutocracy,” said Bill Moyers — who began his adult life as a Baptist minister, became Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary, and has been a true practitioner of journalism as a civic craft — in his acceptance speech upon receiving the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, at The New York Public Library in 2015.
Moyers and I have corresponded over the years; Moyers & Co. published some of my columns, including this one, on Trump. Here’s another.)
Journalism is the only private industry named (as “the press”) in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which was written to protect self-governing citizens from repression by government. But the arts and disciplines of self-government need protection also from business corporations that have become almost as powerful as governments and often even more so. “The press” itself — including digital speech platforms — is still housed in media corporations whose main interest is not to enlighten a deliberating public but to assemble and dis-assemble mere audiences in whatever way will boost profits most quickly. That’s their main incentive, even (and sometimes especially) when it makes public life go badly in ways that bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and our wallets. Impulse buying, not civic strength, is most of corporate journalism’s Holy Grail.
Under such conditions, government censorship in America is less dangerous to good journalism thanwhat media critic John Keane calls “market censorship,”the profit-crazed abduction of journalists from serving “the public’s right to know” to “giving the people what they want,” instead. This is done by following a perversely uncivil model of what many of “the people” can be groped and goosed into wanting — including wanting to be lied to with simplistic but comforting fables about who to blame for their unhappiness and who to follow to “fix it.” In speech platforms like Facebook, the public’s right to know is effectively market-censored by feedback loops of conspiracy-mongering, bigotry, and worse.
Partly that’s because platforms like Facebook insist, and market-worshipping jurisprudence affirms, that The First Amendment protects not only individual citizens’ right to stand against a stampeding herd but also media managers’ “right” to be mindlessly herd-driving and money-grubbing, in ways and for reasons I present in the following pieces. Fable-spinners on Fox News or MSNBC have ideologies, not just market interests, but, as Eric Alterman showed scathingly on his site “Altercations,” at The American Prospect, even “mainstream” news organizations such as CBS News (whose former chairman Les Moonves said that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”) hire professional liars as on-air news analysts.
Digital social media have accelerated and intensified the deluge of misinformation and disinformation, as Richard L. Hasen explains well in a column that also recommends necessary legislative, jurisdictional, and civic curbs on a lot of what passes for “free speech.” But it’s equally true that the deluge of deception has been decisive ever since the emergence of mass-circulation daily newspapers in the 1890s. The Spanish-American war of 1898 and the grip of McCarthyite anti-Communist hysteria on American politics in the mid-1950s are only two examples of how the supposedly venerable gate-keepers of honest media misled readers and betrayed democracy itself. (See my Washington Spectator essay, re-published by Newsweek, “Don’t Blame Social Media for Fake News. Mainstream Media Got There First,” and my review of Dean Starkman’s book (pictured at the top of this section), The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark.)
This is a tragedy in the classical sense that tragic figures — in this case, publishers, editors, and a few too many reporters — hasten their doom by the ways they’re trying to escape it. We need journalists who are paid well enough and protected well enough from market pressures to keep on telling “the public” not user-friendly lies that keep people reading and watching for all the wrong reasons, but hard truths that uphold the civic-republican fairness and accuracy which business-corporate moguls and their bureaucracies can’t be trusted to sustain, any more than corrupt governments can be trusted to sustain. No state-directed or market-driven or bureaucratic-corporate model can substitute for the skills, resources, courage, and public trust that make journalism fair, accurate, and essential to freedom. If myopic jurisprudence and shareholder-driven priorities deplete those skills, resources, and trust while handing huge megaphones to corporations that leave civic-minded citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard, then Trump was right: Too much of what Facebook and CBS News present as news is “fake.”
Although I was a student co-editor of my high school newspaper in 1964 and will always be grateful to its faculty advisor, John F.X. Lynch, for teaching me good values and habits, my journalism began in earnest in the mid-1970s, when I was in my mid-20s and newspapers were still trusted as carriers of democratic hope. From the civil-rights movement’s finest hours in the early 1960s through the Watergate exposes of 1973, more than a few journalists and news organizations stood tall as tribunes of the public, as trusted resources for citizen vigilance against elected officials’ and business leaders’ mishandlings of public trust. Televised imagery of civil-rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War, produced and presented by practitioners of journalism as a civic craft, pierced through fogs of official rationalizations and lies.
When such journalism exposes public corruption and private “special interests” that are hobbling popular sovereignty, it also exposes, indirectly but inevitably, some publishers, editors and reporters who’ve become sycophants to the established, corrupted forces whose investors’ interests effectively run their news organizations and platforms. Trump knew that a lot of “news” was “fake” in that way because it takes one to know one. But many Americans know it, too, only because they haven’t been seduced into the networking and pirouetting that market censorship demands of many of the journalists it hires.
In the 1970s, journalists and readers who were still independent minded and “civic” supported “alternative” newspapers and magazines that provided critical information and civic-republican clues missing from most mainstream media. I remember rushing to newsstands in Boston and New York on Wednesday evenings or Thursday mornings in the early 1970s to buy copies of The Village Voice as it tumbled off delivery trucks, bearing exposes of wrongdoing unearthed by muckrakers Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett and scathing critiques of journalism itself by Alexander Cockburn in his “Press Clips” column.
In 1982 I was thrilled to become one of them, a writer of Voice exposes and interpretations, after doing something similar for The Harvard Crimson(where I met the future national journalists Nicholas Lemann, Jonathan Alter, and others) and for The Boston Phoenix, where Joe Klein, Sidney Blumenthal, Janet Maslin, and other national journalists also got their starts, thanks to The Phoenix’s editor, Bill Miller. Later, when I worked for daily newspapers in New York, I owed a lot to the wise, principled guidance of publishers such as Steven L. Isenberg and editors such as James Klurfeld and Anthony Marro at Newsday. (A few of my Voice, Phoenix, Newsday, and Daily News pieces are on this site’s sections, “Leaders and Misleaders” and “Scoops and Revelations.”)
Since the 1990s, editors and writers at websites, such as Salon editors David Daley and, now, Andrew O’Hehir, have fused wise public judgment with passionate advocacy, without descending into ranting or propaganda. Non-profit, online community journalism has been vindicated in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, by Paul J. Bass, founder of The New Haven Independent,whose model and methods should be studied and adapted by journalists everywhere.
New Haven Independent founder and editor Paul Bass at New Haven City Hall. (Brad Horrigan / Hartford Courant)
Another public practitioner of journalism as a civic craft who reaches beyond the class-bounded interests of corporate reporters is Alissa Quart, who directs the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. This non-profit journalism organization that covers inequalities of social class that so often exclude actual voices and perspectives of daycare providers, gig workers, opiod addicts, homeless people, and even labor and community organizers from most reportage and commentary. Even when such people are quoted or depicted by Ivy League reporters who’ve never really been Squeezed in ways that Quart describes in her book by that title or Bootstrapped in ways she discusses in her forthcoming book, they need to and can participate in the practice of journalism itself as a civic craft. Quart makes that case also in her Columbia Journalism Review essay, “Let’s make journalism work for those not born into an elite class.”
When digital production began to run circles around established journalism, many observers celebrated the Internet’s instantaneity and interactivity as the liberation of news gathering and commentary. But journalism’s essential (and classical) virtues — of courage, persistence, creativity, and tough-minded, public-serving optimism — can be short-circuited and misdirected if journalists have ingested the steroid of profit-crazed, tech-driven sensationalism.
As the alternative models that I’ve just mentioned have struggled and sometimes prevailed, rising practitioners like Bass, O’Hehir, and Quart and veterans of print journalism’s supposed glory days have watched the souffle-like collapse of many proud dailies into witless titillation machines chained to conglomerate bean counters. We’ve also experienced the corporate consolidation and co-optation of alternative weeklies and websites. The challenges to all news organizations aren’t coming only from the deluge of tech-enabled, unfiltered, self-indulgent, ignorant, and anti-civic clickbait. They’re essentially corporate, coming from media executives’ and managers’ obsession with boosting their own and shareholders’ dividends in whatever ways will glue customers’ eyeballs to their screens and pages and to advertisers’ come-ons.
Publishers’ and editors’ political priorities, too, may hobble a website’s fairness as decisively as they do a print publication’s, (For example, another thematic section on this website, “Israel’s Tragedy, America’s Folly,” presents the texts of columns that I wrote for Talking Points Memo between 2007 and 2010, but those columns disappeared — along with other TPM columns about Israel by M.J. Rosenberg and Bernard Avishai. TPM founder and editor Joshua Micah Marshall proved unable or unwilling to restore or to account for these disappearances.)
Any newsroom can be a hothouse-cum-snake pit of frazzled journalists who are competing with one another as often as they’re collaborating. That was as true at many of the old print-newspapers as it is at many news outlets now. But many people became journalists in the first place back then not just to see their own names in print but to master what the media critic Jay Rosen, in What Are Journalists For?, describes as a civic craft that helps to make public life go well by strengthening public vigilance and intelligence, not paranoia and ignorance.
Along with Paul Bass in New Haven, another master and eloquent defender of this civic craft is Dean Starkman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who meticulously, fairly documented the American business press’ failures to report the oncoming train wreck of the 2008 national financial meltdown. Dean told hard truths about those failures, writing as a managing editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I first read him. He told those truths again in The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, which I reviewed for Dissent magazine under a headline, “Reporting for the Republic”.
I hosted Dean Starkman at Yale, as I did Paul Bass, in my seminar on “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy” and, with Dean, at a class of future business leaders at the Yale School of Management. He shared his understanding of the difference between “accountability” journalism, which requires dogged investigation of entities that don’t want to be investigated, and mere “access” journalism, in which reporters expend too much of their talent on stroking powerful hands that feed them stories that are marketable but unenlightening. Dean has since worked with The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which carries accountability journalism far and wide.
Dean Starkman: Truth above ‘Access’
No one intuited the priorities of profit-chasing news organizations better than Ronald Reagan, who built his political career partly by playing self-righteously on journalists’ weaknesses even while castigating ratings-obsessed media for taking the bait of sensational-sounding stories that “sell papers.’ Here’s Reagan, talking with some of my Yale classmates in 1967, blaming journalism for distorting public understanding in ways that he himself had been distorting it since the 1940s. Both Reagan and the press were equally to blame for this dance of the damned. The same was true of Trump and the press decades later.
Can journalism as a civic craft outrun this circus? The newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann doubted that it could, explaining, as early as the 1920s, why mass media were unlikely to generate anything more than “manufactured consent” from a busy, distracted, and often gullible “buying public.” The challenges facing public truth are much older and deeper than those driven by manufacturing and buying. I can’t resist citing Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to convey my apprehensions about what has become of American journalism since the end of the Cold War and of the relatively egalitarian material opportunities that had followed the victory against fascism in World War II. Gibbon could have been anticipating our condition now when he wrote that:
“This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished…. [T]hey no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command…. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.
“… A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste. The sublime Longinus… laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries…. ‘In the same manner,’ says he, ‘as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients.”
Gibbon had his own 18th-century political agendas and prejudices. But several founders of the American republic had read him before they wrote the Constitution, so they knew that a polity needs to guard against slow and secret poisons. What they didn’t reckon with effectively was the reality that only some of those poisons come from government and that they aren’t slow or secret. Here are my accounts of some of the consequences.
“Manufactured Consent,”The Washington Monthly, March, 2001. American news media’s mishandling of the 2000 election and of the prospects for responsible civil disobedience at that time.
What Leon Wieseltier’s Fall Showed About Washington’s Chattering Classes, AlterNet, Nov. 2011. For one thing, it revealed that they take war-mongering like his less seriously than groping. Wieseltier wasn’t wrong to warn that sometimes liberals must take up the gun and fight, but he was wrong to live for and in those times. Washington didn’t notice or object. His mild, mannered sexism mattered more.
Wieseltier, honored by Brandeis University
“Enough With the F***ing Rich Kids.”The tragedy of The New Republic in 2012-2014, when it was owned by Chris Hughes, a wunderkind of commodification. Salon, December 9, 2014. Hughes and his kind didn’t misread what journalism, politics and capitalism in America are becoming. They read it only too well. Like so many other young, market-molded Americans, they don’t understand how the perversion of public life by tsunamis of marketing, financing and technological innovation has overwhelmed thoughtful writing, reading and the habits of mind and heart that sustain republican deliberation and institutions. (I don’t suggest that The New Republic was a better champion of America’s civic-republican ethos when it was owned byMartin Peretz,even though I wrote for it (and “around” Peretz’s prejudices) then.)
Between June, 2007, when Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy The Wall Street Journal from Dow Jones was briefly in doubt — and August, when it became clear that he would take possession by the end of the year — I wrote four columns cautioning, cajoling, assailing, and ultimately despairing of journalists who were becoming Murdoch’s apologists.
I wrote this Discussion Paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy when I was a fellow there in 1998. In it I argue that conglomerate news media are more interested in niche marketing to new immigrant groups than in guiding and prodding the newcomers toward full citizenship. It’s as if corporate bean-counters have displaced civic leaders at the helms of these news organizations, letting down immigrants by lavishing upon them the soft bigotry of low expectations of them as citizens. To understand what’s at risk for the country, read this account of how news organizations sometimes welcomed — and challenged — immigrants more constructively and less opportunistically on bottom-lining terms than they do now.
In 2002, reviewing William McGowan’s book Coloring the News, in which he challenged corporate newsrooms’ cookie-cutter, “diversity”-driven coding of hiring reporters and assigning them stories unofficially but effectively by race-and surname, I endorsed many of McGowan’s criticisms but cautioned against overdoing them. In 2011, he really did overdo them in Gray Lady Down, his conservative-funded, ideologically driven attack on the admittedly flawed New York Times, prompting me to take down his take-down,not so much to defend the Times as to defend journalism more broadly against what I characterized as ‘ressentiment’ that was insinuating itself into reporting and commentary.
Memory and judgment, not “proof,” led me to decide in 1996 that Joe Klein, a prominent columnist and TV pundit, was also Anonymous, the unnamed author of the novel Primary Colors, a roman a clef about Bill Clinton and his circle. I first identified Klein that way to William Powers, the Washington Post’s media columnist (the relevant column is the second item on this pdf). In a subsequent column of my own, I insisted on the validity of my finding, even though most journalists still accepted Klein’s vehement denials that he was the novelist. I couldn’t persuade anyone to publish yet another column of mine that began, “May I remind Joe ‘I didn’t do it’ Klein of O.J. Simpson’s vow that he will ‘leave no stone unturned’ until he finds Nicole Brown Simpson’s killer?…. If Klein didn’t write Primary Colors, let him devote his far-more-considerable investigative skills to finding its author.”
Only when another reporter discovered a paper manuscript of Klein’s novel with his own handwriting on it did Klein confess vindicating my claim. Why had I been so sure of his authorship, despite his denials? Having read and admired many of Klein’s columns in New York magazine in the late 1980s, I hadn’t forgotten his characteristic locutions and obsessions about liberals and race. So I noticed them when some of them popped up in the novel — as, for example, when he punctuated his account of some politically correct absurdity by writing, simply, “Yikes!” Then I saw a column in the Baltimore Sun by David Kusnet, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, that expressed similar suspicions, so I read Klein’s novel again and more of his locutions leapt off of its pages. It was then that I called the Post’s Powers, who wrote about the “Kusnet/Sleeper theory” of authorship. That prompted Klein to leave me an exasperated voice-mail message: “Jim, I don’t have a patent on the word ‘Yikes’!”
Well, maybe so. We were in a gray area, where I “knew” a truth in my bones thanks only to good memory, some literary acumen, some political judgment, and some circumstantial evidence. When Klein finally told the truth at a press conference with the novel’s publisher, Random House’s Harry Evans, I faced him wordlessly from the crowd of reporters. And, in a Wall Street Journal column (linked here with the Powers column), I offered my interpretation of why he’d lied so vigorously, and at what cost to journalism and politics.
An early storm warning about moralism and arrogance
Also in the realm of predictions based on memory and judgment, I wrote somewhat nastily about journalism itself for the first time in a Daily News column in 1994, predicting that the New York Times’ then-editorial-page editor Howell Raines would cause problems for the paper and journalism generally. I said it again at length in 1997 in Liberal Racism, in the chapter called “Media Myopia.”
But not until 10 years after my News column was Raines brought down, partly by the scandalously false reporting of a young Times reporter, Jayson Blair. Raines is a great journalist with great flaws, including but not limited his a penitential Southern anti-racism that can get so tangled up in itself that it clouds realistic judgments upon which true justice always has to rely.
By the time of Raines’ editorial demise in the Blair affair, I was no longer at the Daily News but couldn’t resist writing an “I told you so” column in the Hartford Courant (it comes after the Daily News column in the link above) that was widely linked and reprinted. It even wound up in The Jerusalem Post, edited at the time by Bret Stephens, whose neo-con’ish, McGowan-like inclinations inclined him to highlight a crisis at a liberal newspaper such as the Times – which later hired Stephens, when it was running scared of conservative competitors.
I’ve defended and even celebrated Times writers and editors who’ve kept the better, harder faith. See “Who Needs the New York Times? We all do. Still.” It ran in TPM and was read widely by journalists at the time, but it was one of a raft of columns by me and other contributors that disappeared from that website.
The cheapest kind of flattery
Commentaries that break new ideas rather than news are more easily stolen that news itself. Not long after I’d written this Washington Post review of Marshall Frady’s biography of Jesse Jackson, 18 paragraphs of my review wound up under someone else’s byline a few weeks later in the San Francisco Chronicle. The reasons were instructive, if depressing. My Hartford Courant column reflecting on them, partly in light of the Jayson Blair debacle, is the second column on this pdf.
Running scared of right-wing “noise”
When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. hired the neo-conservative field marshal and propagandist William Kristol as an opinion-age columnist in 2007, I sensed that Sulzberger was running scared of The Wall Street Journal’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch. Certainly the Times needed sharp conservative commentators who can keep-liberal readers on their toes, but Kristol was the opposite of sharp, and his tenure there was mercifully short. Bret Stephens is much sharper than Kristol was, but no less propagandistic. Ross Douthat is more broad-ranging and engaging there, but he’s so often obsessed with blaming social ills on liberal domination that I diagnosed him for the History News Networkas a walking casualty of IDS — Ideological Displacement Syndrome.
Book reviewing as ideological policing
The journalist Nicholas von Hoffman once told me that he’d given up reviewing books because he’d decided that “It’s not worth $250 to make an enemy for life.” Even just assigning and editing other writers’ book reviews can earn book-review editors some enemies for life, and that danger inclines some editors and some favored, “reliable” reviewers to cozy up to one another in unspoken ways, when it comes to picking and choosing their prospective battles “safely” as books and reviewers are assigned. Some book-review sections come to resemble clubhouses or royal courts, in which editors bestow assignments on reviewers who anticipate and follow their preferences instead of ruffling their feathers. Is the author of a book that’s being considered for a review “in good odor” with the review editor? is the author acceptable ideologically? There are fairer ways to assess a book’s merits and to assign reviewers to assess them. But some editors decide on the basis of the narrower inclinations and prejudices that I’ve just mentioned.
I exposed such difficulties in this 2007 Nation magazine broadside against The New York Times Book Review, which, under editor Sam Tanenhaus, a self-described “sympathetic observer” of conservatism, was running a steady stream of negative reviews of books by critics of the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007, as the reality of America’s grand misadventure there was moving from triumphal to inexcusable. One day I told Tanenhaus’ deputy editor Barry Gewen that the NYTBR had become “a war-hawks’ damage-control gazette.” Even a publication with a broad reach and civic mission will have some distinctive editorial preferences (and strengths and weaknesses), but my Nation piece showed pretty damningly that the Times had gone too far in favor of excusing the war and bashing its critics. By showcasing pro-war reviewers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Brookhiser, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, and David Brooks, the NYTBR fed public antipathy to presumptively feckless opponents of the war.
Given how I’ve spent the last 40 years, I plead guilty to having expected more of journalism than it can deliver on its own. But in the next thematic section, “Scoops and Revelations,” I recount some of my journalistic triumphs that I dare say did help to make public life go well.
Ultimately, journalists draw upon and reflect the strengths (and weaknesses) of the deeper (or shallower) civic culture that they serve (or dis-serve). “The public’s right to know” can become a meaningless slogan for journalism’s mission if the public is demanding to be lied to because millions of its members are stressed and dispossessed enough to crave simple directions for scapegoating others and following Leaders. When Trump called journalism “fake news,” he was anticipating bad journalism’s acceleration of such desperation.
But journalism fails that way only after subtler poisons have stupefied its readers and viewers. For that, I blame the deluge of commercially over-determined, algorithmically driven, hollow “speech” by conglomerates, only some of which are in the business of journalism itself. I’ve outlined this challenge in the essays “Speech Defects,” in The Baffler, and “How Hollow Speech Enables Hostile Speech,”in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will (Wikimedia/AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
American conservatism has many mansions and sects, but few conservatives can reconcile their yearning for an ordered, sometimes sacred, liberty with their obeisance to nearly every whim and riptide of capital that’s dissolving the liberty they cherish.
Today’s corporate consumer capitalism, far from being the Lockean expression of creative, private work that conservatives have long claimed it to be, degrades individuals and subverts civic-republican dispositions and traditions. It’s also undermining national sovereignty with a speed that confounds conservative understandings of patriotism. Among the pacified and degraded are conservatives themselves, as I became exasperated enough to explain in “The Coddling of the Conservative Mind.”
Whittaker Chambers told William F. Buckley in 1970 that one can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism because capitalism disrupts culture. He didn’t blame this on the conservative movement’s noxious neo-conservative cheerleaders and squawk-talk radio and cable TV drones, but on central contradictions within conservatism itself. Libertarian conservatives dismiss a lot of the “order” that other conservatives demand; orthodox religious conservatives try to impose doctrinal order on a fallen world, even while sighing occasionally, like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, at doctrinal order’s often-hypocritical, even brutal, results.
Yet most conservatives keep on trying to reconcile capitalism and community values in symposia at elegant redoubts such as their Manhattan Institute and their Hoover Institution at Stanford or by teaching the classics opportunistically, as in the Grand Strategy program at Yale during the early 2000’s, which I’ve criticized obliquely below. More often these days, conservatives end up projecting the central contradictions between their moralism and their materialism — and the bourgeois self-loathing that it often prompts — onto scapegoats at home and abroad. They dine out on leftist follies so often that they’ve forgotten how to cook for themselves and the rest of us, and they’ve abandoned their conservative kitchen to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
Capitalist markets should be honored in their place, which is determined by a sovereign polity exercising republican vigilance. Profit-maximizing multinationals subvert that vigilance and republics themselves, through anarchic consumer marketing and the seduction, corruption, and control of politicians. The tragedy is that many conservatives truly mean better. When they vow to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy from liberals, they mean to defend a classical liberalism that balances individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property with the same individuals’ responsibilities as republican citizens. They want students to become loving and self-disciplined enough to rise above narrow self-interest to enhance the common good in a true commonwealth.
Such conservatives know that a decent society shelters the spark and flame of individual dignity and conscience but that it can’t presume to light that flame in the first place — or extinguish it. Conservatives think that that flame is lit and sustained by faith or natural law. But even a conservative republic’s “civil religion” can’t create or, ultimately, sustain that flame. Conservatives often blame leftists and left-liberals for ignoring this sublime truth and for relying too heavily on its statist supports. Most liberals haven’t a credible answer to that accusation, but neither do conservatives who’ve prospered so well in the system as it is that they make only philanthropic or moralistic gestures against its deepening, increasingly dangerous inequities.
Yet neither today’s liberals nor conservatives can quite bring themselves to defend the corporate and financial dispensation wholeheartedly. Sensitive to individual rights and sufferings, they want to strengthen society’s public provisions without restricting individual liberties. For that they rely on outside incubators of virtues and beliefs which a classically liberal state itself cannot nourish or even enforce very well, committed as it is to protect and even expand individual autonomy. Conservatives share in that dilemma because the mayhem that’s rising all around and within us is driven in no small way by the seductions and stresses of corporate consumer marketing and employment.
Defenders of today’s capitalism forget, or only opportunistically invoke, Adam Smith’s theory of the moral sentiments and a civic-republican patriotism that might be enabled and ennobled by a classical education. But instead of taking that challenge as seriously as they claim to do, conservatives careen incoherently between loyalty to a national-security state and subservience to a post-national, global capitalism that, far more than terrorism, is dissolving both the state and the republican virtues on which they rely. Call Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez insufferable scolds, if you wish, but there’s such a thing as “economic violence” that does eviscerate the villages that raise the children. Wall Street does subvert Main Street and morals.
Here are some of the essays and reviews I’ve written to assess these challenges and conservatives’ efforts to meet them:
“Half-Right,”Commonweal, Feb. 13, 2009. Review of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Where Ross Douthat Goes Wrong,History News Network
“By Gradual Paces,”The American Prospect, 2004; how conservatives betrayed the founders’ original intentions for the American republic.
“Thucydiots,”The American Prospect, 2004. The Iraq War’s folly was evident to some of us early on.
“Humanists and Warriors,” The Yale Politic, 2007. How conservatives misconstrue the humanities and leadership training for a national security state within American republic.
Video of me “answering” conservative writer Amity Shlaes at a conference on “American Exceptionalism” organized by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, 2014. Shlaes, David Bromwich, Joan Richardson, and I were on a panel discussion, “The Unmaking of Americans.” To see my comments on Shlaes’ remarks, go to 37:57 on this video.
“Conservatives’ Conundrum — and Ours,”History News Network June 18, 2008. What’s gotten into George Packer? His account of “The Fall of Conservatism” in the May 26 New Yorker shows mainly how the chattering classes, liberal as well as conservative, avoid reckoning our civic-republican decline.
“Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea-Change,”Salmagundi, 2006. This essay about what I called “the pornification of public space,” written for the 40th anniversary issue of the quarterly Salmagundi, was reduced and adapted for the Dallas Morning News, where it got a lot of reaction from members of the Christian right, a lot more of it positive than I’d have expected.
Here they go again. October, 2009, David Brooks, Afghanistan, and neocons’ habit of celebrating sacrifices that they don’t make.
“Neoconservative chickens coming home to roost,”The Guardian, 2007, a potted history of their misconceptions and missteps, occasioned by essays and a lecture by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus late in 2007.
“The Wiley E. Coyote Conservatives,”The American Prospect, 2006 What will it take for conservative movement pundits in pursuit of liberal subversion to realize they’ve fallen off the cliff? This was posted as well on CBS News’ website.
“Timmerman and the Case For a New Politics, “The Bennington Review, 1982. Anyone who has followed neoconservative drumbeating for an aggressive American foreign policy will be amused but also outraged by this 1982 account of their silence about — and apologetics for — a brutal, anti-Semitic dictatorship’s violations of human rights.
“Hawking War Guilt,”The Nation, November 12, 2007. How the New York Times Book Review became Iraq Warhawks’ damage-control gazette.
Sketches of public leaders I’ve known or have watched closely
Mario Cuomo (and Andrew)
This profile of Mario Cuomo made him governor. I’m not kidding. When The Village Voice ran it in June, 1982, during the Democratic primary campaign, he was seven points behind Ed Koch, who’d defeated him for the mayoralty five years earlier with a strong death-penalty pitch that Cuomo courageously resisted. I sketched his fascinating mind and character as well as the politics that shadowed this race. The piece turned heads by re-introducing elite liberals and leftists to an “outer borough ethnic” whom they’d spurned in 1977. I showed that Cuomo was a more brilliant, bravely grounded “liberal” than Koch.
Cuomo disappointed me and other supporters when he decided not to run for president and, more surprisingly, when he turned downBill Clinton’s invitation in 1993 to nominate him to the Supreme Court. Andrew Cuomo was deeply involved in his father’s prevarications on this in ways that suggested flaws in the son that seemed to me to play off of flaws in the father. When Mario Cuomo ran for a fourth term, in 1994, I wrote some less-than-generous New York Daily News columns. He lost to moderate Republican George Pataki. When he died at 81, in 2015, I softened my still-saddened assessment of Mario but recalled a couple of things that had made his inability to accept Clinton’s offer especially shocking and disappointing.
George W. Bush
George W. Bush. Having known Bush slightly during our years in the same residential college at Yale, where he was president of one of my roommates’ fraternity, I had a few insights to share, along with a special photo, from my own class year book, that no one else had found, during his re-election campaign in 2004. So I wrote Bush and the Bad Boy Vote, LAT, 2004.pdf (jimsleeper.com)for the Los Angeles Times.
George Bush delivers illegal but gratifying right hook to an opponent in Rugby, 1966
Ed Koch
Ed Koch’s mouth and New York’s prospects,Dissent magazine, 1981. The King of New York,New York Times, Feb. 2, 2013, The column, about Ed Koch as I saw him in the early 1980s and got to know him better in the late 1990s, was written the day of his death and published a day later.
A Strong Voice for Democracy is Lost. March 26, 2014. My first, brief posting about his passing appeared inThe Washington Monthly and was picked up rapidly by AlterNet, HuffingtonPost, Bookforum, and History News Network. The next day I published a column in the Yale Daily News that was cross-published by the U.K. site openDemocracy.net and by History News Network. Several people have written me since then to say that Jonathan Schell’s writing, especially on nuclear arms, changed their lives.
The year-long civic-republican revival rally of 2008, and the challenges of 2011.
I began writing about Obama with my “civic-republican” pen in 2007, tracing the arc of his rise, travails. and accomplishments. My assessments of him evolved, and you can witness that evolution by reading these columns, which are presented as they were posted during the campaign. If you’re writing a book or a journal article or presentation for a conference about his presidency, you’ll want to read this chronicle and assessment of his 2008 campaign, which I followed as a columnist on several websites. (See also: Obama bin Dustbin? Leaders, Great and Small.)
Can we ever get beyond “left” and “right” by synthesizing each side’s better elements into a way of life that’s old and honored but also new and responsive?
Some American conservatives now acknowledge that their long-standing commitment to “ordered liberty” can’t survive their lockstep reliance on financialized and conglomerated riptides that derange ordered liberty’s ways of communicating, culture-making, and enforcing mutual obligation.
Others, instead of acknowledging the lockstep and its costs, displace their frustration onto targets for hatred, sometimes by scapegoating ethno-racial minorities and/or women and/or leftist excesses and hypocrisies.
But both sides, left and right, have been gaslighting us by condemning capitalism’s affronts yet relying on them more than they acknowledge.
Some conservatives finesse their contradictory celebrations of “liberty” and corporate capitalism by urging sacred, “throne and altar” guidance for our eternally divided human hearts. They seek an authoritative state capitalism — sometimes authoritarian, sometimes religious — to channel the accumulation and distribution of private wealth amid recent economic, technological, climatic, migratory, demographic, and cultural upheavals. But no one knows how to ride these global riptides constructively.
Some conservatives have always tried to make ethno-racial differences a central organizing principle of public life, hoping to achieve order and peace by placing every group in its place, with a label on its face, under the tutelage of Western (historically white) classical liberalism.
Progressives oppose such strategies. They accuse conservatives of intensifying capitalism’s dark, destructive downsides instead of challenging its depredations forthrightly. But many liberals and self-avowed progressives have defaulted to racial and sexual identity politics or groupthink, sometimes militantly, in ways reinforce inequality and economic dispossession and that endorse ethno-racial and sexual separatism. They may break a structure’s “glass ceiling” with “the first Black woman” or “the first gay man” as its CEO, but without reconfiguring the structure’s capitalist walls and foundations and priorities.
Ironically, some liberal Democrats who tout breaking glass ceilings have rushed to join Republicans in breaking the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, whose repeal Bill Clinton signed in 1999, enabling big commercial banks to speculate wildly in financial markets and thereby helping to prompt the 2008 economic meltdown. But breaking glass ceilings cannot excuse or cover for breaking Glass-Steagall and the social justice that it protected.
Conservatives aren’t always wrong to condemn leftist progressives for clinging to “the illusion that in politics there is anywhere a safe harbor, a destination to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress,” as the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it. Nor are conservatives always wrong to yearn for a “positive liberty” that accepts social obligations within wisely ordered material, spiritual, and ethno-racial frameworks. Civic republicanism balances individual rights and freedoms with mutual obligations in a commonwealth that serves the general welfare by imposing some restraints, without asphyxiating individual conscience and autonomy. “Obedience to Law is Liberty,” reads an engraving on a courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I was born. In this website, I explore what this entails.
Civic republicanism puts reasonable restraints on commercial, religious, ethno-racial, and individual behaviors, even while it protects a fairly high degree of liberty. It relies on the rule of laws that are enacted democratically; on expectations of mutual respect and rational communication; and on inspiring narratives, “myths,” or “constitutive fictions” that organize our energies for constructive ends. It reminds us and our children that a strong society, like a strong individual, strides forward on two feet — a “left” one of social equality and provision (public schools, public health care, and Social Security), without which the individual and communal strengths that conservatives cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right” foot of irreducibly personal conscience, responsibility and autonomy, without which even the best-intentioned social engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
Some of this balanced stride can come from public undertakings by a state that’s elected democratically. But for that stride to lead to freedom, most of its energy must come from voluntary individual and associational initiatives in entrepreneurial ventures, religious communities, labor unions, cultural organizations, and other undertakings in what we call “civil society,” which maintains some independence from statist and market forces.
Civic republicanism also relies on humanistic education — some of it classical, some of it religious — that cultivates intellectual and moral virtues. It shares Aristotle’s view that humans are the noblest of animals when they have deep education and sound politics that prepare them to govern themselves through dialogue, reflection, and authoritative choice, but not through force and fraud. Without that balance, humans all-too-easily become prey to despotic rule. Civic-republican strategies and customs subordinate beastly and despotic inclinations to voluntary, associational efforts, regulated by law. Civic republicans can smell a despot coming from a mile away, and they reject demagogic seductions and intimidations.
The following pieces sketch some of the civic-republican strengths and risks that I’ve just mentioned:
Decadence “By Gradual Paces,”The American Prospect, 2004. Written shortly before George W. Bush’s re-election, this carried warnings from the republic’s founders and from Edward Gibbon
“Gip, Gip, Hooray!” Ronald Reagan euthanized American civic culture even while celebrating it. History News Network, 1997
“Should American Journalism Make Us Americans?” How American media companies profess “diversity” but foster division. A 1998 discussion paper that I wrote for Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
Religion in its Place – ICNLThis essay was written for a conference on “Nurturing Civil Society” at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School in 2004. I say that we “can’t live with it, can’t live without it,” because a republic needs a “civil religion” to anchor and inspire its young.
Civic Republicanism: Good for the Jews, by Win McCormack, The New Republic, 2020 An endorsement of my arguments by the magazine’s publisher, himself a strong exponent of civic-republicanism.
A liberal democracy relies on its citizens to uphold, voluntarily, certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state nor markets truly nourish or defend. The liberal state can’t do it because it’s not supposed to impose one way of life over another, so it can’t always distinguish legally or morally between constructive entrepreneurs and opportunistic free riders. Markets can’t do it because they “work” by approaching individuals primarily as self-interested investors and consumers, not as citizens who can be relied on to restrain their self-interest at times to enhance the public interest.
But American colleges and the private preparatory and public schools did traditionally nourish and defend civic virtues and beliefs. They strengthened the common good by preparing their students for civic and political responsibility and leadership — sometimes even for dissenting leadership. Yet most colleges and schools were institutionally racist. sexist, and elitist. Many of their “old-school” alumni were clubby managers and facilitators of financial, legal, and business establishments that served states and markets more readily than they nourished civic-republican virtues.
Still, if you had to choose between today’s would-be autocrats, on the one hand, and graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan, you’d choose the latter, hoping that they’d been trained to hold themselves accountable to civic-republican standards, even though they sometimes departed from them for “clubby,” partisan, and ideological purposes.
Some of the following pieces take you into those collegiate, civic-republican struggles to balance truth-seeking with wealth making and accountable power-wielding. After the 1960s, many old, selective, civic-republican colleges like Yale tried to throw out the dirty bathwater of their institutional racism, sexism, and elitism. But they also threw out the baby of strong, civic-republican social bonding that had come from a WASP, patrilineal culture. Now it would would have to come from somewhere else, but from where, and from what? The hard truth is that the old colleges haven’t found new wellsprings. They’ve have been overwhelmed by “liberal” and “market” forces that have no moorings or trajectories to keep faith with.
King and Kingman at Yale, 1964
In the middle of the last decade, conservatives, who’d been complaining about the loss of direction ever since William F. Buckley Jr. had written God and Man at Yale in 1954, mounted a ferocious campaign to blame leftist political correctness and godless socialism but not the market forces that were narrowing education’s horizons to those of investors and consumers. I pushed back against that assault, even though I’m also critical of racial identity politics (white and otherwise), and of a lot else that’s considered “politically correct.” The following pieces sort through these charges. I find political correctness loathsome but not as decisive as the seemingly more anodyne but more destructive marketization of liberal education. The colleges don’t challenge the casino-like financialization of their own missions; they succumb to it and even celebrate it. Take a look:
Training a republic’s governing elites, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 2004, a review of The Guardians, by Geoffrey Kabaservice. In this review I revivified a civic-republican standard for liberal education that sees beyond certitudes of left and right in order to be itself and to stimulate open, but rigorous thinking. Years later, when Trump’s presidency and impeachment had made these matters even more urgent, I made similar arguments more briefly for undergraduate readers of The Yale Daily News
Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind, The New York Times, 2005. (Where the conservative campaign to rescue liberal education from liberals goes wrong — and betrays one of its supposed heroes, Allan Bloom.
“Blame Those Ivy League Liberals!”, urge conservative pundits, recycling a familiar dodge of the real reasons why income disparities are destroying American politics. TPMCafe, Oct. 25, 2010
What ‘Liberal’ Academy? October 21, 2009. In writing this column and this letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education, I was provoked by an exchange there among Mark Lilla, Alan Wolfe, and Bruce L. R. Smith about “liberal” bias against conservative scholars. Most of their observations missed the elephant in the room: The real cause of intellectual and cultural conformity on many campuses isn’t leftists or liberals, silly though their priorities and policies have may be, but swift market currents driving students and administrators, as well as professors themselves. The Chronicle published my letter, and my column gives it some context.
The more important challenge, I say at least briefly in these two essays and will address more directly this fall, is to renew what’s best in these schools, which do have a special role to play in American public discourse and regeneration. To say that the colleges are compromised by the increasingly illegitimate and unsustainable regime they currently serve is only half an answer: They haven’t always been in synch with the powers of the day, and they’ve sometimes stood apart and stimulated real reform.
Renew America’s great liberal-arts colleges, don’t just assail them. I posed this challenge in Bookforum in June, 2014 and more broadly in Salon, July 25, 2014, as former Yale English Professor and essayist William Deresiewicz became the latest would-be prophet to succumb to marketing pressures. The New Republic ran a chapter of his book Excellent Sheep under the headline, “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League!”, fulfilling my prediction, in Bookforum, that, by promoting books like his, the gilded cage’s conscience-keepers would drag the kept through yet another empty ritual of self-flagellation on their way back to college. As I explain further in Salon — and as others noted later — there’s a monumental hypocrisy in Ivy League editors’ and professors’ telling 18-year-olds and parents to avoid the colleges that they themselves attended or taught at and would still do anything to send their own kids to.
What Politics Does to History. How a former senior U.S. Foreign Service officer miscarried liberal education as Yale’s Diplomat in Residence. Salon, 2021
Henry Kissinger, Charles Hill and George Shultz (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/U.S. Navy/Eric Dietrich)
Loyalty Gone Wrong: Review of The Man TIME Forgot,by Isaiah Wilner, Yale Alumni Magazine, 2006 (Scroll way down the pdf to “Loyalty Gone Wrong”) If you tend to idealize the “old,” white-male Yale, this may temper your enthusiasm.
Liberal education vs, money, power, and public relations.“Examining the Crimson’s Civic Slide,” The Boston Globe, 2008. Review of former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis’ book, Education Without a Soul.)
(TPM, History News Network, The Guardian, and Dissent)
Between June 18, 2007, when Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy The Wall Street Journal from its Dow Jones and Bancroft family owners was in doubt, and August 7, when he had won his bid, I cautioned, cajoled, assailed, and ultimately despaired of some journalists who became Murdoch’s apologists and, in one case, even his cheerleaders. The more reflective of my columns here below are “Rupert vs. the Republic” and “Murdoch and His Enablers.” The harshest is “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Another Good Journalist Lost, Along with TheWall Street Journal.”
“Rupert Murdoch has grown so desperate in his attempt to buy Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal that he’ll tell any lie he thinks will help,” wrote Slate’s Jack Shafer on May 24.
In half a dozen columns, Shafer himself has sounded a bit desperate to expose Murdoch’s lies in order to discredit his bid. He’s right to note that “Murdoch doesn’t exasperate because he’s a conservative; he exasperates because he has no principles.” But the ownership and investment system which Murdoch is gaming doesn’t have any principles, either. It will take more than investigative journalism, satire, or commentary like Shafer’s or mine to pose the challenge that needs to be posed.
I share the desperation about Murdoch for two reasons. Contrary to a perception common on the left, the Journal’s news pages are ethical and sparkling — unlike its speculator-worshipping fact-challenged editorial pages. Second, my cousin James Wechsler was editorial page editor of the crusading, liberal New York Post when Murdoch bought it from publisher Dolly Schiff in 1977 and promised to maintain its political independence, only to make it a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.
But it can have astonished no one that, after some fretting about journalistic integrity, the Journal’s Bancroft family owners agreed to meet with Murdoch as the price of Dow Jones stock surged: What, besides profit, could have driven Dow’s mostly anonymous whorl of shareholders, whose composition changes daily at the clicks of brokers’ mouses?
The Bancrofts do retain legal control of Dow Jones and the Journal through Class B super-voting stock, along with some portraits of ancestors whose pieties about journalism as a public trust still ring in their ears. They might be able to withstand Murdoch’s carrots and sticks for the sake of something besides free-market freedom – the freedom of intelligent stewards to run a company by more than just its bottom line.
They might, that is, if times were better and if some Bancrofts weren’t dividend hogs themselves. “As a rule,” the Journal itself reported, “trustees have a fiduciary duty to serve the interests of the beneficiaries, but the Bancroft trust documents generally don’t stipulate that the trustees must maximize the value of the trust’s holdings of Dow Jones shares.”
But now that Murdoch’s offer has driven up the price of Dow’s more public, Class A shares, those brokers’ mouses will roar if the family turns him down. The stock will plummet as greed whirls elsewhere, and shareholder lawsuits may claim that the family abdicated its fiduciary responsibilities. New offers by others may “save the day,” but for what? That’s the important question.
In the republic we used to have alongside loose-limbed markets, informed citizens (including capitalists) were supposed to choose when to rise above narrow self-interest. Voters could organize to curb or even contravene some market forces to achieve public goals which self-interested consumers and companies can’t achieve alone. The hitch is that for some time now corporations have enjoyed the legal status of “persons,” entitled by law to free speech and other citizens’ rights; yet at these same corporations are enjoined by their charters only to maximize profits and market share. The consequences for republican freedom are closing in on us all.
If a General Electric subsidiary can profit by pumping porn movies into hotel rooms, why not? It’s legal. Corporations are “persons” entitled to freedom of speech, no matter that the republic’s founders intended this freedom only for persons who could persuade one another, in open debate, to set aside self-interest sometimes for the greater good. When was the last time you debated Murdoch’s News Corporation? If he can make more by scaring or titillating customers than by informing them, no one can balk. If the Bancrofts balk, other Dow Jones shareholders may balk at them.
On the job, every media-corporation employee has to do whatever management thinks will glue the most eyeballs to the newspaper or TV screen. Citizen activists who try to talk with corporate minions in civic terms often have an out-of-body experience. Just reading or watching what’s churned out by the glad-handing, goosing, scare-mongering producers of Fox and even the NBC Nightly News is an out-of-body experience for anyone seeking enlightenment or reinforcement of the values and virtues without which no republic can cohere.
Murdoch is especially bad here because his huge engines so brilliantly stimulate fear, mistrust, and impulse buying, often subliminally. But he’s merely an especially duplicitous excrescence of bottom-line imperatives that have corrupted many great newspaper families and broadcast pioneers before the Murdochs and the Bancrofts. Even the most civic-minded heirs must bow to shareholder pressures like those Murdoch has goosed here.
Journalists’ responses are often wrenching and sad. Newspapers that were dying through no fault of theirs amid conglomerate and technological upheaval get editors and writers whose consumerist pandering only makes their papers deserve the deaths they’re dying. Some editors attempt a phony irreverence, offering us noisy simulacra of freewheeling controversy in which nothing I’ve mentioned above can be discussed. Some even bait liberals at home and enemies abroad. That distracts these courtiers and servants of the quarterly bottom line from facing their own slavery and fills them with illusions of liberation and righteous mission.
But let’s try a less desperate, less damning approach to capitalist masters. I’d like the Bancrofts to meet Matt Pottinger, a former employee of theirs who has put his life on the line, hoping to defend the very freedoms the Bancroft family claims it wants to strengthen.
Some Bancrofts may recall opening their Wall Street Journals one morning shortly before Christmas, 2005 and reading an op-ed piece by Pottinger entitled, “Mightier than the Pen.”
“When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines,” he began, “I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that’s not the whole answer” – especially because he was already 31 when he changed venues.
Reporting on China had taught him “what a non-democratic country can do to its citizens” – and to reporters. He learned “that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule…. That makes you think about protecting your country…. What impresses you most, when you don’t have them day to day, are the institutions that distinguish the U.S.: the separation of powers, a free press, the right to vote, and a culture that values civic duty and service, to name but a few.
“I’m not an uncritical, rah-rah American. Living abroad has sharpened my view of what’s wrong with my country, too. It’s obvious that we need to reinvent ourselves in various ways, but we should also be allowed to do it from within, not according to someone else’s dictates.”
The Journal received letters of soaring praise for Pottinger from its editorial page readership’s many armchair warriors. But what if he’s risking his life to defend the Bancrofts’ right to choose maximum gains over good journalism? When he signed up to protect his country, he seemed not to have noticed who and what is endangering our freedom to reinvent ourselves from within. What if the most immediate threat comes from Dick Cheney, not Saddam Hussein, or from Murdoch (and the Bancrofts, if they sell to him), not Al Quaeda?
Marines can’t protect republican freedoms against predators like Murdoch. A liberal capitalist society has to rely on virtues and beliefs which neither the liberal state nor free markets themselves can enforce or nourish because, in the name of freedom, they can’t draw distinctions between bold free spirits and parasitical free riders. Citizens alone can draw such distinctions, exercising their sovereign freedom to discover, describe, debate, and legislate a few necessary parameters.
That’s just what good journalism promotes. Two years after joining the Marines, Pottinger wrote another op ed, on May 31, entitled “A Trust Murdoch Won’t Keep” and addressed to “Dear Shareholders of Dow Jones & Co.” Writing from Iraq’s Anbar province, where his unit had just barely escaped a crater-generating explosion, he told of his realization that journalism like that of “the Wall Street Journal isn’t a commodity — it’s a vital national resource. It is possible that there are only three or four U.S newspapers of its reach still willing to do what it takes to dig that last foot for a story and to strictly observe the ‘church-state’ divisions among news, opinion and an owner’s broader commercial interests.
“It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch does not own such a paper. His mission is to blur the lines between church and state…. Some things in America need to be protected, and none more than a free and intrepid press…. [T]he loss of [the Journal’s] rigorous, undiluted reporting would be a hole in America’s heart deeper than that hole in the road.”
Pottinger gives damning specifics about Murdoch. How did the Journal letter writers who’d praised him in 2005 respond now that his warnings pointed back home? We’ve not heard from them, because the Journal’s speculator-driven op-ed pages, which are panting for Murdoch, didn’t publish Pottinger this time. Patriotism is fine on those pages as long as it’s window dressing. Pottinger’s true patriotism had to run in the Washington Post.
The republican freedoms Pottinger invoked aren’t only American, of course; they’re “the cause of all mankind,” as Tom Paine put it. They depend not only on the right to dispose of capital as one wishes but on capitalists’ obligation to keep public trust. We aren’t just speculators and self-marketers. We’re fellow citizens, or we are lost. Profit-seeking that bypasses the republican brain and habits of the heart on its way to the lower viscera, degrading our lives together in order to spur sales, is an enemy of our freedom.
Those who sparked and led a fight for that freedom in Paine’s time pledged their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” within and against what they’d recently believed was their own English realm and monarch. Now Matt Pottinger has pledged his life and fortune and sacred honor against enemies abroad, but also, apparently, at home. Can the Bancrofts pledge at least some of their fortune and honor to rebuff Murdoch? Rejecting his offer would be risky, but it might be an American shot for freedom heard round the liberal capitalist world.
Stepping lightly into his grave as an American writer in the grand cemetery he and other well-known journalists have designed for the American republic, TIME’s Eric Pooley seems as ecstatic as a jihadist ascending to another world. It’s frighteningly instructive to read his July 9 apologia-cum-hagiography on Rupert Murdoch for what it tells us about how American journalism is changing, especially now that Murdoch has virtually won his bid for The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, according to sources on the company’s board. The deal is done, they say, though Dow Jones is denying it, perhaps pending a formal announcement expected next week. But even if it fails, something has been lost in the anticipatory applause of people like Pooley.
At least Pooley, TIME’s star composer of breathless encomia to great men (like Rudy Giuliani after 9/11) who’ve broken the rules and borne lesser mortals’ uncomprehending rage to change the world, paused to take note of the rage at Rupert, the latest, weirdest addition to his pantheon.
“The notion of this tabloid terror controlling the world’s leading business journal [The Wall Street Journal] is being met with ferocious opposition,” Pooley allows, assigning the protesters their seats in the past (including me, presumably). “Some of the opposition is principled, some of it is sanctimonious, and some of it seems driven by a tangle of ideological and commercial motives. Each day brings another investigative story about Murdoch using his media properties to boost his business interests, reward his friends and punish his rivals, and each story carries the message that this man will destroy the Journal by using its hugely respected news pages as his personal fief.
“Of course,” Pooley adds, waving off those critics, “the Journal’s editorial pages are already more conservative than Murdoch.” Actually, those pages are less conservative in any Burkean or Buckleyan sense than they are fanatically delusional, and Pooley knows that the presence of a few editorial bats in the Dow Jones attic – the batty James Taranto, John Fund, and the ghost of Robert Whitewater Bartley – didn’t justify anyone’s selling the whole mansion to the Count Dracula of journalism.
The real reason, Pooley argues, is that the mansion itself is old-fashioned and decrepit, at least by the go-go marketing standards his own Time-Warner Corporation shares with Murdoch’s News Corporation. Murdoch is the herald of an economic and civic climate change larger than himself, and Pooley is hot to introduce us to the inevitable. He hints often at the intimacy of his access to the Great Man, though not so loudly that you wonder why he was granted it. Time-Warner and the News Corporation are rivals, but they’re partners in weaning us of old-fashioned civic republican morals. They do that subliminally every day.
So let’s try to notice what’s getting lost here, including Pooley himself, who used to care about America’s republican integrity. He’s surfing the tidal wave of our collective corporate destiny by rendering Rupert as a charming rogue and great explorer of this century’s vasty deeps, a pirate/pilgrim as awesome as Columbus or Cortez, and never mind the sins and sicknesses they brought with them. The profile reflects a shift in American journalism, which is giving up the ghost of civic-republicanism to follow our new conglomerate masters’ obsession with market share uber alles.
Pooley offers a sprightly tutorial on this to all who aren’t yet clued in — a terrific read for Time-Warner’s long-sought demographic, twenty-somethings who are sloughing off the musty liberal arts they wasted four years getting graded on in college. (I include here those balding, 50’ish twenty-somethings who zoom past me on the Merritt Parkway in their BMWs and armored vehicles; there seem to be millions of them).
Pooley waves aside any lingering suspicion that we Americans shouldn’t be just speculators and self-marketers but citizens who require good journalism as much as we do oxygen to achieve a common good. He and Murdoch are administering euthanasia to all that, and in this quick joint venture they do it more entertainingly than Jack Kevorkian:
“‘They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,’” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “’in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it–that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!’
“It was a little before 5 o’clock on Friday, June 22, and the chairman of News Corp.–the world’s third largest media conglomerate, with a value of $68 billion, and one of the few mega-corporations controlled by a single individual–was at his desk on the eighth floor of his midtown Manhattan headquarters, trying to shore up a deal he had dreamed about for a decade…. He was speaking in soft bursts to an investment banker on the other end of the line. Murdoch had stripped off his jacket and tie, and his thin, dyed-brown hair was scattered across his scalp. His controversial $5 billion deal to acquire Dow Jones & Co. and its crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, was in danger of crashing. Murdoch was playing poker: to get the deal back on track, he had to threaten to walk–and mean it.”
He’s playing more than poker. In 2005, Murdoch outbid Viacom for MySpace at a price few thought it was worth, but soon he “looked like an Internet visionary,” Pooley tells us, as he told Murdoch himself. “‘I love being called that,’” Murdoch answers, “‘but the truth is, I’m just lucky and nimble.’” He “generates his own good fortune by being perhaps the most gifted opportunist in media,” echoes Pooley, calling him “the last of the true media moguls, the one who’s still building — grabbing Dow Jones, dreaming about trading MySpace for a big chunk of Yahoo!, trying to launch a Polish TV network. News Corp.’s voting stock, of which the Murdoch family owns 31%, has gone up 18% in the past year, making him worth $9 billion.”
“He lives like an old-fashioned tycoon too,” Pooley swoons, “hopscotching the planet on his 737 and recharging on his yacht off St. Tropez. Recent stop: London, where he got thrown from a horse (but didn’t break anything–too busy). His likeness was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery and he threw a party in Kensington Gardens for 400 friends, including incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown….”
But what about those sins and sicknesses? Isn’t Murdoch a right-winger who’s corrupting news and public discourse? Naw, Pooley assures us:
“Murdoch isn’t a party-line guy. He’s a pragmatist. He likes strong politicians and change agents and winners;… he has supported moderates like Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. But he has a stubborn populist streak, and his populism finds an outlet on Fox News, a channel that gives voice to angry middle-aged white guys.” Then Pooley lets Rupert himself do the spin: “‘[I]f you look at our general news, do we put on things which favor the right rather than the left? I don’t know…. We don’t think we do. We’ve always insisted we don’t. I don’t think we do. Aw, it’s subjective. Neither side admits it.’
“Has Murdoch just said what I think he said?” Pooley asks disingenuously. “Has he flirted with an admission that Fox News skews right?” Since we can’t respond to this phony question, he does: “If so, Murdoch quickly backs away. ‘We don’t think we do.’”
It’s Pooley who keeps backing away from glints of skepticism he musters for theatrical effect while setting up Murdoch’s responses with his soft-ball questions. Compare with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Noting that 60 percent of Americans have believed that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, Krugman reported that only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences “believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News…. [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had ‘found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.’”
Pooley doesn’t report that Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985, to get around rules limiting foreign ownership. By my lights that makes him even more un-American than Dick Cheney for rousing 3500 young Americans to die in desert sands. But maybe citizenship is as marginal to the brave new world of conglomerate media as Columbus’ Italian-Jewish nationality was to the Spanish empire-builders Ferdinand and Isabella.
What about Murdoch’s degrading his news outlets? Krugman calls him “an opportunist who exploits a rule-free media environment — one created, in part, by conservative political power — by slanting news coverage to favor whoever he thinks will serve his business interests.” Now, there’s a conservatism the Journal’s editorial-page bat-heads champion, whatever their jitters about Murdoch’s telling them how to do it. And it’s what the paper’s brave news side has kept at bay. Again Pooley bobs and weaves: “Murdoch waves away the past and cuts to the heart of the matter: the Journal. ‘Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?’ he asks” – as does Pooley, who fleetingly acknowledges Rupert’s nasty record but just as quickly portrays the Journal as a basket case that only a market visionary like Murdoch could save.
Pooley glances at Murdoch’s phony populism but then veers back to calling him a bold explorer-inventor, unlike “sanctimonious” journalists – that word again, Pooley’s word – who still consider serious reporting the lifeblood of democracy. Murdoch’s own editors aren’t sanctimonious, of course; one of them throws Pooley their line: Murdoch may meddle, the editor allows, but “if he’s not interested, then where is the money going to come from…. if Dow Jones wants to grow globally?”
“Show me the money.” That shuts up most would-be do-gooders these days. But what if “growing globally,” like growing imperially, involves dying internally? What if only aroused republics can channel or limit that growth? What if that requires honest reporting? Pooley never asks, because Murdoch shows he tolerates only the doom-eager populism he pumped up for Iraq.
“‘Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs,’” quoth Rupert (a bit sanctimoniously). But he doesn’t mean it, and Pooley, realizing this, pretends to doubt him, calling him “the man who influences Prime Ministers and Presidents and still poses as a scrappy outsider.” But he adds just as quickly that “associates say he’s finally considering his legacy and wants to run the Journal impeccably to upgrade his reputation….”
Murdoch “scoffs at the notion. ‘I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies–and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.’ Murdoch has invested billions in newspapers when few others were willing, but he has also kept them alive through a lowest-common denominator approach typified by the trashy Sun, with its topless Page 3 girls…. Murdoch wouldn’t be Murdoch if he didn’t love sticking it to sanctimonious J-school toffs. ‘When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,’ he jokes late one night, ‘we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.’”
So, laugh it all off, okay? But notice, too, what you were supposed to have forgotten during Pooley’s pirouetting: By crowning Rupert an empire builder, however scrappy, he’s buried any thought that journalism must remain outside the establishment with anything more than the fake populism of war machines and of topless girls.
Pooley wheels in more apologists: “‘Those who say he’ll wreck the Journal are in for a surprise,’” a British professor of journalism tells him. “‘What they miss is that he really does distinguish between his tabloids and his serious papers…. At his serious papers, there’s much more of a discussion.’” Much more of a discussion? “‘There’s such a thing as a popular newspaper and an unpopular élite newspaper,’” Murdoch concurs. “‘They play different roles. We have both kinds. Just like we have the Fox network with American Idol and 24, and we also have the National Geographic Channel. It’s hard for outsiders to understand that.’”
Is it hard to understand that Fox does a lot more damage to the republic than National Geographic does good?
Pooley has given Murdoch his say as if he had no other way to be heard. But Rupert Murdoch is a liar, and Eric Pooley is his enabler. Everything in this profile, circling the globe in TIME’s foreign editions and online, is disingenuous and self-serving. You read lie after lie and wait for Pooley to challenge Murdoch’s credibility as Krugman did and as the Columbia Journalism Review did in an editorial on his promises not to ruin the Journal:
“A familiar fable tells of a scorpion that asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is sensibly fearful of getting stung. But the scorpion is persuasive, pointing out that if he stings the frog, they will both sink into the water and die. Why would he do such a thing? So the frog agrees. Midway across the stream, the scorpion stings. The dying frog asks: Why? It’s my nature, the scorpion explains…..
“We appreciate that the Bancrofts [the Journal’s owners] have come to realize that Dow Jones needs a fresh direction. And it is easy for outsiders to ask people to walk away from a $5 billion offer. But this is their moment in history. We hope they find a way to keep this American treasure away from Rupert Murdoch, who will smile even as he raises the stinger.”
Surely he’s smiling this morning. But let’s assume that for the first year after he takes over, Murdoch will pump more resources into the Journal than it has ever enjoyed, transform its outreach, and sustain its reportorial independence, just enough to get his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life, complete with a fantastic position for Pooley.
I get an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feeling watching the transformation of writers – Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker, Ronald Brownstein at the Los Angeles Times — who used to care about reporting for a republican polity they apparently no longer believe in. It isn’t just Murdoch who has swept away their old coordinates as free citizens. A tidal wave of conglomerate consolidation and relentlessly strange and intrusive marketing has done that.
Joseph Schumpeter wrote about capitalism’s powers of “creative destruction;” Pooley names Murdoch one of the creators. What he can’t afford to tell us, or himself, is that tidal waves are awesome but meaninglessly destructive and that the empire builders riding them hurtle from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sooner or later, as Jonathan Schell demonstrates brilliantly in his The Unconquerable World, better people show them — as Ghandi did the British, King the American South, Mandela the Afrikaners, and Havel, Michnick and Walesa the Soviets — that empires aren’t really as strong as tidal waves, or as irresistible as democratic hopes.
Having lived through two monumentally wasteful American wars and the souffle-like collapse of several newspapers, I like to think myself tough-minded and knowledgeable in the ways of the world. But it never ceases to amaze me that the progenitors and captains of such calamities always come on as the tough realists and strong leaders – and often bow out that way, too — while convincing most people that it’s the dissenters who are naïve. Call it the anthropology of power: People don’t trust nay-sayers who have no capital or troops, and hence no cachet.
Noticing recently that one of my T-shirts was “Made in Vietnam,” I wondered if free-market powers would have defeated Hanoi’s socialism, for good or ill, without sending 50,000 young Americans and countless more Vietnamese to grisly deaths. At least Robert McNamara, the super-confident Secretary of Defense who computerized all that, admitted later he’d led us into a fog of war. But Henry Kissinger, who deepened that fog and folly, is unrepentant and often celebrated as the bearer of Metternichian wisdom.
Now comes a new parade of apologists and accommodators for Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal. All’s well, they tell us, although, of course, we must watch Murdoch skeptically (and impotently) as he makes the paper’s journalism his own.
Never mind that 3700-plus young Americans have been blown to bits in desert folly in no small part because 80% of Murdoch’s Fox News viewers, who include watchers of all the TV sets at U.S. military facilities, believed war rationales that were lies. Never mind that they get their politics from watching Fox factotum Nick Cavuto yell at and dress down Senator Dick Durbin and other Democrats he is supposedly interviewing.
Never mind that Murdoch’s media, very much unlike the present Journal, kow-towed so shamelessly to China’s ugly Communist Party that he even dropped the BBC’s straightforward reporting from his satellite service there and cancelled publication of some “offensive” books. (Maybe that makes Murdoch a good Maoist!)
Never mind, because, last night, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Norman Pearlstine, former managing editor of the Journal, reassured us — just as Murdoch himself assured TIME’s Eric Pooley — that he wouldn’t spend $5 billion to acquire the Journal if he intended to ruin it.
And George W. Bush wouldn’t have run for President if he’d intended to ruin government as we know it.
It matters how you define “ruin,” and the truth in both cases is that too few players and citizens have a civic-republican understanding of what makes journalism good or government strong. So we don’t begin to realize what’s at stake.
Some on the “worse is better” left don’t care what happens to the Journal because they’ve let its right-wing editorial pages blind them to the bravery and discipline that go into its news coverage of, say China, or, say, American poverty.
Even worse than the “Who cares?” crowd are soothsayers of the center, like Pearlstine and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who reminisces fondly this morning about his stint at the Journal but decides that it was dying, anyway: “People will bemoan what Murdoch does to the Journal, no matter what it is. They will say that he is killing a great newspaper. But the sad part of this story is that ‘the empire,’ as we reporters once liked to call it, was already dying — and that so many of its wounds were self-inflicted.”
Well, yes: Some newspapers that have been dying as venues for serious reporting, through no fault of their own amid conglomerate and technological upheaval, have found themselves with editors and writers whose consumerist pandering only makes those papers deserve the deaths they’re dying.
But not the Journal. The real reason for its travails is given by another soothsayer, this one an unreflective apostle of conglomerate capitalist logic. William Zabel, a trusts and estates lawyer, yesterday stepped right up for the captains of calamity (in this case, the Bancroft family members who sold the Journal to Murdoch) to tell New York Times readers that “The requirement for prudent investing by the trustees overrules the right to retain the Dow Jones stock. The lack of any competing offer would appear to make it legally unreasonable for them not to sell.”
Talk like that, untouched by dissenting analyses such as mine here, has a mind-freezing effect on most people, especially college students, who’ve barely heard of thinking that assigns citizens, and hence boardroom directors, a little more sovereignty over meaningless market riptides than Zabel ever would.
And if most citizens’ and opinion-makers’ minds are frozen like this, what can one expect of their political leaders? Well, this time even I found myself amazed to read in the Times on July 18 that “Mr. Murdoch’s potential stewardship of The Journal gained an unlikely endorsement yesterday, given both his and The Journal’s traditionally conservative politics. In an interview, former Vice President Al Gore defended Mr. Murdoch as someone who supports independent voices and keeps his word. Mr. Gore was referring to his own experience negotiating a contract to carry Current TV, a cable channel he helped found.
“Mr. Gore, who has spoken out against media consolidation by conglomerates like the News Corporation in the past, said that he was mainly concerned with ownership of broadcast outlets. ‘That’s an issue — but on the question of his openness to independent points of view, I want you to know that my experience has been that when he gave his word, he kept his word.’”
“That’s an issue” – it sounds like the reporter had to remind Gore what’s in his new book, The Assault on Reason, which I described here. But, hey, Murdoch kept his word to Al on a business deal, and that’s what counts in America today. And he’s gracious to Hillary Clinton, too.
I may as well close by covering my own rear like everyone else in this sorry parade. But I’ll do it only slightly. Contrary to what the “worse is better” crowd thinks, Murdoch’s Journal will probably get better before it gets worse. As I wrote here last month, “…let’s assume that for the first year after he takes over, Murdoch will pump more resources into the Journal than it has ever enjoyed, transform its outreach, and sustain its reportorial independence, just enough to get his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life…”
My worry is that by then, few in our amnesiac, gullible former republic will notice what’s been lost. They’ll have forgotten what real journalism and good government are, anyway. Edward Gibbon’s description of how Rome seeded its own decay as a republic even at the peak of its felicity and power jumps right off the page these days. John Adams saw it coming here, too even in 1786, and warned us:
“‘Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud’ is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of the people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, … until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
Good journalism bucks swift currents that run toward lassitude in republican vigilance and toward demagoguery as its alternative. Because breasting those currents isn’t profitable, it ‘s becoming harder and lonelier than ever, although publications like New York Times (which Murdoch will try to outfox with his new Journal) and the Columbia Journalism Review have been keeping the faith. These days, increasingly, a good reporter’s calling is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the journalists.
Even before Rupert Murdoch won his bid for Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal last week, what Harper’s magazine former editor Lewis Lapham calls “the orchestra of high-minded opinion” could be heard tuning up for “This Is The Best of All Possible Worlds,” its familiar medley of hosannahs and half-truths. But now I’m hearing hoof beats as the parade of Murdoch’s apologists becomes a stampede, rivaling that of the run-up to the Iraq war.
Isn’t it time some little boy, or a Vaclav Havel, cried that the emperor has no clothes? Murdoch does rule an empire of sorts, but why not make him wield his power nakedly, stripped of the raiment of rationalisations which apologists such as Tony Blair’s spokesman Alastair Campbell, New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, and Time magazine writer Eric Pooley are bestowing?
Their torrent of truisms runs like this: the Journal was declining anyway, because its Bancroft family owners were negligent and because upheavals in technology and investment have hurt even well-run newspapers. Murdoch surfs these tides brilliantly, a businessman first, a conservative only second. All owners influence their properties; besides, there’s no such thing as objectivity.
So why not let a hundred flowers bloom? While many are wilting, Rupert is planting, so why care about his fertiliser and his scent? ”[C]apitalism is built on the highest and best use of capital and [Murdoch] understands that. Money has no conscience,” an investment banker told The New York Times. We’re back to Adam Smith’s observation that it’s not through the benevolence of the butcher and the baker but through their self interest that we get a good dinner.
And, after all, how different is good reporting from good cooking?
Quite different. In a republic, informed citizens (including capitalists) are supposed to rise above narrow self interest occasionally and curb or even contravene some market forces to achieve public goods together that consumers and competing companies couldn’t achieve alone.
Ever since the US supreme court’s decision of 1886, in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railway, huge, anonymously-owned corporations in America have enjoyed the legal status of “persons,” entitled to rights such as freedom of speech, even though, unlike citizens, they are bound by their charters to maximise profits above all. This is the trap the better Bancrofts tried but failed to escape, with grim consequences for republican freedom.
Enter good journalism, as the little boy, or as Havel, to face those consequences. The press is the only private enterprise recognised in the constitution – in the First Amendment – for its responsibility and privilege to use its powers of persuasion to rouse our better angels and our reason. It’s not supposed to stimulate fear and mistrust or to promote demagogic, decadent responses, as Murdoch’s news media do relentlessly.
Sure, he’s not the only one. But good business and partisanship can be especially poisonous in a bad but brilliant owner. Read reports that 80% of Fox News Channel viewers believed the lies that sent 3,700 young Americans to their deaths. Watch Fox’s Neil Cavuto yell at and dress down Senator Dick Durbin and other Democrats he’s supposedly interviewing.
”All newspapers are run to make profits. Full stop,” Murdoch told his biographer William Shawcross. But, too often, big corporations use “their growing wealth to improperly influence government to distort markets to their advantage, eroding trust in markets themselves,” as Dean Starkman put it in his blog, The Audit at the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s a story Murdoch’s News Corporation “is quite incapable of covering,” Starkman adds, “because… that’s what it does… to gain an advantage over other actors unwilling to do the wrong thing.”
He gives chilling chapter and verse, as have others. Why doesn’t the full truth make a dent in the apologists’ half truths? Why don’t they admit that a lot of information on blogs depends on the hard work of full time journalists whom newspapers pay and protect to report with courage, discipline and high standards? Only a few newspapers do that, and – its speculator-worshipping, fact-challenged editorials aside – the Wall Street Journal has been one of them.
The Journal’s news pages have “led great campaigns against gun proliferation, the cigarette lobby, predatory practices in the fast food industry, pharmaceutical jiggery-pokery, government bond auction-rigging, the abuse of human rights in China, options back-dating practices,” and more, writes the economist David Warsh at economicprincipals.com.
He calls the Journal’s news pages “a church for a certain kind of knowledgeable, fair and balanced reporting, … the tradition for which the reporter Daniel Pearl laid down his life in Pakistan, …. pursuing a difficult matter where it led, in the hope of ultimately helping to govern a nitty-gritty republic of fairness…”
A Journal reporter told me last week that “Murdoch doesn’t have the instincts to sustain something as fragile as the Journal’s late-night pangs of guilt, second guessing and self doubt that keep journalists honest and on the ball.”
But let’s give the new emperor a fig leaf: at first, he’ll pump more resources into the Journal, expand its reach, and sustain serious reporting – until he gets his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life, promoting Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson for president, all the time.
When that happens, I’ll ask the apologists why they couldn’t wait a year before easing Murdoch’s way with their hosannahs and half-truths.
The news media’s obsession with an attempted “pie-in-the face” attack on Rupert Murdoch at yesterday’s parliamentary hearing has a lot in common with its focus on the allegations of phone-hacking, police payoffs, and political intimidation by Murdoch’s News Corporation: The scandal is almost as irrelevant as the “pie” assault to the real danger facing the public sphere–not the crimes, but the perfectly legal kind journalism that prompted them.
Recently a former student of mine told me how a much higher standard of journalism had been impressed upon him when he was starting out as a reporter for the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal in 2005. A news editor emphasized to him the importance of “making that last call” to a person he was writing about to make sure that the story would be fair as well as right.
“Never forget,” the editor said, “you may be this guy’s last judge and jury in the court of public opinion. Once the story’s launched, he’ll have no clear court of appeal.”
To which my student added a year later, as Murdoch was acquiring the paper, “Murdoch doesn’t have the instincts to sustain something as fragile as the old Journal‘s late-night pangs of guilt, second guessing, and self-doubt that keep journalists honest and on the ball.”
Serious journalism does require “making that last call,” even to an elusive or nearly forgotten person on one’s list. It means climbing a tenement’s stairs a third time to see what may have changed, or catching the look on an administrator’s face the instant you pop your question.
A good journalist brings that depth of commitment to a story, along with the appropriate contextual information, public memory, and reportorial skill. When a reporter from the German magazine Der Spiegel told me in 2003 that Fox News reporters in Baghdad had borrowed sandbags from American soldiers and piled them on the roof of their hotel to stage an on-camera impression that they were reporting from a battle elsewhere, I was reminded that Murdoch’s News Corporation isn’t so interested in serious journalism.
No large news organization in the world, in fact—at least none that’s as large as or larger than those influenced by Vladimir Putin in Russia or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or the Communist Party in China—tries as brazenly as Murdoch’s globe-straddling News Corporation to generate and even fabricate news or to subvert good reporting of news so cynically and powerfully—and hurtfully, to both its subjects and its audiences.
Sure, all journalism is only a rough draft of history. And its drafting can be compromised by any news organization that’s market-driven enough to reach past its readers’ and viewers’ brains and hearts toward their lower viscera on its way to their wallets. But no other news organization has matched Murdoch’s lust to capitalize on large audiences’ susceptibility to being groped—and, yes, to “enjoy” it.
By playing on this all-too-human temptation to displace our hopes and fears onto celebrities and scapegoats, Murdoch’s journalism accelerates self-fulfilling prophecies of civic decay in every body politic it touches. It reduces citizens to consumers and then blames them for their discontent: “People wouldn’t buy what he’s selling if they didn’t want it. If you don’t like it, switch the channel, buy a different paper!” said a student in the Yale seminar I teach on journalism, liberalism, and democracy.
Murdoch himself couldn’t have said it better. “All newspapers are run to make profits. Full stop,” Murdoch told his biographer William Shawcross. We’re back to Adam Smith’s much-loved aperçu that it’s not the benevolence of the butcher and the baker that gives us a good dinner but their self-interest, and ours. And, really now, how different is reporting from cooking?
Quite different, as Britons have recently been reminded. News organizations owe citizens a lot more than whatever they can induce them to want to “buy.”
The currents Murdoch is riding are even more powerful and dangerous than he is. The scandals involving phone-hacking, police-bribing, and politician-intimidating that are now engulfing his News Corporation are only symptoms of a syndrome, familiar throughout history, in which certain leaders artfully titillate, frighten, and stampede polities that seem ripe for it.
Thucydides chronicled it in ancient Athens. And in Edward Gibbon’s telling, the Roman republic succumbed to its first emperor, Augustus, because he understood that “the Senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”
The founders of our own republic, reading Gibbon’s account (then hot off the presses), worried that their new republic would end not with a coup but a dictator’s smile and swagger if the people became so tired of the burdens of self-government that they could be either jollied along or intimidated into servitude, or both.
Ben Franklin warned that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
How might that happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty to…slavish subjection have been brought to this unhappy condition by gradual paces,” wrote founder Richard Henry Lee.
And Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post in 1801 because he saw a need for information and commentary to help Americans “decide the important question,” as he’d put it in 1787, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1977—after Hamilton’s New York Post had had some distinguished editors, including the poet William Cullen Bryant and my cousin, the crusading liberal journalist James Wechsler–Rupert Murdoch, looking to grope a new body politic, bought the paper. He began answering Hamilton’s question loudly by turning the Post into a daily reminder that his native Australia and been founded not as republic but as a penal colony.
The more Murdoch has profited by stroking and stoking people’s inclinations to fear, mistrust, and resent one another instead of lifting their sights and reminding them they can till common ground, the more he’s subverted our founders’ efforts and hopes.
That’s why, even if his minions had never hacked a phone, bribed or intimidated a police officer or politician, or broken any other law, everyone who cherishes a republic, here or in Britain, should by now have used their own freedom of speech to denounce and discredit him and public officials who enable and fawn over him.
The solution isn’t to curb Murdoch’s freedoms of speech, with regulations on “the press” as such. But citizens and news organizations that still have a civic mission can certainly press one another and our political leaders, whom Murdoch has controlled by stampeding too many of their constituents, to withdraw the discretionary waivers and other indirect subsidies that facilitate his growing domination, if not monopolization, of public speech .
COLUMNS ON YALE’S VENTURE IN SINGAPORE; SINGAPORE’S REGIME; AND LIBERAL EDUCATION IN ILLIBERAL SOCIETIES
A visit to the U.S.S. Stennis: From Yale-National University of Singapore College Facebook page.
These thirty-six columns, written between March, 2012 and September 21, show how business-corporatization and slow, subtle, abandonment of the liberal arts at some American universities has driven ventures to establish overseas campuses in collaboration with authoritarian regimes. It has also driven faculty resistance, some of which I participated in at Yale.
Among the arguments I make here that many people have misunderstood are:
We shouldn’t be moralistic about the real and alleged sins of regimes abroad, even though we must reckon with them seriously and resist them. We needn’t “boycott” or otherwise discontinue reasonable academic exchanges with universities there. We need to strengthen liberal education in the U.S. which is facing crises that some misguided ventures abroad actually reflect and compound rather than resolve.
In the elaborate and fateful joint venture of Yale-NUS and other projects, which I opposed and criticized here, I didn’t predict explosive conflicts or scandals, although such tensions did prompt Singapore to “expel” Yale in 2021, as described in the last column below. More worrisome in other cases is an all-too smooth convergence, described by The Economist magazine, of Asian and American “state capitalism”: Asians liberalize a little, at least cosmetically; Americans tighten surveillance and suppression of academic freedom and workers’ rights, here in the U.S. as well as abroad, where they are learning to do it. Some Americans are even learning to call brutally authoritarian societies “authoritative,” because those societies seem more orderly and energetic than ours. American civil society is definitely in trouble, but not for reasons that can be corrected by emulating countries such as Singapore.
Twenty-five of the columns are by me, accompanied by a brief news report from the Yale Alumni Magazine, a Yale Daily News column by Prof. Seyla Benhabib that focused the controversy, a couple of items from Singapore websites about controversies that my columns ignited, and a column from the Boston Globe that ran in the New York Times.
These columns have appeared in several venues. Here I provide the Huffington Post versions, with links to the others, unless a column appeared only in other sites in which case it’s presented as it appeared there.
The columns trace an arc of flawed thinking and blundering leadership on the part of Yale’s trustees and president (Richard Levin, now retired), who arranged the Singapore deal without approval by Yale’s faculty and so compromised liberal education and Yale’s pedagogical mission. Again, the columns focus less on the “sins” of Singapore – a boutique police state with a glittering façade and facile apologists who gull or cow American investors and tourists – than on weaknesses that were already emerging in Yale’s own governance and pedagogy and that prompted it to collaborate with Singapore, as much out of weakness as strength.
For example, the Washington Spectator column below (it’s # 15) is a transcript of a talk I gave at Yale on September 20, 2012 about what I call a galloping culture of self-censorship in elite colleges. That culture is prompted not by fear of state power, as in Singapore, but by the allure of “access” to power and influence that students hope to gain by showing that they can be relied on never to divulge information or pose questions that suggest that an emperor has no clothes.
I argue that the self-censorship of fear in Singapore and the enthusiastic self-censorship of seduction at Yale reinforce each other, endangering liberal education and the training of American leaders. And in Yale’s collaboration with Singapore I foresee not conflict or scandal but an all-too-smooth convergence of illiberal premises and practices – a convergence in which Singapore and similar regimes “liberalize” a little, cosmetically, as Americans tighten their own emerging culture of corporatist governance, surveillance, and punishment, with its assiduously marketed, compensatory, but decadent after-hours “escapes”.
The Yale College Faculty expressed grave reservations about the administration’s arrangement with Singapore, in a resolution that it passed in President Richard Levin’s presence and over his objections on April 6, 2012, after two and one-half hours of discussion. Four months later, Levin announced that he would resign the presidency on July 1, 2013. His successor Peter Salovey and the Yale Corporation have proceeded with the Yale-Singapore venture, which received its first class of students in August, 2013 .
You could have heard a pin drop among the 150 professors — three times more than usual — in attendance at a closed-door, March 1 meeting of the Yale College Faculty as one of them told president Richard Levin something he didn’t want to hear. The message was that his administration shouldn’t have collaborated with an authoritarian, corporate city-state to establish a new college — “Yale-National University of Singapore” — without most of the Yale faculty’s knowing of it until the basic commitments had already been signed and sealed.
“You are this university’s highest executive officer, and we’re grateful for what you and the Yale Corporation do,” the professor said. “But in political philosophy there’s a living, unwritten constitution: Yale is really what we do –our research, teaching, and conferences. Without that, there is no Yale to take abroad or anywhere else. The faculty are the collegium” – a company of scholars that, to do its work well, has to stand somewhat apart from both markets and states.
Liberal education probably couldn’t survive without markets and states, but Levin was being reminded, in effect, that in a liberal capitalist republic like ours, markets and states can’t survive without liberal education because they have to rely on citizens’ upholding certain public virtues and beliefs that, as you may have noticed lately, neither markets nor the state can do much to nourish or defend. A liberal state, after all, isn’t supposed to judge between one way of life and another, which makes it hard to distinguish bold entrepreneurs from sleazy opportunists. And markets certainly can’t draw that distinction, because their genius lies precisely in approaching consumers and investors only as narrowly self-interested actors.
That leaves only good journalists and good colleges to nourish our public prospects. Which is why, even though the Yale Corporation — a small, self-perpetuating governing body, with only a few members elected by alumni — can do whatever it wants, the professor was right about the “living” part of a university’s constitution.
In 2006, for example, Harvard’s governing corporation, which is like Yale’s, understood that its faculty’s loss of confidence in President Lawrence Summers made his administration untenable. Now Yale’s faculty is challenging not Levin’s presidency but one of his emblematic projects. A resolution demanding that Singapore respect, protect, and further political freedom, on-campus and off, will debated at the faculty’s April 5 meeting.
This measure’s proponents will surely be portrayed as leftist malcontents by conservative commentators who said the same thing about Harvard’s critics of Summers. But neither controversy fits the panicky caricatures of politically correct professors or deans who’d rather denounce capitalism and chase post-modernist moonbeams than prepare their students to serve markets and the state. Nor is the Yale dispute really only about the rush by American universities to emulate multi-national business corporations by expanding abroad.
The greatest danger in such ventures — and in Harvard’s recent embarrassing entanglements with some of its faculty members’ dubious dealings in Russia or Libya — is that no university can remain what the political philosopher Allan Bloom called “a publicly respectable place… for scholars and students to be unhindered in their use of reason” if those scholars are treated (and behave) as employees of a corporation — or, in public universities, as political appointees. More properly, they’re a “company” in the old-fashioned sense of a body whose principals determine and care for its mission.
The university as a business corporation helps them do that by keeping the lights on, as it were, and by defending their freedom where possible against market and political constraints. It shouldn’t get involved in trying to export its university’s “brand name” and expand its market share abroad, or in transforming the home college into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a “diverse” global elite that answers to no polity or moral code.
Unfortunately, some members of Yale’s corporation are doing even more than that. And, unfortunately, enough Yale faculty have come to depend on or aspire to administrative funding or preferments – or have become self-marketing free agents in their own right — that even those who oppose the Singapore deal express their view only with arched eyebrows and significant silences.
But the packed faculty meeting this month reflected rising concern that Levin, a very nice man and an economist of the neoliberal, “world is flat” sort, has joined with corporation members to commit Yale’s name and some hand-picked members of its faculty to a venture that sidelines the collegium from any real deliberation about its educational mission.
Too much more of this, and the company of scholars becomes a corporate team.
* * *
It’s not only faculty self-governance that’s fading under market imperatives and seductions. So is liberal education, which, in American colleges, has often succeeded in inducting future citizen-leaders of the republic into what the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called the humanities’ “great conversation” across the ages about eternal challenges to politics and the spirit. Markets and states skirt such challenges, but free people since Socrates have risked a lot to meet them, and they’ve always been a republic’s greatest strength, not only in high places but in local communities.
The old colleges struggled to temper students’ training for Wealth-making and Power-wielding with humanist Truth-seeking. Yes, students who took that effort seriously could become somewhat adversarial to conventional wisdom; Allan Bloom considered that the colleges’ raison d’etre and their glory. Yet today’s globalization of capital and culture, which Yale’s Singapore venture reflects, makes it hard for the old colleges’ defenders to reconcile their yearning for American republican liberty with a knee-jerk, algorithmic obeisance to riptides of casino-financing that’s dissolving American sovereignty.
Conservatives are trying to straddle this yawning contradiction between their patriotism and their “free market” ideology by developing “grand-strategy” agendas, in lavishly funded college programs that they think will rescue liberal education from the few feckless liberals and Marxists whom the noise machine blames for subverting what conservatives themselves are destroying.
Yale recently established a $50 million Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, along with the $17.5 million-endowed Brady-Johnson “Studies in Grand Strategy” program and, the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. These have soft spots for “professor-practitioners” such as Stanley McChrystal (hired fresh off his firing by Obama), John Negroponte (the former Bush National Intelligence Director), and Tony Blair.
Even President Levin, who gave George W. Bush an honorary doctorate just before 9/11, later served on Bush’s commission to evaluate 9/11 intelligence failures, bringing along several Yale students to produce a report that the New York Times called “a profile in timidity.”
Whether or not the Times was right, Yale emerges from such accommodations looking less like a bulldog than like a kitten that purrs when stroked and that darts under a sofa when threatened. And you have to wonder: If this is how the university’s leaders deal with the government in our “free” society, can we expect them to stand up to Singapore’s?
In fairness, Levin and other neo-liberals, buffeted by conservative ranters, donors with agendas, and daunting market undertows, would really rather bring liberal education to Asia on somebody else’s dime than be parties to its conscription and debasement at home. But in fact Yale is doing both, and for reasons that remain unclear.
The university’s insistence that it’s spending nothing on the Singapore venture only reinforces the perception that who pays the piper calls the tune, and certainly there’s no consolation in the fact that three present or recent members of the Yale Corporation – among them the venture capitalist G. Leonard Baker, Jr., who recently led a 5-year “Yale Tomorrow” capital campaign that raised $3.881 billion, thereby placing the university’s administration in his debt – are now or have also been directors, advisors, and investment officers of Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation Pte Ltd. (GIC), which is chaired by the country’s prime minister and manages at least $100 billion of assets.
(The other two Yale Corporation members who’ve been involved in this are Charles Ellis, who is married to Linda Lorimer, the Secretary of Yale University, and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear, the former CEO of another Singaporean government investment company, Temasek, in 2009.)
Whether or not Yale-NUS is a business deal, it’s an instance of the business corporatization of universities. “Is Yale U. Starting to Run More Like Yale, Inc.?” asked a 2009 story in the student-run, independent Yale Daily News, noting that university vice presidents who’ve been imported from business corporations were referring to students as “customers.”
Some students and their lawyered-up parents readily accept that designation and demand the services they think they’ve paid for. That accelerates a superficially pleasing drift from civic-republican rigor to posh campus amenities, but it also leaves the colleges handling students’ real intellectual and intimate crises with the soulless, self-protective legalism of corporations worried only about liability and market share.
Fortunately, some conscientious (and some brilliantly irreverent) student reporters and editorial writers have kept the deeper questions alive on campus even when most faculty seemed too apathetic or intimidated to raise them. It was a Yale Daily News editorial last year, “Keep Yale Out of Singapore,” that awakened some faculty.
Sea changes in capital and in state efficacy have contributed to the recent loss of compass and ebbing of faith in liberal education. But there are other causes, too. In his forthcoming (and already much ballyhooed) College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia English professor Andrew Delbanco echoes Yale’s former law school dean Anthony Kronman, whose Education’s End blames the loss of faith less on markets or conservative grand strategists than on universities’ much-older commitment to scientific (or, one might say, “scientistic”) research.
The criticism here is not of science per se but of some liberal educators’ pretensions to be scientific in their explorations of the eternal challenges to politics and the spirit mentioned earlier. “When political science is severed from its ancient rootage in the humanities and ‘enriched’ by the wisdom of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists,” warned Reinhold Niebuhr more than half a century ago, “the result is frequently a preoccupation with minutiae which obscures the grand and tragic outlines of contemporary history and offers vapid solutions to profound problems.”
Neibuhr’s solutions were Christian, and while Delbanco invokes America’s Puritan wellsprings, he offers only a secular-humanist reliance on the humanities to shape citizens for a republic or an embryonic global public sphere. Kronman – who worked on the early stages of Yale’s Singapore plan and also helped New York University develop its campus in Abu Dhabi — takes justified swipes at “politically correct” dismissals of the works of dead white men. So does Delbanco, a survivor of culture wars in Columbia’s English Department, but, as http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/soft” target=”>Margaret Soltan shows hilariously in her “University Diaries” blog at Inside Higher Education, Delbanco is more than a little too cautious.
The challenge Delbanco and Kronman don’t quite face is that, like Christianity and free markets, liberal education has many more noisy claimants and celebrants than it has true friends. The false friends are funding the lavish campus institutes and centers and even some student organizations and faux-populist movements, to save liberal education from the liberals by mining the classic texts for guidance in navigating riptides of global capital and of resistance to it abroad and at home: “You need a 360-degree perspective,” Yale’s Diplomat-in-Residence and Reagan State Department veteran Charles Hill told a student interviewer in 2003. “Your approach can’t be just military and diplomatic, it also has to involve such things as economics, personnel, rhetoric, and morale. And you can’t just look outward, because somewhere in some basement or in the Holland Tunnel, something is going wrong. You can’t neglect anything.”
Liberal education requires a lot more adult grace and restraint than that, as well a much deeper sort of conviction and inter-generational commitment. It would ask just who Hill’s “you” is; there is no 360-degree perspective, but 360 different perspectives. A liberal education would show why Hill’s is not the way to persuade 18-years-olds, fresh off thousands of hours on the internet and in shopping malls, and that freedom isn’t about the defense and promotion of consumer choice and self-marketing. Freedom relies on the mastery of public virtues — the arts and disciplines of democratic deliberation — that are grounded in mutual respect and rational dialogue. It disposes a student to keep words and deeds from parting company, the words becoming empty and the deeds becoming brutal, as indeed they’re becoming in our investment banks and election campaigns.
Harried administrators such as Levin and other university presidents, struggling to balance what former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis calls “the retail-store university” in his Education Without a Soul, find themselves shorn of the authority and wisdom to distinguish one student’s quiet civic passion from another’s busy public emptiness, let alone address them. No wonder that some administrators are indulging or even conducting what leftists think is a coup d’etat against faculty self-governance. It’s not quite that, but it’s a consequence of the desperate effort to ride market and political currents and to open conservative the hearts and wallets of conservative alumni to provide more loyal crews and tighter rigging for their commercial and military cruises.
No wonder, too, that some professors have become part of the problem, behaving not as members of the collegium but as free-agent super-stars who leave the humanist conversation and its soul-sick student aspirants to the ministrations of university bureaucrats and health counselors.
No one warned against all this more tellingly than Bloom, whom conservatives often invoke. He urged the university to resist “whatever is most powerful” and “the worship of vulgar success.” He especially disdained http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/henry-kissingers_b_1093835.html professors who try to become counselors to the king but forget that “the intellectual, who attempts to influence… ends up in the power of the would-be influenced.”
The ultimate irony, again, is that the conservatives’ own market and nationalist strategies have begun to work against one another, with disastrous consequences that they finesse by shifting the blame to feckless liberals. In 1941, when TIME magazine co-founder Henry Luce (Yale Class of 1920), a son of American Protestant missionaries to China, proclaimed The American Century, the two horses of American national-security and of global capital pulled more or less together, in harness to the American republic. But by the time George W. Bush (Yale, 1968) and Dick Cheney (Yale drop-out, 1961), took that rig on a full gallop in 2003, they couldn’t avoid crashing into what the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington had seen coming in 1994: The hard reality is that the horse of global capital no longer pulls alongside the horse of American nationalism.
Huntington noticed that Aetna, Ford, and other conglomerates are no longer American companies. After 9/11, Cheney’s own Halliburton moved its world headquarters from the Bushes’ Houston to Abu Dhabi, and Post-America, a book by Fareed Zakaria (Yale, 1986, now a Yale Corporation member), announced that the global capitalist horse had broken loose from its old harness. This time, it’s not Henry Luce’s Yale that’s paying for missions abroad; it’s the government of Singapore, for a mission that Yale’s own faculty has had little role in shaping.
The old colleges weren’t always noble and independent. They produced herds of dray horses of the financial and legal establishments; legions of mountebanks, blowhards, and bounders at the Council on Foreign Relations; and the CIA, which was invented at Yale soon after Luce proclaimed the American Century. But they also produced or provoked a Dwight Macdonald (Yale, 1928), William Sloane Coffin, Jr.(1949), William F. Buckley, Jr.,(1950) John Lindsay (1944), Garry Trudeau (1970), John Kerry (1966), Howard Dean (1971), and thousands of other remonstrants and guardians of the republic, most unsung, whose works, including their inspiration of others, have been among Yale’s greatest contributions to America, and sometimes the world.
Today’s neoliberal riders of national-security and global currents justify themselves morally by waving the pennants of “diversity,” but its advances couldn’t have been won without tough, old civic-republican virtues that sustained the early Civil Rights movement and, yes, the old colleges themselves: At its 1964 Commencement Yale presented an honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr., who, fresh out of jail, wasn’t yet popular with most white Americans (including conservative Yale alumni of that time.). The college helped open the hearts of northern WASPs and Jews whose own Puritan and biblical ancestors had made history of the same Exodus myth that King was invoking in the South.
If that myth has expired, except as a cartoon in the mind of a Rick Santorum, then conservatives and neoliberals like Levin, struggling to pilot our liberal arts colleges through the sea-changes sketched here, will have to find some other way to demonstrate the courage of liberal education’s best convictions. Conservatives of Henry Luce’s stripe, especially, will have to test the best of their old Puritan faith against what John Winthrop called the “carnall lures” of wealth.
There’s a reason to hope that faculty critics can help them or their institutions to do that. It’s precisely — and ironically — that the old colleges weren’t so noble all the time but that they never stopped trying. At the dawn of the 18th century, Yale was founded to stop Harvard’s diversion of the holy Puritan mission toward decadent wealth-making, in a world increasingly connected but flattened by commerce. The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that’s powerful enough to plumb them, face the demons in them, and even defy the powers that be in the name of better ones.
Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of Puritan governors of Connecticut, demonstrated that faith in 1951, when — almost as if anticipating Yale-heavy intelligence and foreign-policy fiascos such as the Bay of Pigs and our grand-strategic blunders in Vietnam and Iraq — he dismantled Yale’s Institute of International for International Studies, a “Good Shepherd” predecessor of the dubious Jackson Institute and Grand Strategy programs at today’s Yale.
Griswold’s successor Kingman Brewster, Jr. a descendant of the minister on the Mayflower, sustained those reforms because, as he told my entering Class of 1969 on September 13, 1965, “To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected the very few who wear the colors of high purpose falsely. This has not been done by administrative edict or official regulation. It has been done by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions.”
It’s tempting these days to dismiss an admonition like Brewster’s as little more than a snob’s boast about an in-crowd. But he really wanted Yale students to plumb the old depths in order to know true leaders from false. He may even have been channeling a spiritual forebear, the Puritan minister Richard Mather, who wrote in 1657 that, “Imposters have but seldom got in and set up among us, and when they have done so, they have made a short blaze and gone out in a snuff.”
The old tensions between religious and humanist Truth-seeking, between authoritarian and republican Power-wielding, and between all of them and capitalist or Wealth-making run all the way back into the old colleges’ taproots. When those Connecticut Puritans founded their college to counter Harvard’s lapses, even they turned for funding and books to a governor of a multi-national corporation, the East India Company, Elihu Yale, and named their college after him.
That might give righteous critics of Levin’s venture in Singapore some pause. Or maybe it gives them even more precedent for criticizing it. Conservatives, hot to rescue liberal education from liberals, might take pause, too, as they remember the old Puritan willingness to defy worldly power as well as to serve it. And neoliberals who still think the world flat had better start looking into its abysses with something more than accelerators and multiple-regression analyses.
For all of us, Truth emerges not from esoteric doctrines, radical-left pronouncements of Rousseau’s General Will, nationalist grand strategies, or even the latest scientific paradigms, let alone from commercial and technological breakthroughs that raise the ante but don’t end the game. Truth develops only provisionally from the trust-building process of deliberative democracy, and the point of this essay is that that requires a deep civic faith that’s kindled or reinforced in college – or, fatefully, that isn’t.
“Anyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” Universities can’t demonstrate this in places like Singapore unless they’re proving it daily in their own companies of scholars. If they try to harness liberal education to strategies driven by the lust for money, power, and public relations, they’ll lose not only liberal education but the republic.
But let me give the last word to former student of mine, who, as a senior at Yale in 2004, wrote that “a set of practices, habits, customs and beliefs must be considered basic to a functioning democracy. …. Unlike the Constitution, though, such subtle understandings and habits cannot be codified. The ethos of a republic is at once its most inscrutable and important attribute.” We have to hope that liberal arts colleges’ faculty and students will vindicate their “living constitution” in the nick of time.
See also an exchange between NUS student and me, in their student paper, Kent Ridge Common, before Yale-NUS was underway: http://kentridgecommon.com/?p=14372
The Showdown on Liberal Education at Yale
Jim Sleeper
The stampede (or is it a gold rush?) abroad by dozens of American universities to plant their flags, brand names and, some of them claim, the seeds of liberal education and democracy was starting to seem thoughtless and chaotic by any serious pedagogical or political measure, even before Yale made its own bizarre entry in 2010. But now I wonder if globe-trotting faculty and administrators at other universities are laughing or crying about Yale President Richard Levin’s not-quite-public, not-quite online statement of last Sunday.
“A Yale lecturer raised questions in a recent commentary about Yale trustee involvement with the Government of Singapore,” Levin’s statement begins — it was sent to only some faculty and is posted on a limited-access website — and I, too, don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the rest of his statement, for I am the man, if it be so, as ’tis, whose” recent commentary” (a version of which ran here) was Levin’s pretext.
The rest of his message is a tortuous lawyer’s account of the trustees’ opportune recusements or timely resignations from Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation or from the Yale Corporation, to avoid any appearance of personal and pedagogical conflicts of interest. But this is a venture that Yale should never have undertaken even if all its legal i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. Let other universities learn and beware.
My column also ran in openDemocracy.net, a London-based website whose editors and readers know a thing or two about the former crown colony of Singapore and more still about universities — the London School of Economics and Warwick University — that have carried their “cosmopolitan” ambitions too far.
In 2005 Britain’s prestigious Warwick canceled plans to set up campus in Singapore after its faculty assessed the regime’s restrictions on academic and other freedoms. Yale has rushed in where Warwick feared to tread, collaborating with the regime to establish the “Yale-National University of Singapore” College, an undergraduate residential institution emulating Yale College as well as bearing its name.
Yale assumes, and Singapore claims, that Warwick’s pullout has prodded constructive change. That’s worth investigating. Far less important was my column’s first-time-in-public report that three Yale trustees, members of the governing Yale Corporation, have had extensive business ties to Singapore’s authoritarian, corporate city-state, for whose $100-billion investment corporation they’ve actually worked as board members, investment officers, and advisers, even before and after Singapore was bonding with their Yale Corporation.
Levin referenced my column to get out in front of the New York Times, whose Tamar Lewin questioned him about those trustees only a few hours before he issued his statement. Her story is expected to run just before the Yale College Faculty meeting of Thursday, April 5, at which the Singapore project will be discussed.
Levin’s statement is only one move in the full-court press Yale’s administration is conducting to justify a venture that, like half a dozen Yale-heavy American foreign-policy escapades, was undertaken with noble claims and promises but ended up weakening “the fabric of democracy” and demoralizing liberal education, as editors of openDemocracy put it in introducing my column. Administration loyalists are working hard to charm, pacify, or intimidate the project’s critics, and they’re planning parliamentary shenanigans at Thursday’s faculty meeting to neuter a proposed resolution (described by its author here) whose purpose is to put Yale on notice that many faculty question the venture on academic-freedom and civil-liberties grounds.
Universities are cosmopolitan and global by definition, of course, but there are good and bad ways to be so, and the bad ones have become heartbreaking for many who love Yale. Notwithstanding popular caricatures and true stories of Yale’s elitism and skullduggery, it has had an historic, bracing, often beneficent influence on the American republic and civil society and on its counterparts the world over.
That’s a complex and intriguing story that goes to the heart of America’s own contradictions, not to mention liberal democracy’s. Suffice it to say here that Yale’s past contributions to it are being parodied and sullied by this effort to establish a “Yale-National University of Singapore College” for undergraduates. If the project is irreversible, so is the folly of putting so many eggs in the basket of an illegitimate and unsustainable regime.
Columbia has opened seven or eight centers for undergraduates abroad, but each one has a light footprint and could be pulled out if political or economic circumstances require it. That’s precisely how a university should do things. It’s not how Yale is behaving in Singapore.
Yale’s Singapore venture also over-commits it to global neoliberalism and its engines of state capitalism, including the very big engine whose fist and fangs the Supreme Court has been baring lately right here in America. Yale has too often functioned as that regime’s velvet glove. That it’s doing so again by trying to ride the new global riptides on the Singapore boat is a tragedy in the making for Levin.
A “regular guy” who, since assuming the presidency in 1993, has pulled the university back from the brink physically, fiscally, and reputationally in the American chattering classes and in New Haven’s fraught town-gown relations, Levin has also gotten the right-wing noise machine to stop bashing “liberal” Yale. But he has done that only by making too many concessions to forces of national-securitization and corporatization that are making so many liberal arts colleges — as Lewis Lapham, paraphrasing the Yale historian George Pierson, put it in a terrifyingly poignant, prescient essay in 2001 — “like ships caught in the same current, some more obviously helpless than others, some steering across or against the wind, but all drifting toward certain destruction on the lee shore.”
It’s one thing for New York University Law School to set up a law center in Singapore, or Duke University a medical school and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology an engineering program there, all of these transmitting delimited skill sets to Singaporean graduate students. It’s quite another to try to carry a college’s deepest mission, liberal education, to another country’s young people by collaborating with a regime as extensively and yet naively as Yale has done.
Such an undertaking should mobilize a lot more wisdom, expertise, and “soft power” than anyone on the Yale Corporation or among its selected faculty operatives has exhibited, outside of bromidic declarations about East-West syntheses. And Yale has ignored its own Southeast Asia experts, at least one of whom, James Scott, has been scathingly critical of the project and of how Yale has promoted it.
Worse, Singapore is paying all the costs of constructing and staffing the new college, and who pays the piper inevitably calls the tune. The new institution is expected to emulate Yale’s residential collegiate character — a new model in Asia — as well as to bear the “Yale-NUS” name and even to integrate graduates right into the Association of Yale Alumni network (a nice fund-raising gambit), but all this without actually granting Yale degrees.
That last provision was the Yale Corporation’s way of insulating itself from an obligation to ask its own faculty to deliberate or vote formally as a body on what will be viewed universally as an expression of Yale College’s educational mission.
No wonder that, as the project has grown and begun to take up the time of hand-picked Yale faculty and factota, and as other Yale faculty have been tasked to assist the new Singapore hires during an orientation in New Haven, two-thirds of the 150 professors who showed up at a Yale College Faculty meeting last month forced the matter onto the agenda of this Thursday’s meeting.
In the column that Levin is referring to, I tried to sketch what’s at risk to Yale College’s larger mission. Here let me address some of Yale’s latest moves to deflect onto its own faculty critics the disgrace it has risked bringing upon itself by succumbing to the siren songs of neoliberal cosmopolitanism.
Those songs have transfixed and run incessantly through the minds of the same American elites whose premises and practices nearly destroyed the American republic and economy in the decade following 9/11. The new globalism is their escape — or so they imagine. Levin’s effort to prove that his trustees broke no laws or conflict-of-interest regulations is escapist in itself: At its best, it can end up confirming only the journalist Michael Kinsley’s observation that what’s truly scandalous isn’t always what’s illegal but what’s been made all-too-perfectly legal, for reasons no one ever discusses. Levin’s statement is an effort to avoid that discussion, although perhaps the Times will discover that he has glossed some real conflicts of interest, too.
The real “scandal” is Yale Corporation members’ blithe assurance that they can do good for the world while doing very well for themselves. When you think of Yale Corporation members G. Leonard Baker, Charles Ellis (who maintains an investment business in Singapore and is married to the Secretary of Yale, Linda Koch Lorimer), Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, and Levin, don’t think of three greedy capitalists and a neoliberal-economist front man conspiring to drag Yale into enhancing their own investments. Think rather of four knights-errant of a commodious American capitalism, hale fellows well met, boyishly idealistic about bringing democracy to the world via free markets.
It’s a lot like the vision of the former Yale political scientist (and later assistant secretary of defense and then World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, and of George W. Bush (Yale Class of 1968), upon whom Levin and his Corporation bestowed an honorary doctorate at the 2001 Yale Commencement, a few months before 9/11.
So imagine these enthusiasts sitting in a room or on a conference call, all of them taking it for granted that they are Yale and getting excited about an opportunity to bestow Yale’s gifts (for which Yale College alumni Baker, Ellis and Goodyear are personally grateful and almost weepily sentimental) upon an Asian society that’s ripe for those gifts, and in which they happen to have extensive connections.
What a fine way to gain the world without losing one’s soul, and never mind that a serious liberal arts education would have subjected these men’s grand plans to an intimate, rigorous historically informed assessment of how such efforts usually end.
Instead of subjecting itself to any such scrutiny, corporate Yale, clueless and flailing, has now wheeled in another trustee, the investment bankers’ favorite journalist, Fareed Zakaria, to write a column in the Yale Daily News that comes across like a wind-up toy of Zakaria at his self-important worst.
Judged by The New Republic to be one of America’s “most-overrated thinkers,” Zakaria, who will be Harvard’s commencement speaker this spring, was interviewed about the state of the world last year by none other than Levin before a large audience at the kick-off off Yale’s $50 million Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, the new home of “Professor” Stanley McChrystal and of what Lapham, writing of the Ivies in another context, called “the arts and sciences of career management,” including mastery of “the exchange rate between an awkward truth and a user-friendly lie.”
The Columbia Journalism Review notes archly that Zakaria, who collects a standard speaking fee of $75,000, has spoken before Baker Capital, Catterton Partners, Driehaus Capital Management, ING, Merrill Lynch, Oak Investment Partners, Charles Schwab, and T. Rowe Price.
In his Yale Daily News column, after parsing the new college’s prospective East-West syllabus with affectations of an erudition he doesn’t possess, Zakaria, an elitist who’s also a consummate player of the Third World card against Western critics of neo-liberalism, discovers in faculty opponents of the Singapore venture “a form of parochialism bordering on chauvinism — on the part of supposedly liberal and open-minded intellectuals” who, he tells us, can’t “see that we too, in America and at Yale, can learn something from Singapore. In fact, together, Yale and the National University of Singapore can teach the world a new way to think about education in a globalized world.”
Maybe so, but Zakaria’s habit of resorting to snarky put-downs only confirms his own closed-mindedness. Last summer, baring the same fangs he’s using to defend the Singapore venture, Zakaria excused President Obama’s dismal leadership failures in the debt-ceiling crisis by telling Charlie Rose, on a show with the insightful Obama critic, the academic psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen, “I’m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this.”
Zakaria — who hasn’t run for dogcatcher, either, but doesn’t hesitate to advise presidents — can’t help himself at such moments, and his column on the Singapore venture is a sad example of Yale’s own transformation from crucible of civic-republican leadership to global career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new elite that answers to no polity or moral code.
As the Yale Daily News staged Zakaria’s circus-dog performance, Levin’s off-line statement about conflicts of interest was joined by another statement, an e-mail message to some faculty by the felicitously named Pericles Lewis, a Yale English professor who has been helping the Yale-NUS college with hiring and curricular design. Urging selected New Haven colleagues to attend this Thursday’s meeting to endorse the venture, Lewis revealed that people in Singapore are actually human, that some of them are very bright, and that, contrary to the impression supposedly given by naïfs and moralists in New Haven who are distressed by Singapore’s laws against homosexuality and free expression and its failures to sign major human-rights covenants, life goes on there rather normally for gays and dissidents who know how to conduct themselves.
This Pericles might want to ponder Maureen Dowd’s observation last year that, in parliamentary hearings on the scandals wracking the News Corporation, whose practices not only broke the law but perverted government and the liberal public sphere, Rupert Murdoch’s “most revealing moment was when he volunteered his admiration of Singapore, calling it the most ‘open and clear society in the world.’ Its leaders are so lavishly paid, he said, that ‘there’s no temptation, and it is the cleanest society you’d find anywhere.’
“It was instructive that Murdoch chose to praise a polished, deeply authoritarian police state. Maybe that’s how corporations would live if they didn’t have to believe in people,” Dowd concluded, leaving off just where the Yale Corporation’s equally instructive account of its engagement with Singapore begins.
Yes, Singapore is a society in transition, but Yale has misunderstood what kind of transition it’s walking into, ill-prepared and prematurely, in the scathing assessment of Michael Montesano, a 1983 Yale graduate who has been living and working in Singapore.
Yale seems determined to miss what matters: It has been swept up by the logic of Davos, where movers and shakers like Zakaria confide to investors with stagey sighs that most other people still have to be ruled, and it has forgotten the logic of, say, Dante, who could remind the would-be rulers at Davos that they can barely rule themselves — something many of the rest of us have been noticing since at least 2003.
The very survival of the new global economy and public sphere depend on colleges like Yale standing somewhat apart from these people and from “the arts and sciences of career management” that markets and states have insinuated increasingly into their training at places like Yale.
Liberal democracy — including the promised liberal-democratic transformation of Singapore — depends on American colleges’ tempering their preparation of the young for wealth-making and power-wielding with rigorous, intimate humanist truth-seeking, not just with a humanist veneer like Zakaria’s. That will require assiduous cultivation and courage, drawn from deep wellsprings. “Can-do” investment strategies and corporate administration won’t be enough.
Some of the strongest warnings have come not only from what Pericles Lewis calls a “small group of active opponents,” and what Zakaria calls the bearers of “a form of parochialism bordering on chauvinism,” but from thinkers whom conservatives invoke, such as Allan Bloom, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Harvey Mansfield, and Samuel Huntington.
Warnings come also from Yale’s own history. When the American Revolution was beginning, many people were still grateful to King George III, whose American officers, including George Washington, had defeated the nefarious French and their Indian allies. But as the monarchy’s subsequent blunders and abuses accumulated, its Tory minions in the colonies began to cast lovers and patriots of a more democratic America as naïfs, malcontents, subversives, and even traitors. It was the colonial Tories who showed, as Zakaria does now, that they loved not the country they were living in but their own primacy as courtiers and operatives in a global empire that was becoming increasingly illegitimate and unsustainable.
Many at Yale had affection for the monarchy, or at least direct interests in it, but those interests became embarrassing when officers of the king hanged the 23-year-old Nathan Hale, Yale Class of 1773, as a traitor. Hale’s last words were, “I regret that I have only one life to give for my country,” for it was he who truly loved America, not what has become its occupying regime. Every day Yale undergraduates pass his statue, which bears his last words. Even if it’s too late to undo the Yale-NUS deal, faculty and students can honor Hale by distancing the College from the Corporation’s abuse of its name and true mission.
Academic empire builders, sailing under the flag of a civilizing mission to bring the arts and sciences of market and state management to undergraduates, are mis-educating them at precisely the time in their lives when they need most to engage a liberal education’s lasting challenges to politics and the spirit.
Questions about whether trustees have broken laws or whether Yale has reckoned adequately with the Singapore regime’s affronts to academic freedom, civil liberties, and human rights are important. But equally important is the question of whether Yale and other liberal arts colleges are being true to their own promise or whether they’re trying to ride currents that will carry them toward certain destruction on the lee shore.
At its monthly meeting tomorrow, the Yale College faculty will debate and probably vote on a resolution that means a lot more for the future of Yale University than its wording alone suggests. I introduced the resolution concerning the planned Yale-NUS College in Singapore to express faculty dissatisfaction not only with Yale’s collaboration with a government that severely constricts human rights, civil liberties and academic freedom but also with the administration’s decision-making process about curricular and pedagogical matters that should have been decided by a vote of the Yale faculty — if indeed Yale’s name is to be attached to the college in Singapore at all.
While the body of a university must be administered by a corporation, its living constitution — some would say its soul — flourishes only in its scholars’ and students’ freedom to follow reason and open inquiry in directions that are not foreclosed by government or market pressures. Yet the Yale faculty has slowly awakened to the virtual fait accomplit of a new college that will be in part governed and fully funded by Singapore and its National University. Yale’s collaboration in this venture was conceived partly by some members of the Yale Corporation who have also served on the Government of Singapore’s investment corporation. While the new college will not technically grant Yale degrees, its graduates will be fully integrated into the Yale Alumni Association Network.
My resolution addresses explicitly only one dimension of these strange and troubling arrangements. It reads:
“We, the Yale College Faculty, express our concern regarding the recent history of lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore, host of the proposed Yale-National University of Singapore College.
“We urge Yale-NUS to respect, protect and further principles of non-discrimination for all, including sexual minorities and migrant workers; to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society.
“These ideals lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as of our civic sense as citizens, and they ought not to be compromised in any dealings or negotiations with the Singaporean authorities.”
At Thursday’s faculty meeting, amendments may be introduced with the intent to get the Yale faculty on record supporting the establishment of Yale-NUS, even though the faculty never formally debated or voted on the project before it was signed and sealed. But any such support would require a new resolution and cannot be adopted before the full terms of the agreement between the Yale Corporation, the Government of Singapore and the NUS administration are made public. How can we be asked to endorse an arrangement the terms of which have not been disclosed?
Furthermore, it is only in ad hoc fashion that the cooperation expected of the Yale-New Haven faculty with Yale-NUS comes to light: We are expected to host and train the new faculty members of Yale-NUS here in New Haven as early as this fall, the president of Yale-NUS writes that classrooms will be equipped for teleconferencing with classes that we teach in New Haven, and the first students admitted by Yale-NUS will come to New Haven in summer 2013 and attend our classes, where special focus will be placed on encouraging them to participate freely and learn to speak their minds. When have we been asked whether or not we agree with all this?
The argument by Yale-NUS defenders that puzzles me most is that we in New Haven live in departmental silos, while Yale-NUS will set a dazzling example of the interdisciplinary future of liberal arts for us here in the United States. Leaving aside this venture’s naïve missionary sentiment, one must ask: Do we need to go to Singapore to advance interdisciplinarity and a revival of the liberal arts?
I understand well the challenges of achieving a genuine interdisciplinarity. A University-wide conversation about such programs would be welcome. But where has that discussion been? What exactly have been the obstacles to holding it here in New Haven?
We, the faculty of Yale College, have the responsibility and obligation to deliberate and vote on these arrangements. Nothing less than our honor and judgment is at stake.
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy.
Even if a train has left the station, it’s important to be clear about what may go wrong on the journey – especially if one is already on the train! Since Yale’s decision to forge ahead with its college in Singapore is full of peril as well as promise, those of us who’ve been critical of the venture should reiterate our normative and pedagogical concerns.
Yale and its graduates aren’t strangers to the blessings of international education and cosmopolitan visions. I myself might not have earned my PhD in philosophy at Yale had I not first graduated the American College for Girls in Istanbul, Turkey, founded and funded by New England Presbyterians, including citizens of New Haven such as the Washburn family.
Singapore, however, seems a poor choice of a venue in which to expand the model of Yale College in Asia. Some call it a police state, citing ample evidence, and there’s little question that it is authoritarian and continues to commit significant violations of basic human rights. Recent tremors in the country’s politics may even accelerate, not diminish, these violations.
If our purpose is to set a model for a liberal arts education, why not engage India, the country with a free and contentious public sphere and an extra-ordinary intellectual life both in India and in the Indian diaspora? Experiments in democratic education are best performed with in genuinely open, multicultural and multi-faith democracies, such as India, rather than in the artificial, boutique-like security of places like Singapore or Abu Dhabi.
Proponents of Yale’s venture marshal long-discredited “cultural relativist” arguments to suggest that “we” have no business judging other countries’ human rights records and that we should learn the rules and mores of other cultures.
This line of reasoning – a long, convoluted one in law, philosophy, and political science — rides the tired notion that sound “Asian” values must be respected even if they are irreconcilable with “Western” understandings of human rights and democracy. But no one professing the liberal arts, especially in Yale’s name, can fail to insist that “human rights have no walls” and that all values are subject to critical scrutiny, whether some call them “Asian” or western. If we don’t live up to these principles, then the whole project is compromised from the start.
I predict that some event in Singapore’s political life or in the interaction of Yale College in Singapore with the larger society will involve some deep clash of principles for the university and that it will tarnish Yale’s own standing for human rights and democratic values.
Finally, why should those who want the Singapore project to serve as an experiment in reforming the core liberal-arts curriculum try to make that tail wag this dog? Let us experiment and reform liberal education as liberal democracies actually do best — through vigorous debate and reforms of old curricular assumptions right here at Yale.
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy
Jim Sleeper Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University
A Small But Solid Victory for Liberal Education
Posted: 04/ 6/2012 4:44 pm
Just as the Tunisian vendor who sparked the Arab Spring was provoked not only by one bureaucratic or police affront but also by a long train of abuses that had alienated many Tunisians from the government, so the Yale professors who passed a resolution decisively (100 to 69) over their President Richard Levin’s objection, in his presence, on April 5 were prompted by a lot more than the resolution’s explicit concern for abuses of academic freedom, civil liberties and human rights by the government of Singapore, with whose National University Levin and the Yale Corporation are setting up a brand-new undergraduate college.
The faculty made clear that it was expressing larger concerns summarized two days before in a Yale Daily Newscolumn by Yale’s Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Seyla Benhabib, the resolution’s author (and my wife; this is a blog commentary, not only a report; I provide the links to other accounts below).
The faculty’s main concerns were reiterated so explicitly in the two-and-a-half-hour-long, closed-door meeting itself that everyone there understood the resolution’s passage as a vote of “no confidence” in the growing corporatization and centralization of governance and liberal education at Yale.
Levin and administration loyalists left the room silently as dozens of people congratulated professors Christopher Miller, Michael Fischer, Jill Campbell, Joel Rosenbaum, Mimi Yiengpruksawan and others, including Victor Bers, the classicist who has really been the William Lloyd Garrison of this movement from the start.
Although the Yale-NUS project, signed and sealed two years ago without the Yale faculty deliberating or deciding on it, will proceed on schedule, things won’t be the same at Yale itself now that its company of scholars, or collegium, has rebuked Levin and the Yale Corporation for usurping its pedagogical and civic independence. Let other universities’ administrations and faculty take note.
Without such independence, liberal education would have merely the instrumental uses that Singapore’s government seeks in its rush to become a global-capitalist entrepot. The professors were rebuking the administration not just for lending their name and pedagogical mission to something concocted by the university’s Davos men, but, as I have described here, for instituting bureaucratic procedures and decrees right in New Haven that reduce the company of scholars to a roster of corporate employees, and (as I’ve argued here and elsewhere) for developing a network of lavishly funded institutes and centers — nunneries for failed, aging neoconservatives and Vulcan warriors who contribute nothing to scholarship and overawe undergraduates by telling war stories and showing how to fight their last wars, complete with career-counseling and recruitment services.
Now that the resolution has passed, the spin has begun. Yale’s Tories — who tried but failed to eviscerate the measure with amendments during the meeting — are claiming that its passage indicates that faculty have accepted and even approved Yale’s venture in Singapore simply by acknowledging its existence.
The new Yale-NUS college train has left the station, according to this spin, and while some dissidents may have hoped to derail it by dancing a self-righteous dance of protest, those who understand how the world really works will now get on with doing that work.
But one of the reasons for the Yale faculty’s revolt is that those who claim to know how the world works have dragged us all through debacle after debacle, from Iraq through the 2008 meltdown and beyond, and then trying to put a nice face on it.
This has happened nowhere more often than at Levin’s Yale, which bestowed an honorary doctorate on George W. Bush (Yale Class of ’68) three months before he and Dick Cheney (Yale drop-out, 1961) took us on ventures supported by Levin and championed even more assiduously by faculty whom he favored, as I’ve described here. Some of the same people at Yale envisioned the Singapore venture as a course correction — less imperialistic, more collaborative — but, in too many ways, it’s more of the same.
But, really, the best way to understand what has been sparked here is to re-read Benhabib’s short column explaining to the Yale community the main point of the resolution that passed yesterday against Levin’s objection.
The is a set-back for Levin’s vision of Yale, not only because of some likely negative reaction from Singapore (actually, the Yale faculty acted in solidarity with critics there of Singapore’s regime, with which Levin has so uncritically collaborated), and not only because some Yale Corporation members may have been in it for the money (I’ve argued here that they were probably engaging in the old Yale practice of doing well by doing good, which is not the same thing).
Rather, this is set-back for Levin’s vision of Yale for a softer, subtler, but in the long run more consequential reason: His policies and indulgences have abetted what The Economist magazine described at length a few weeks ago as a convergence of an Asian model of state capitalism with the one that’s emerging in the U.S. What gets lost in that convergence are the American republic and civic-republican ideal, and this should worry honorable conservatives as well as liberals in America; but neither side is acknowledging or reckoning with it — precisely the kind of reckoning a liberal education is for. The vote at Yale is the spark of something more promising.
Faculty members find their seats before yesterday’s meeting in Davies Auditorium. Photo: Mark Zurolo ’01MFA.
Over the objections of President Richard Levin ’74PhD, the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a resolution yesterday that criticizes Singapore’s human-rights record and calls on Yale’s new joint venture there with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to “respect, protect and further principles of non-discrimination for all, including sexual minorities and migrant workers, and to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society.” (See the bottom of this post for the full text.)
The resolution has no statutory weight, and it’s hard to say if it will have any impact on the development of Yale-NUS College, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2013 in Singapore. But it is seen by its supporters not just as a statement on Singapore, but as a kind of awakening of the faculty to what they see are issues of governance at the university. Jim Sleeper ’69, a lecturer in political science whose wife, poli sci professor Seyla Benhabib ’77PhD, proposed the Singapore resolution, wrote on the website Talking Points Memo that
Those concerns were reiterated so explicitly in the two-and-a-half-hour-long, closed-door meeting itself that everyone there understood the resolution’s passage as a vote of “no confidence” in the growing corporatization and centralization of governance and liberal education at Yale. Let other universities’ administrations and faculties take note.
Faculty had the opportunity to weigh in at town-hall style meetings two years ago when the Yale administration announced plans for Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college on the NUS campus. But the matter was never put to a faculty vote, and faculty response of any kind was minimal. Since then, growing faculty dissatisfaction over a number of issues—the allocation of support staff and the administration of the Graduate School among them—has led some professors to look at Yale-NUS again. Questions about academic freedom and free expression were raised anew.
More than 200 professors —an unusually large number —attended the faculty meeting, which was moved from its usual venue in Linsly-Chittenden Hall to Davies Auditorium to accommodate the anticipated crowd. Although the university will not release the official vote, faculty who were present say it was about 100 to 70 in favor of the resolution, which was amended slightly to soften its language.
President Levin, who was present at the meeting and spoke out against the resolution, was disappointed with the result. “I felt that the tone of the resolution, especially the first sentence, carried a sense of moral superiority that I found unbecoming,” he told the Yale Daily News. In a statement to the media, Levin said:
“I value the engagement of my colleagues and their commitment to important principles, even though I opposed the resolution because it did not capture the mutual respect that has characterized the Yale-NUS collaboration from the beginning.”
FULL TEXT OF THE RESOLUTION:
“We, the Yale College Faculty, express our concern regarding the history of lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore, host of Yale-National University of Singapore College,” the resolution reads.
“We urge Yale-NUS to respect, protect and further principles of non-discrimination for all, including sexual minorities and migrant workers, and to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society.
“These ideals lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as our civic sense as citizens, and they ought not to be compromised.”
Will Yale’s Alumni Rescue Liberal Education at Yale?
Jim Sleeper Lecturer in Political Science, Yale
Hoping to head off alumni resistance to the brand-new “Yale-National University of Singapore” college that the Yale Corporation has created somewhat stealthily in collaboration with the government of that authoritarian city-state, Association of Yale Alumni chairman Michael Madison has inadvertently demonstrated one of the ways Yale College is being transformed from a crucible of civic-republican leadership, grounded in liberal education, into a global career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new elite that answers to no polity or moral code:
STATEMENT OF THE OFFICERS OF THE AYA BOARD OF GOVERNORS, Michael Madison, Chair of the Board
“All Yale-NUS College graduates will be warmly welcomed as a part of the Yale alumni community. They will also be invited to participate in general alumni events and programs. They will not, however, be voting in the elections for Alumni Fellows to the Yale Corporation since the University by-laws limit voting to those with Yale degrees.”
All that counts here is that Yale-NUS graduates will get a “warm” welcome when they impress their business clients over dinner at the elegant Yale Club of New York and when, grateful for this access of grace, they respond to Yale’s fundraising appeals.
This sad gambit hastens the Yale Corporation’s selling of Yale’s name and pedagogical talents to Singapore without the Yale faculty’s actually deciding on it, owing to the provision that the new venture’s graduates won’t actually get bona fide Yale degrees. What they will get is Yale’s name and aura on their resumes and even diplomas. And like the regime in Singapore, this will infect and inflect the university’s nature and mission.
On its face, the strategy seems consonant with neoliberalism’s noble promise to transcend narrow nationalism and war with commerce and, through commerce, with global democracy — an old, fond hope of “enlightened” global elites since long before there was a Davos. Unfortunately, as I’ve argued a bit heatedly, it subordinates liberal education to corporatism in ways that doom the latter.
It also ignores the warnings not only of leftist and liberal thinkers and a few right-wing isolationists, as defenders of Yale’s Singapore folly keep trying to suggest, but, even more so, of thinkers whom honorable conservatives invoke (Allan Bloom, Samuel Huntington, John Gray, Harvey Mansfield). They’ve insisted that universities stand farther apart from both markets and states than the Yale Corporation or Yale President Richard Levin, a neoliberal economist, show any sign of understanding.
Just how blind they’ve been in blundering into Singapore is sketched by a young Singaporean, Shaun Tan, a graduate student in New Haven, and, devastatingly, by Michael Montesano, Yale ’83, who lives and works in Singapore and knows the moves in this game.
It would not be xenophobic or moralistic to call the game off. Yale is already commendably cosmopolitan, its undergraduates increasingly diverse in national as well as ethno-racial and religious terms, though not yet adequately in socio-economic ones — a problem that’s side-stepped, and indeed almost denied, by putting so much energy into Singapore. Alumni of liberal arts colleges would be well-justified to remind their alma maters’ new pharoahs that diversity wouldn’t have been achieved at all had not the old colleges nurtured the tough, civic-republican (and, yes, American) virtues that aided the civil rights movement.
That nurturing is being eviscerated subtly but palpably by administrators’ neo-liberal grand strategies, which presume that the world is flat and “connected,” not that it has abysses which only a liberal education can plumb.
Yale alumni can make this shallowness an issue in the current election for an alumni fellow of the Yale Corporation to replace the retiring Margaret Warner ’71. Will the candidates criticize and oppose the Singapore venture? Protests against the facile networking of NUS graduates into the alumni association should also be lodged with AYA chair Madison and governing board members. The Yale administration may listen to alumni more carefully than it did to the faculty last week.
It would also help if a dozen eminent professors and emeriti who oppose this drift in their university’s mission would say so. Life is short, and certain moments in history are fateful enough to demand voice and courage at the expense of protocol and convention. A letter or column signed by such keepers of a university’s conscience and soul might have a profound effect on others’ reckonings with the prospects of liberal education.
Finally, the Yale faculty’s resolution expressing concern about Singapore’s inhospitality to true liberal education was only a signal, of what is required. New resolutions, and perhaps a strong faculty Senate, may be necessary to restore the independent collegium, or company of scholars, to its rightful role in the governance of universities that shelter and nourish the kind of liberal education that prepares citizens to keep their republics.
Yale’s president and trustees think they’ve found in Singapore a new haven for a liberal arts college and the kind of civil society a liberal education nourishes and needs. Their university sustained such a college for more than 300 years and, through it, the American republic, and for much of the time the republic inspired the world. But now Yale’s captains have bound it contractually to an authoritarian corporate city state by building a “Yale-National University of Singapore College” that, while bearing Yale’s name, will be wholly funded, constructed and ultimately controlled by Singapore’s omnipresent government from behind the façade of a joint board.
Yale’s captains know that they’re taking a big gamble. So did Puritans who crossed another stormy sea to found Harvard and Yale on the models of Cambridge and, later, Oxford, to which they remained loyal officially, though not so much in their hearts.
Unlike their predecessors, who built their own City Upon a Hill, today’s adventurers aren’t so much in control of the venture, and they’ve kept most of its risks hidden from the crew and passengers and, I think, even from themselves: They can’t have anticipated that freedom of expression would be waterlogged so soon at Yale itself. But it has been, and thereby hangs our sorry tale.
To Yale’s 21st Century pilgrims, Singapore seemed shimmering proof of the doctrines of Yale Corporation trustee Fareed Zakaria, whose The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad and The Post-American World prophesied the transubstantiation of untrustworthy democratic distempers into prosperity and ordered liberty through capitalist discipline of the market and the public debt.
But while Singapore, reputedly a sterling example of such order, was celebrated by the BBC in the early 1990s as “The Intelligent Island,” it was derided by others as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” and now it’s encountering some knotty problems that it hopes Yale can help solve, defer, or disguise.
Whether that happens will depend on the interests and “values” of Singapore’s tight ruling Han Chinese elite, whose future leaders might be invigorated by liberal education if their elders weren’t taking such an instrumental, commercial view of it and if their would-be mentors from Yale hadn’t sailed into Singapore so clueless about the country and even about what they’re bringing to it.
The result could be a collision, not a confluence, of Singapore’s increasingly frenetic, hollow ascent in the world and America’s heavy, messy descent into the violence and vapidity of its own politics, streets, and gladiatorial entertainments. Seeking a Leviathan, American leaders could even wind up asking Singapore’s to come over and show them how to take charge before the Beijing Chinese do.
More likely, though, Yale-NUS will become a laboratory where white-coated scientists and priests try to synthesize Singaporean state capitalism with American state capitalism in a convergence that will seem harmonious only to its architects and apologists.
“Singapore has always regarded as one of its strengths its ability to move fast, adopt policies quickly, implement hard policies which are unpopular but deemed necessary to put the country in a competitive position,” explained its ambassador to the United States, Chan Heng Chee, to a Yale Law School audience in March.
In other words, it has been successful partly because it’s been a lot less democratic than its ruling People’s Action Party likes to pretend. But now, the ambassador explains, “The governing party… has become even more responsive” to a vocal and politicized electorate, mooting the old doctrine that democracy and freedom must wait upon order and prosperity.
There’s more than a little ambiguity in the word “responsive” here, for Singapore’s government “responds” with alacrity and energy to any hint of public protest. Its deft balancing of surveillance and seduction makes the doughty little city-state look, on the surface, like the United Colors of Benetton bubble that Yale’s campus in New Haven would love to be if only the Yale Corporation could grace the surrounding neighborhoods with more work, income, and safety in exchange for more obedience, self-censorship and, failing that, surveillance, and suppression. But we don’t do that in America, because too many of us are too libertarian for such governmentality.
Or are we? Perhaps Yale has gone to Singapore partly to figure out how to adapt what they do there to something we might be persuaded or otherwise induced to accept here.
President Richard Levin and the university’s governing Yale Corporation didn’t give their own collegium, or company of scholars, any deliberative role in this venturing of the institution’s hallowed name, culture, and pedagogical mission. One hundred professors asserted their rightful share of responsibility in a vote of no-confidence last month, but the Yale-NUS contract had already been signed and sealed.
And what’s in the contract? The administration has kept that sealed, too. It hasn’t revealed why it accepted Singapore’s refusal to exempt the new campus from state prosecutors’ and favored plaintiffs’ infamously sinuous enforcements of laws against defaming anyone who governs — laws that, if applied in the United States, would lead to the expulsion, imprisonment, and/or ostracism of a professor who argues in public that Barack Obama or Antonin Scalia is irresponsible and duplicitous.
Nor has Yale explained why it accepts Singapore’s right to expel any professor, without cause, simply by refusing to renew his or her yearly work permit. Are these practices legitimate cultural differences to be respected, or just realities to be accepted?
The Yale-NUS non-binding memorandum and prospectus assure readers that academic freedom is secure because of the prospective faculty’s scholarly excellence, as determined by weights and measures that leave too much wiggle room to a regime like Singapore’s, and too little wiggle room for a college of Yale’s influence and, one might have thought, its dignity. What would the university have to pay to get out of its junior partnership here? Yale isn’t saying. One rumor has it at $30 million, another at $300 million.
Yale’s only substantive response to such questions has been to deflect them by reminding inquirers of its stipulation that Yale-NUS graduates won’t actually receive bona fide Yale degrees. But that only raises more questions than it answers: Why will Yale’s name and logo still be on the diplomas of an entity it cannot ultimately control, and why has it been announced that “Yale-NUS” alumni will be integrated into the Association of Yale Alumni network, unless as a nifty fundraising gambit that further cheapens the university’s name by marking the first time in its history that non-degree holders will become its alumni?
A Standard Is Lowered
The opacity of this strange, new “openness” is the other side of Yale’s strange, new closedness to what truly counts: A university isn’t a university unless it stands for the openness of inquiry into the unknown through experimentation and free exchange of ideas. During the Cold War, Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, descended from a line of Puritan, colonial Connecticut governors, found the courage to crusade for liberal education nationally against Communism and McCarthyism, both of them imminent and intimate threats to liberal education at the time, on campus and off.
Yale’s statement on Freedom of Expression, developed in 1975 by a committee chaired by the distinguished American historian C. Vann Woodward, affirms that if liberal education isn’t merely an ornament but a wellspring of human striving, the free exchange of ideas “is necessary not only within [the university’s] walls but with the world beyond as well” and that “the university must do everything possible to ensure within it… the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
“To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom,” the statement continues, “for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives another of the right to listen to those views….. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.”
Students and faculty at Yale-NUS will have no such freedom beyond the university’s walls, and Singapore refuses to exempt the campus itself from its energetic ban on criticism of government policies and public figures. “Understanding that norms are different is part of the value of this experiment,” Levin rationalizes,, adding pointedly that “In Singapore, it is illegal to express racist or intolerant positions publicly. Here in the United States, some of our university peers have speech codes.” The implication here is that Singapore’s codes shouldn’t shock a student at a leafy, liberal arts campus in America that has one of these codes.
But the “hate speech” that’s punished by some American colleges is only one variety of what’s silenced by Singapore’s codes and creative enforcements. Yale’s Freedom of Expression statement acknowledges that some speech really does hurt: “Shock, hurt, and anger are serious consequences of untrammeled expression,” it cautions, and “No member of the community with a decent respect for others should use, or encourage others to use, slurs and epithets….” But the statement insists that “It may sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free expression.”
The statement adds that its committee weighed carefully the argument that uncivil and disrespectful behavior “should be made subject to formal sanctions and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive.” But it concluded that “Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject …. The assumption that speech can be suppressed by anyone who deems it false or offensive.”
The perverse irony about Singapore’s strict laws against racist speech is that they keep the lid on a hierarchy of color and caste that’s presented to Western liberals as “multiculturalism” wrapped in “Confucian” traditions that are also invoked to justify subordinating Malay and Indian minorities, and impoverished Chinese migrant workers, to the country’s Han Chinese majority.
This cruel duplicity is persistently overlooked by Americans who, because they’re penitential about their own country’s racism toward Chinese, find it hard to imagine that some of Singapore’s Chinese might consider themselves superior to other peoples in the region and deserving of prerogatives like those of the old American WASP establishment (which was often dumber and more decadent). Another reason why Americans accept this nonsense is that they wouldn’t be able to question it without unsettling the “harmony” its progenitors claim they’re ensuring in Singapore no less than Beijing.
And what if we want to examine not Singapore’s laws against racist speech but its broader economic and political restraints on two million migrants and other non-citizens who labor without minimum-wage laws or any other public standing, in a country of six million? Don’t try it, even online. “When asked whether the government’s close surveillance of political blogs was antithetical to Yale’s values, President Levin declined to comment,” notes Shaun Tan, a Yale graduate student in international relations, in a recent, devastating account of several Western universities’ collaborations with authoritarian regimes.
“When debating [the faculty resolution mentioned above] urging the Yale-NUS College to respect civil liberties on campus,” Tan notes, “Levin opposed a clause expressing concern at Singapore’s ‘lack of respect for civil and political rights’, objecting that it ‘carried a sense of moral superiority.’ As the project comes to fruition, the Yale administration has grown increasingly reluctant to make any kind of value judgment with regard to Singapore.”
“[Singaporeans] take demonstrations in a kind of different way,” explains Yale astronomer Charles Bailyn, the “inaugural dean” of Yale-NUS. “What we think of as freedom, they think of as an affront to public order, and I think the two societies differ in that respect.”
They certainly do. Or at least, they once did: Yale’s Woodward committee and its statement on Freedom of Expression are now eviscerated by the agreement with Singapore, whose “anti-defamation” laws are enforced without jury trials in courts wholly subservient to the ruling People’s Action Party, which has held power uninterruptedly since Singapore gained independence in 1965.
For example, the first opposition politician to win a seat in parliament, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, was soon charged with defamation in a suit that bankrupted him and forced him out of public life. His was only the first prominent case in a relentless tide of prosecutions that shuttle countless dissenters, including NUS faculty, out of their jobs and homes and into unemployment, prison, or exile.
Dr. Chee Soon Juan (PhD, U of Georgia) was fired by NUS from his position as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined an opposition party; when he attempted to contest his dismissal, he, too, was sued for defamation, imprisoned, bankrupted, barred from leaving the country.
“Supremely confident of the reliability of his judiciary, the prime minister uses the courts … to intimidate, bankrupt, or cripple the political opposition while ventilating his political agenda. Distinguishing himself in a caseful of legal suits commenced against dissidents and detractors for alleged defamation in Singapore courts, he has won them all,” writes Francis T. Seow, a former solicitor general of the country.
“In the past couple of years,” wrote a Yale student in a paper for a seminar I teach on Global Journalism, National Identities, “British author Alan Shadrake was sentenced on defamation charges for criticizing the country’s use of capital punishment; and the New York Times group was forced to apologize to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew after being threatened with a substantial fine for printing an article about political dynasty of the Singaporean prime minister. These recent cases further substantiate the claim that Singapore’s judiciary is simply a political instrument in the hands of the ruling party.
“The government’s grip on media is even tighter and more obvious,” the paper continues: “Nearly all print and broadcast media outlets, internet service providers, and cable television services are either owned or controlled by the state or by companies with close ties to the PAP. International organizations monitoring human rights and freedom of the press consistently criticize Singapore’s harsh crackdowns on journalists, writers, or anyone disagreeing with the government’s official standpoint. Reporters without Borders, ranked Singapore 135th out of 179 surveyed countries in terms of freedom of the press in 2011.”
The Shame of American Self-Censorship
Even more consequential for freedom than censorship via unjust prosecution has been the self-censorship it generates in Singaporean society. “The defamation law is a line in the sand. Never knowing where it will be drawn, we live in perpetual fear of crossing it,” writes Kenneth Jeyaretnam, son of the persecuted parliamentarian, in an essay that WIRED magazine published on April 19, the same day that a strange panel discussion at Yale, organized by Singaporean students under the beguiling title, “Singapore UnCensored,” tried to counter what they characterized as false and offensive stereotypes about their country. By implying that irresponsible faculty critics had “censored” fair appraisals of Singapore, the event introduced an Orwellian whiff of self-censorship to Yale itself, as I’ll show below.
Levin’s and Bailyn’s most common response to critics has been that anyone who truly means to “engage the world” – the phrase is a mantra for Yale-NUS apologists – must be willing to bend principles such as those in Yale’s Freedom of Expression statement, out of sensitivity to our Singaporean partners’ values.
What values? Asian values. Order and harmony. So what if, in Singapore, Asians dare not share their ideas publicly? It’s their culture! “Close the door and I’ll tell you what I think” is the sentence “Singapore UnCensored” panelists used several times to normalize American listeners’ understandings of a “different” culture.
Americans say “Close the door….” that way in their workplaces all the time, too, of course, but they don’t like hearing it said in public arenas. Yale’s leaders present their hesitation to open the doors that Singaporeans close as a token of their cosmopolitan way of engaging other societies.
Somewhat ironically, they’re also continuing a Yale obsession with China and East Asia that was a lot less humble and that peaked in Protestant missionary work there in the 19th Century and, later, in anti-Communism: Henry R. Luce, Yale Class of 1920, co-founder of TIME and LIFE magazines and author of the 1941 manifesto “The American Century,” which declared that the world must and would become more like America, was born in China to Yale Protestant missionaries.
Levin has gone to China often on behalf of Yale, which has many small centers and projects there, but probably the Chinese were less receptive than Singapore has made itself seem to something as grandly ambitious as Yale-NUS.
“I am afraid there is an apparent tendency to believe what one wants to believe,” warned William (Bo) Tedards, a 1991 Yale alumnus and the Coordinator of the World Forum for Democratizaton in Asia, in a 2010 letter to Levin that wasn’t answered. “[Your] conclusion that faculty and students from overseas will need to ‘understand those differences,’ i.e. accept that human rights violations are occurring around them, …. offers no hope at all to Singaporean faculty and students, who apparently will feel no more free than they currently do at the National University of Singapore…
“And make no mistake, they do not feel free…. Singapore is governed by a political system that is the antithesis of the ideals of liberal education. Human Rights Watch recently described Singapore as ‘a textbook example of a repressive state.’
“One must not fall into the trap of feeling guilty for ‘imposing Western values’ or ‘failing to respect local cultures,'” Tedards added. “The very idea that basic human rights are anything but universal is a racist one (and the fact that it was so eloquently articulated by Lee Kuan Yew indicates the depth of his personal racism.)”
Yet so much “respect” have Yale’s planners for the “local culture” of Singapore’s Sino-centric rulers that, for now, at least, they’ve planned no serious work on Japan or Korea in the Yale-NUS curriculum; nor are they hiring faculty for it from Japan or Korea, according to the felicitously named Pericles Lewis, a Yale professor of comparative literature (!) who thinks he’s engaging the world and advancing the liberal arts in this way.
In a message he sent on April 10 to an applicant who is a Yale alumnus teaching at a Korean university and is the author of a best-selling book in South Korea, Lewis wrote that while the “application is good, and I am sure you would be a great asset, …. we decided that the fields of Korean and Japanese would not be high priorities in our initial hiring group. (As compared to Chinese, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and European). That may well change in the future, so I hope you will consider re-applying when the college expands in coming years.”
Fair enough, perhaps, but every time that Yale has hired a senior professor of Chinese in New Haven in the past ten years, the newcomer has been invited to affiliate with Lewis’ Comparative Literature department, while senior faculty in Japanese have never been invited to affiliate with it. As for Korea, Lewis concluded his note by saying, “I am afraid I don’t think I should sign on for the interviews regarding Korea, as I would simply be displaying my ignorance!”
Yale’s incapacity or reluctance to live up to its own Statement on Freedom of Expression, even when prodded by Tedards and the evidence that supports him, was on sorry display in 2006, when Chinese Premier Hu Jintao spoke at Yale. As Shaun Tan notes, “Hu was not subject to questions from the audience like a normal speaker at Yale. Instead, he was given two softball questions pre-selected by the Yale administration.” Hundreds of students protesting the visit “were restricted to the enclosed area of Old Campus, where they could not upset Hu and cause him to rethink his recent decision to allow Yale to be the first foreign university to trade on China’s heavily regulated stock market.
In a prophetic irony, the Singapore edition of The Christian Post noted that “A CNN reporter was reportedly thrown out after asking the Chinese president if he saw protestors gathered outside. A Yale spokesperson later said that the man was escorted out because he had been invited to ‘cover an event, not hold a press conference.'” Whether or not Singapore’s government noticed that Post story, it’s unlikely to have punished the paper for doing what the regime itself is always quick to do: point the finger at others’ human-rights violations.
Now that the Chinese human rights activist Chen Guancheng, after being forced out of his refuge in the US Embassy, will be allowed to come to the United States “to study,” Yale has an opportunity to defend academic freedom and “engage the world” in a way that’s “becoming” of a great university. It can do what it did after the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, when it appointed the heroic dissident Kang Zhengguo a Senior Lector. Will Yale be as brave now, and offer to bring Chen Guancheng to New Haven? Will the Yale Law School, which maintains a China Law Center to advance the rule of law in China and welcomes visiting scholars from all over that country, invite Guancheng, a human-rights lawyer? Singapore, ever eager to point the finger at China, might even give Yale its permission.
When the Yale Alumni Magazine invited comments on the Singapore plan in 2010, Peter Conn, a 1969 Yale graduate who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that “in dealing with the protection of academic freedom, the current Yale administration has quite recently demonstrated neither good judgment nor a deep commitment to fundamental academic values.”
Conn recalled that in 2009 Yale University Press, anxious to avoid Muslim rage with a decision that was “surely taken with the assent and presumably under the direction of senior administrators” but that was “appropriately condemned across the scholarly community,” removed from Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World the very cartoons, disrespectful of the prophet Muhammed, that were the subject of her scholarly book. Although the cartoons had been published and posted often without incident, Yale chose fear over freedom.
In Conn’s judgment “this censorship subordinated the requirements of truth-seeking and truth-telling to the hypothetical behavior of an angry mob. In short, the Press and its overseers chose to abandon the central principles of the university…. It may be that the administrators of some universities possess the stamina and proven moral courage that will be needed to withstand the attacks on freedom of inquiry, speech, and assembly that collaboration with Singapore’s government will inevitably provoke. Yale’s administrators manifestly do not.”
This year Levin did condemn a New York police intelligence unit’s spying on Muslim students at Yale as part of the NYPD’s over-ambitious (and remarkably stupid) anti-terrorism operations. But his statement risked offending no one besides a municipal bureaucracy that plays no role in Yale’s life. In Singapore, on the other hand, Levin has bound himself to a city-state that spies on its Muslim population and may now even keep a wary eye on Yale’s.
Maybe Levin’s Yale wasn’t veering so far off course, then, after all, when it sailed into Singapore and collaborated in the theft of its own identity. It did so partly, I think, because the Levin administration was already re-fashioning Yale’s identity without quite knowing what it was doing, and it was bewitched by the mirage of the golden web that Singapore’s smiling, cosmopolitan elites are weaving from the iron filings of authoritarian instincts that they insinuate into the whole country’s little daily regimens of ingratiation and insinuation.
Superficially pleasant and smooth, these mannered regimens take awhile to decode. Levin and his colleagues have had little reason to try. Step off a plane into Singapore’s striking Changi airport, tour the country’s clean, state-of-the art public works and transit systems and its city scapes, towers, parks, restaurants, nightclubs, and cultural amenities, and you’ll understand why “many international businesses find Singapore a congenial place to establish regional offices or operations, and many expatriates find it a congenial place to reside,” as Tedards wrote to Levin. “However, these businesses do not consider freedom of expression or conscience among their concerns; expatriates are not citizens, and they are aware that they must keep their mouths shut about anything they observe in Singaporean public life.”
Nor are executives doing business with Singapore likely to credit Kenneth Jeyaretnam’s observation in WIRED that “our streets are clean because an army of [sub-minimum-wage, tightly policed] immigrant labor sweeps up behind us” or that “We are mostly law abiding because we are afraid and repressed and we have no choice, not because we are inherently well behaved or ‘good.'”
Jeyaretnam acknowledges that Singapore may not be the “Disneyland with a Death Penalty” that William Gibson called it in another WIRED article in 1993, but he thinks “it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.”
Hail and Farewell
Three current or recent members of Yale’s small governing corporation have participated directly in Singapore’s golden weaving by managing, advising, and/or investing in its sovereign wealth and investment funds long before the Yale-NUS deal was done. But until a tip-off from a Yale faculty member prompted my report here in the Huffington Post, which in turn prompted The New York Times to ask Levin about it, the university hadn’t disclosed its trustees’ employment by Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation and its Temasek fund.
Yale Vice President Linda Koch Lorimer, Levin’s alter ego and top administrator, who fiercely pressed some senior Yale faculty to get on board the S.S. Yale-NUS long before it entered dry dock in Singapore, and who will now sit on the new college’s governing board, is married to Charles Ellis, a Yale Corporation member until 2008 and an investment adviser to Singapore’s government until June, 2009, when the Yale-NUS deal was under discussion, and Ellis maintains a business in Singapore now.
Also in 2009, Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, who would become a Yale trustee in 2011, replaced the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, as CEO-designate of Temasek, the sovereign wealth fund, which is wholly owned by the Singapore Minister for Finance. As Yale explored partnership with the National University, Singapore’s cabinet discussed the Temasek Board’s nomination of Mr. Goodyear and, according to its minutes:
decided that the Government should have no objection to Temasek appointing a foreigner as CEO if he was assessed by the Board to be suitable and the best candidate available. Cabinet, therefore, endorsed Mr Goodyear’s nomination, but also reaffirmed the need for the Board of Temasek to remain in the effective control of Singaporeans. [Emphasis added].
Within a few months Goodyear was out of Temasek, reportedly after disagreements on investment strategy. Might that be a sign of things to come? “Foreigners” such as Lorimer and Levin will compose half of Yale-NUS’ 10-member board, an entity within the National University, which is “wholly owned” by Singapore’s government. For now, the Cabinet has no objection. But as Michael Kinsley said of deals done in Washington, the true scandals don’t involve what’s illegal as often as they involve what’s all too meticulously legal.
The most important reason Yale lost course in Singapore is that Levin & Co. actually think they’ve found it there. What they’ve discovered is that they’ve been trying to weave something very like Singapore’s golden web themselves, right at home in America, by transforming their old college from the civic-republican crucible of citizen-leaders it was for three centuries into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a global elite that will answer to no particular polity or moral code.
Levin has appointed professor-practitioners such as Charles Hill, Stanley McChrystal, John Negroponte, and even Tony Blair to teach American and international students the arts of strategy making and self-censorship in service to swirling new configurations of power that are becoming less democratic and more intolerable to hundreds of millions of people.
Taking Some Bearings
A liberal education should test such configurations rather than contract itself out to them. Yale’s abandonment of that principle and of the standards of freedom of expression that sustain it seems almost fantastical until one remembers that Yale was the birthplace of the CIA and its “Good Shepherd and Skull & Bones appurtenances and that the college is named for Elihu Yale, a governor of one of the world’s first multinational corporations, the East India Company, which later acquired what was then called Singapura for the British Empire.
Yale does still honor the memory of someone who tried to subvert a state-capitalist regime corrupted by multinational corporations: Nathan Hale of the Class of 1773, was caught spying on British troop movements and was hanged by officers of the empire after saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” When he was hanged the Boston Tea Party had already dumped the East India Tea Company’s heavily subsidized, government-protected product into the harbor.
It’s a sign of the exquisite perversity of Yale’s civic-republican patriotism that a replica of Hale’s statue on the college’s Old Campus stands at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Hale may have been one of the first American intelligence agents, but it’s worth remembering that he was spying against an entity very similar to what America itself has become.
Levin & Co. may still be trying to reconcile the statue of Hale that stands at the CIA with the one I pondered as a freshman on Old Campus many years ago. But Yale faculty have taken a stand with the Hale who was hanged, not the one who has been spun posthumously by the Office of Public Affairs and Communications. When Levin tried last month to dismiss, as “unbecoming” of Yale, the faculty resolution against Singapore that 100 professors passed over his objection and in his presence, he may have commenced his own “unbecoming” the president of Hale’s Yale.
Singapore, UnCensored?
Administration loyalists mutter that critics of Yale-NUS are parochial elitists or leftist ideologues. But actually they include computer scientists, neo-conservatives, and distinguished alumni, so this controversy can’t be parsed through the old binary, left-vs.-right lenses. Hale’s civic-republican intuitions would serve us better, but Singapore’s elite doesn’t share them, and some future members of that elite who are studying in New Haven became defensive and prickly this spring when faculty voiced their criticisms of the government that has sent them to Yale on full scholarship to test and build the partnership.
Most of these emissaries are earnest, engaging, impressive. But some use American freedoms of speech to lob red herrings at critics of Singapore. That’s fair game, at least in this country but so is my assessment of the gist of their message that Singapore’s evident prosperity and apparent harmony reflect emphases in its political culture that are far preferable to the paralysis and hostility that pass for political freedom and democracy in America.
Some young Singaporeans in New Haven are well-practiced at lightening that message with humor even as they lace it with barbs: “The Yale College faculty meant well when they passed Thursday’s resolution championing American-style political freedoms in Singapore. But — I hate to break it to you — our value systems aren’t quite the same as Yalies’. It’s hard for Singaporeans to imagine wanting the right to bear arms if it would mean worrying about getting home safely at night,” wrote E-Ching Ng, 33, a graduate of Yale 2001, and now a 5th-year graduate student in linguistics whose education has been paid by her government in return for services rendered as a teacher and, perhaps, an operative, in a Yale Daily News column entitled “Show Singaporeans Some Respect.”
Actually, it’s just as hard for me and most other Americans as it is for E-Ching to imagine “wanting to bear arms in order to get home at night,” but I feel that way even without being able to rely on a police force as ubiquitous and “responsive” as Singapore’s. It’s fine to remind us that this country has ills and sins that are equally grievous, and that Singapore’s ethos of “soft” repression and self-censorship are “realities” that won’t bend to mere moralism. It’s not so fine to suggest that Singaporean disciplines and restraints express genuine cultural differences and that therefore Americans would be insensitive, not to mention imperialistic, to criticize such things. To say that in a debate about Yale-NUS is to duck the truth that Americans who criticize Singapore also criticize their own government and society in ways Singapore’s defenders cannot do without great risk.
E-Ching, an energetic, tightly wound woman who readily flashes what I can only describe as an iron grin, parried that truth by lobbing a criticism of Americans when she began her YDN column by citing a young writer in Singapore, Koh Choon Hwee, who’s bewildered by the “careless, generalized stereotypes being traded not only by students, but also by Yale faculty members — which seem to betray the very ethos of good scholarship.” Twisting Hwee’s puzzlement a bit, E-Ching added, “I believe Yalies can think, but I can see why my fellow Singaporeans might suspect otherwise.”
“Criticizing a partner publicly during this crucial trust-building phase is a last-resort negotiating tactic used just prior to walking away from the deal,” she added — while doing precisely that. She’s a virtuoso at hoisting Americans on their own petard: “We prioritize our values differently, and different doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong. At least, that’s what I learned from a Yale liberal arts education.”
That sounds a lot like Singapore ambassador Chan’s comment to the Yale Law School audience in March: “Are some Yale professors saying that unless the countries and societies look like the US or function exactly like the US, they will not have anything to do with them? I would have thought it is important to share teaching skills and values in education.”
E-Ching became the star of the April 19 “Singapore UnCensored” panel that brought censorship to Yale with witting and unwitting complicity by some Americans in the audience of 60 students and faculty.
A poster for the meeting in print and online read, “Yale Faculty and Students Welcome,” not “Open to the Public,” and E-Ching made clear, in response to a faculty member’s request to listen in and participate via Skype or conference call, that “we would certainly welcome the virtual presence of faculty at our session, if it is understood that there will be no recording of any kind, and no quoting from what is said during the session. This is because we expect it to be a lively debate and are concerned about quotes out of context.”
What “context”? The answer would emerge only slowly, later in the meeting and afterward. Moderator Tse Yang Lim, a 2011 Yale College alum and a graduate student at Yale in Forestry and Environmental Science, opened the meeting with the delicately sardonic observation that as the panelists were preparing “to bring some more lux and veritas” to the debate about Yale-NUS that had erupted in the preceding month and half, they’d been “awed and humbled by your interest and your research into our history and society.”
Everyone knew perfectly well that few of us critics who weren’t already experts in Asian Studies had done research that was awesome or humbling enough to deflect complaints that we were criticizing a country we’d never visited. (To that incontrovertible truth I responded, here in Huffington Post and in online comments to students in Singapore, that for some of us Yale’s Singapore venture matters most for what it has revealed about the Yale administration’s strategy and vision for our university and our republic.)
Lim repeated the evening’s ground rules: First, reasonably enough, the panelists, who are Yale students or new alumni, not affiliates of the new Yale-NUS project, would not discuss “how Yale University makes its decisions” or the wisdom of the venture itself: “We are not here to debate Yale-NUS.” Rather, they would try to clear up misunderstandings about Singapore by presenting “a diversity of views.”
Lim then played the “cultural difference” card, explaining that this was a “closed door” meeting because “In Singapore we are always willing to close the door and tell you what we really think.” Behind the doors of Yale’s Luce auditorium (yes, that Luce), Singaporean Yalies could talk to other Yalies: “To everyone here, including reporters, do not record or quote from the session, it’s off the record.”
With that, we were off on a crash course in how to appear to criticize your government while minimizing and contextualizing its wrongs, and in how to displace attention from those wrongs onto the flaws of your interlocutors.
Although one panelist told the audience that other Yale professors and some reporters were listening in via hookups, that wasn’t quite so. Although the organizers had succeeded in Skying in E-Ching’s brother, the gay activist Y-Sheng, all the way from Singapore as a panelist, they couldn’t, despite much promising and fussing, secure the promised “virtual presence” of some others who’d asked to listen in and perhaps pose questions from New York and Washington: Karin Fischer of The Chronicle of Higher Education, who is covering the developments in New Haven, told me that after 15 minutes she had “to give up trying” to listen on a connection that was unintelligible. It was hard not to suspect that the organizers wanted it that way. If other reporters were able to listen in, they weren’t identified, and I haven’t seen their reports.
I think that they were worried not mainly because they feared the authorities in Singapore (the panel’s organizers were recording the session, without telling the audience they were doing it) but because, to some extent, they shared the government’s worry about losing control of public discourse in Singapore. (Only when I rose toward the end of the session and asked if they were indeed recording the discussion and if the government might receive a report did they acknowledge that they were and that it might.)
Mixed though their feelings were about their athletically repressive state, they had good reason to want to spare it embarrassment. After all, they are highly intelligent, engaging graduates of their country’s most exclusive high school. They’re secure enough near the top of their society to acknowledge some of its ills and sins, which they felt licensed to air a bit more at the meeting (behind “closed doors,” of course) in order to win over a skeptical but polite Yale audience that’s highly interested in Singapore’s freedoms and that wouldn’t be credit anything too sweet. A professional reporter or anyone else at the meeting can quote their public comments without restriction, although he or she ought not to if the speakers are claiming that they’d be endangered if quoted. Obviously these panelists made no such claim.
What I think worried the panelists was that our questions and their answers might “go viral” on websites the government doesn’t in some measure control. For all their gripes about the regime’s excesses, they have more than a little faith in it, and they contrast its “mentoring” and control with our comparative chaos and decay. In a burst of candor, a recent Yale graduate on the panel lamented that that websites and books are banned but that “we never know which are on the list unless we go to look for them and can’t find them.” But much of what they’d like to change in Singapore is changing, and they hope that Yale’s presence will help.
Skyping from Singapore, Yi Sheng claimed, “You can say anything you want on campus,” if only because “the government doesn’t care what most academics say,” but then he modulated that claim by telling of a gay friend whose teaching contracts were suddenly terminated with no explanation, by administrator who said at one point, “I’m telling you all that I’m not allowed to tell you.”
But Yi Sheng also said he wasn’t sure his friend’s being gay was the main reason for his dismissal; it have been something more political or more strictly academic, because other gay faculty weren’t being dismissed. In fact, there’s been “a rapid rise in acceptance” of gays in recent years, in part because “the government has realized that the country can make a lot of money from having more gays.”
That put a new light on E-Ching’s claim in her YDN column that “The police have never bothered my openly gay brother,… despite his public gender-bending antics and book of coming-out stories with real names and faces… [U]sually, where freedom of speech and sexuality are concerned, written laws and enforcement are very different things. It’s a bit cognitively complicated, but if we can handle that, so can you.
“E Ching may have been spreading a little cognitive dissonance herself to give the impression that Singapore is becoming as free as America. Singapore’s police had stopped bothering gays not because her brother’s antics had spurred the political organizing that wins civil-rights victories but because a shrewd ruling party had figured out that gays are good for the economy. She may have hoped to spin Yale critics’ concern for gay rights into recognition that Singapore is already changing, without pressure from arrogant American moralists.
Meanwhile, other constraints on other freedoms, prompted more directly by corporate priorities, haven’t been changing for the better. E-Ching ignored her brother’s warning that academic freedom will be freed from the specters of surveillance and summary dismissal “only if Yale NUS faculty are really willing to exercise their freedom and advocate for it outside of classroom.” Here was a genuine plea for help that I don’t expect Richard Levin, Charles Bailyn, or Pericles Lewis to answer in ways that will matter.
When a professor asked how Singapore can reconcile a recent announcement that at least half of NUS’ seats must go to Singaporeans with Levin’s claim that the 80 % of Yale-NUS students will come from all over Asia and the world, Yale’s director of admissions for Yale-NUS replied that Singapore’s 50% restriction applies to the university as a whole but that the new college will have some wiggle room. But panelists seemed less than enthusiastic about the prospect of more diversity and more understanding of the government’s reluctance to open the floodgates to students from abroad.
Panelist Rayner Teo worried that if everyone who wanted to come to Singapore could, its population would triple. Noting the government’s “deep support for Yale-NUS at every level,’ he tried to temper the questioner’s implicit push for a more cosmopolitan admissions process by suggesting that it might pit diversity against democracy: Singaporean voters want their tax dollars to pay for Singaporean students, not foreigners, and as the ruling party struggles “to take better account of public opinion” after experiencing a modest but unprecedented and jarring setback in recent elections., it will have trouble resisting populist demands to curb immigration. To champion diversity, in other words, one would have to stand with the government against too much democracy.
All but unnoticed was the likelihood that almost all the panelists were Han Chinese, members of the socioeconomically elite. Only in a comment posted online after the panel did an audience member note that “we, the ‘educated elite’ English-educated ‘scholar-class’ — I use the term ‘scholar’ loosely, as opposed our rigid stereotype of near-eternal bondage to the funding agency — do not represent the country in its entirety….
“[T]he bulk of our country is actually made up of a class of people who think very differently from you and I,” the commenter continued. “I’m… referring to … the non-English-speaking working class guys who just don’t make it into university, much less to Yale or Columbia. They have a very different value-system to you and I, and a whole different take on ethics, morality and even pragmatism.”
It was the only time in the Yale-Singapore discussion that I heard the working-class part of Singapore’s population described. The treatment of migrants and foreigners is a very touchy issue because many Singaporeans are xenophobic. Trying to dispel that unpleasant scent as it rose with the panel’s discomfort over the question about diversity at Yale-NUS, E-Ching slipped a bit: “We want foreigners to come here and work for us!” she exclaimed. If “for” had been “with,” she might have gotten away with this disclaimer of xenophobia.
Although she’d written in her YDN column that criticism of the Yale-NUS deal “annoys the Singaporean in the street who had already thought Yale was getting a sweetheart deal – free campus, free staff, free rein to run pedagogical experiments on free subjects, even the risk of putting the Yale name on a diploma,” E Ching probably knows less about “the Singaporean in the street” than she does about Yale faculty after nine years at the university. Her very deftness (and relentlessness) in filleting American moralism to expose its hypocrisies and insecurities suggested to me that it takes one to know one.
And it was discomfiting to imagine what she actually knows about repression. People who write and talk as she does seem to have anticipated and internalized it even without having been arrested or fired. “I don’t want to trivialize the heroism of political dissidents like Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, who was sued into bankruptcy by the ruling party,” she wrote somewhat breezily, “but disliking it doesn’t make our political culture any less real, and to change it, you have to start from reality.” Another obligatory feint toward Singapore’s critics in a dance of put-downs.
This reference to Jeyaretnam — who wasn’t Han Chinese, by the way — trivializes of a truism that is almost a non-sequitur. Jeyaretnam ended up selling his books near subway stations, “a bizarre spectacle, this old gentleman barrister on our uneventful streets, with his sandwich board,” as his son put it in WIRED days after E Ching’s YDN column appeared. The list of others treated similarly or worse in Singapore has only grown.
Shaun Tan, the author of the essay on Western universities’ collaborations with authoritarian regimes and the only young dissident who addressed the panelists that evening, asked what benefits they thought would accrue to Yale from coming to Singapore.
E-Ching answered with a characteristically hard spin: “Yale is replaceable. Singapore wanted a liberal arts college for ten years before talking to Yale,” she said, omitting that in 2005 Britain’s prestigious Warwick University canceled plans set up campus in Singapore after its faculty assessed the regime’s restrictions on academic and other freedoms. If Yale is replaceable, that’s only because it has rushed in where Warwick rightly feared to tread.
In Singapore, E-Ching also said, Yale could overcome its elitism. Another benefit! When she’d been accepted to Yale in 1997, she claimed, Singaporeans who’d never heard of Yale assumed it was a second-rate university that she’d have to attend because she didn’t get into the National University or Singapore Management University. “Without this deal, Yale would never get to show its merit.” That sounded awkward and implausible, a kind of mind-game. She took a different tack: “See, it’s great: Yale gets a gigantic pedagogical laboratory to do its experiments.”
Zhipeng “Nick” Huang, a recent Yale graduate who’d been a student member of Yale’s Course of Study committee, wondered if “Singapore is taking too much of a risk on Yale: If Yale bails, Singapore looks foolish. There has been little effort by Yale NUS to explain the situation. Yale should have been more cautious about affixing its name, but although I have these reservations I want to make sure it succeeds.”
Dana Miller, a blonde American woman whose parents are permanent residents of Singapore and raised her there, saw “two benefits to Yale: An opportunity to develop best practices and standards and foster the spirit of what Yale says education is all about. Also it will show that Yale knows about Asia,” at least as Asia is known outside China, where Yale has other engagements, none remotely on the scale of Yale-NUS. She didn’t note, or perhaps know, that Yale rebuffed its own experts on Southeast Asia, such as James Scott, who opposed the NUS deal.
When William Whobrey, dean of the Yale Summer Session asked, “What do you think of the liberal arts?” answers ranged from noting that the liberal arts are more than just the performing arts to nothing that they’re more than just “liberal” politics, as someone said a Chinese paper had asserted by equating “liberal arts” with “freedom.”
Dana Miller noted that New York University already has a Tisch School of the Visual Arts in Singapore and that the government has had “very long term policy goal of engaging with performing arts.”
What the liberal arts are really about, one panelist opined, is “inter-disciplinarity that helps people to solve real problems.” Another said that when he’d arrived at Yale as an undergraduate, the “liberal arts” had impressed him, and still do, as “a vast store of resources full of people who would teach you whatever you were interested in.”
Another got closer to a better answer, I think, by announcing that liberal arts “stretch the mind for the sake of stretching the mind” and that “Singapore has a tradition of elites that start from fundamentals and rethink everything.”
That edges still closer to recognizing that the liberal arts stand in some in tension with markets and states and with elites who are engaged in commerce and policy-making. The liberal arts may be indispensable to such decision makers, but often by requiring that they step back and take look at their prospects that’s long enough and hard enough to help them contemplate a complete change of course. Most of the panelists seemed no more or less close to understanding this than most other students at Yale.
An American who’ll teach at Yale-NUS told me that Singapore students “are better educated” and more disciplined than Americans and that they can be evaluated more honestly than at Yale because “there’ll be no grade inflation” in Singapore. Besides, this professor opined, teaching the liberal arts there probably won’t be any more subversive than it is in America, where “most of it isn’t subversive at all.”
Unlike the panelist who understood that the liberal arts should help people to “start from fundamentals and rethink everything,” most of us accept the misconception of the liberal arts that was expressed in a Yale Alumni Magazine interview, by Kay Kuok, chair of Yale-NUS’ governing board and a Singaporean businesswoman whose family runs “one of Asia’s most diversified and dynamic multinational conglomerates.”
Asked what the liberal arts are, Kuok replied, “We must look at ‘liberal’ in the sense of broad, rather than free. It’s freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.” Asked what the difference is between freedom of thought and freedom of expression, she replied, “Well, freedom of expression can be taken in many ways. Everyone has a right to express himself. It’s a question of expression in the right way, within certain norms in society, so to speak.”
Whose norms? A liberal education helps us to ask that question well. That every society has “certain norms” is a truism, an inevitability, but it also needs more than a few citizens who are wise enough to know when push the envelope, and in what direction – in, or out.
Calling Home Although I enjoyed listening to the young Singaporeans, from the start of the discussion I’d been feeling uneasy, and when my turn to ask a question came, I said, “Thank you for your presentations. I think that we all understand that Singapore is a country in transition. This has been a very interesting discussion, and I assume that you’ve made a recording of it?” Two panelists nodded in confirmation.
“But that poses my question, about the ground-rules of this meeting,” I said. “The moderator said at the outset that there would be no recordings allowed and no quoting of anyone’s comments. Yet you have recorded the session yourselves.
“In discussing academic freedom tonight,” I continued, “one of you [it was Yi Sheng, via Skype] said that in Singapore ‘You can say anything you want on campus,’ partly because the government doesn’t even care what most academics say on campus. Well, we are on an American campus, and I’m wondering why you feel that here you must take this ‘closed door’ approach and, since you are doing that, how you can call this ‘Singapore UnCensored.'”
Dark clouds crossed the countenances of some Yale-NUS faculty in the room, but the panelists were energetic in response. The gist of it was what the moderator had said at the outset: They were here to speak with others at Yale about concerns that had been raised about Singapore, and they were concerned that if comments appeared in Singapore they would be misunderstood.
I asked if the recording they were making was basically a report to the government, and one of them acknowledged that the government wanted to be informed. Responding to my query about the session’s title, a panelist said, “I think we knew we were gonna get shot in the foot with that title.” (She didn’t suggest that they’d shot themselves in the foot.). Again we were told that “Singaporeans tend to self-censor” and that the organizers knew that “some members would be more comfortable” with the ground-rules against reporting and quoting.
But another panelist said that in establishing the rules, the organizers had to recognize “the reality of Singapore.” That suggested something rather different. “Professor Sleeper, we’re not saying that there’s no censorship in Singapore!” E-Ching exclaimed, to a big laugh in the audience that was prompted, I think, by her coming right out and saying it.
As the session ended, moderator Lim and other panelists invited the audience to come down front to meet speakers individually and make pose any comments or questions they wished. But I saw only the half-dozen Yale-NUS faculty chat with and congratulate the panelists. Something hadn’t “set right” with a lot of people in the audience, as I learned from undergraduates I spoke with the next day.
I would have thought that, when ground-rules were announced in e-mail message days before the meeting, Bailyn, Lewis, and other Yale-NUS personnel would have met their “obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed,” as Yale’s Freedom of Expression statement puts it by suggesting that the ground-rules be changed.
“To look at it from both sides,” a professor who sat near me during the session wrote me later, “this attempt to control reporting might reasonably be taken as an attempt to allow some participants to express more critical and oppositional views than would be possible otherwise–yet this premise, like much else, couldn’t be explicitly said. It had instead to be expressed in terms of issues of “being comfortable” and of cultural generalizations–which occurred frequently during the event, despite the objections that panelists had lodged against the supposed “stereotyping” Singaporean”
“According to the organizers,” wrote Yale English Prof. Jill Campbell in a striking analysis of the event that’s been posted on a campus discussion site,”the contents of the session could be conveyed to the Singaporean government but not, via press reports or citations in opinion pieces, to readers in New Haven or elsewhere.” What those attending “learned at the session by hearing students from Singapore speak — which was considerable — could be held in their minds, would perhaps alter [their views] of Singapore and of Yale’s venture there, but could not be conveyed by them to the public arena of the debate about Yale-NUS By these terms, a new space for ‘closed doors’ knowledge was formalized in listeners minds; a space for things of public import… not to be referred to publicly without a sense of peril and the violation of trust.”
Another professor wrote me that, “At one level, by their choice of what to say and what not to say, they were telling us what is out of bounds and what is not. On another level, they were giving the official party line, including statements about Singapore being ‘in transition’, and things being different now than they were in the past. I also thought the statement [by E-Ching] about Singapore being committed to a liberal arts college long before Yale came on the scene was a coded warning that they don’t really need Yale, so if Yale steps out of bounds, they will simply pull out and Yale will lose whatever it is that Levin negotiated for.
“On yet another level, I think they were trying to tell us that yes, our concerns about censorship and lack of freedom are well founded. They almost seemed to go out of their way to make sure we understood that censorship is real and pervasive. Of course, they were quick to add that it was okay, with the excuses we have heard many times before.”
“For me,” yet another faculty member wrote, “the event was the most compelling demonstration yet of what self-censorship requires — and this was palpable at the panel, even as it was tripped over again and again in a discussion that wasn’t smooth and successful.”
Still another noted that “However eager some of the participants were to serve as apologists for the government, the overall impression given was that the idea of Yale-NUS was pretty ill-considered, and now the best has to be made of it. “
A Telling Default
One of the most dispiriting consequences of the “Singapore UnCensored” discussion was what I can describe only as the sudden, brazen self-censorship of Yale Daily News after two months in which its editors and reporters had published a commendably broad range of news reportage and commentaries by all interested parties.
As the session was adjourning, one of the two YDN reporters who were covering it and had watched me and others pose questions and panelists respond came up to me as the meeting adjourned and, instead of asking me any question, informed me that there were “many precedents at Yale” for the ground rules I’d challenged, including their use at a talk Karl Rove had given to hundreds of undergraduates in the Yale Law School auditorium.
Doubting that Rove, who has defamed many people, deserved ground rules like that, I replied that even if there were such precedents, they weren’t right, for there is also a Constitution, and this was a public meeting. I asked if the YDN would report the question I had asked and the responses it had received.
“We’re still working out how we’re going to deal with the ground rules,” the reporter replied unflappably, and that night I received some anodyne questions, such as “Were there issues raised which you think had not been touched on previously?”
I replied by asking again if the YDN would report what had actually happened in the meeting. Receiving no answer, I didn’t reply to the questions, and, the next morning the paper ran an account of the session so Orwellian it left many of us who’d been there breathless, and messaging one another in amazement.
The story opened with the organizers’ claim that they were bringing “some nuance to the debate” on Yale-NUS in a discussion “exclusively meant for the Yale community,” and it quoted not a single criticism of Singapore by any panelist, only what panelists had said in defense of the country.
The story neither named nor quoted any of the five faculty members who’d asked questions, astonishing because if anyone in the room could have been quoted without risk of reprisal from Singapore or the Yale administration, we could have been. Nor did the story ever mention my question about why the organizers had imposed ground rules they hadn’t observed. It didn’t report their acknowledgement that they were recording the session and that Singapore authorities would get a report.
The story didn’t even report the “licensed” criticisms of E-Ching’s brother Yi-Sheng. It didn’t mention either his descriptions of limits on academic expression outside the classroom or his claim that change would only be brought about if Yale NUS faculty were willing to exercise academic freedom and advocacy.
As one faculty member wrote to several us, the story “confined all its quotations to uncontroversial statements” and, although it listed some of the topics discussed, omitted all reference to any part of the discussion that might be construed as critical of the Singaporean government or of Singapore as a site for the Yale campus.” The student journalist bowed to the organizers’ “ground rules” against recording or quoting from the discussion, defaulting on their journalistic obligation to report questions asked by some others Yale faculty and answered or dodged in varying ways by the panelists.
E-Ching answering inadvertently acknowledged that the YDN report on “Singapore UnCensored” went so far to accommodate the evening’s ground rules that it omitted all of the panelists’ own criticisms of Singapore and almost all of the challenging questions from the audience. Eager to rebut a comment posted under the YDN account suggesting that the panelists had censored themselves, E-Ching let slip what the YDN and, a day later, the government controlled Straits Times had omitted:
“One of the panelists gave a long opening statement that was nothing but fundamental criticisms of the Yale-NUS agreement,” she wrote in rebuttal. “Two other opening statements brought up our touchiness about the strong foreign presence in Singapore. During Q&A, two panelists told disturbing stories about foreign academics being denied work permits for unknown reasons. Another described how Catherine Lim got told off. We wanted Yale-NUS critics to back up their arguments with accurate facts that matter to Singaporeans.”
I suspect that E Ching really wanted the meeting to have presented a simulacrum of robust debate, credible enough to sow doubt about critics’ charges that Singapore is repressive. She certainly didn’t want the YDN’s seemingly contrived portrait of harmony, which would only drive critics’ suspicions in directions she and most other panelists didn’t want to take.
I got a clearer answer to my questions about the ground-rules the next day, when Singapore’s government-controlled Straits Timesreported on the meeting as selectively and inadequately as Yale Daily News had done. The Straits Times’ omissions are all the more striking now that a panelist has informed me that the paper was indeed able to follow the whole session, from Singapore, via Skype. In fact, sadly, what you’re reading here is the only serious posted or published account so far of what actually went on at the meeting. (This section has been updated to reflect new information from a panelist who was present.)
A journalist’s foremost obligation is to report what he or she has witnessed that readers relying on that report wouldn’t otherwise know. Yet this disinclination to report what everyone in the room had seen and heard reflected constraints far broader than the panel discussion’s ground rules.
Two days earlier, in a long, fulsome profile of Yale Vice President Lorimer, the same reporter listed Yale NUS among the projects she works on but not that she will sit on the Yale-NUS board or that her husband had been a member of both the Yale Corporation and Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation.
A few days later, a story “Corporation Discusses Budget, Student Life,” mentioned half a dozen topics taken up at the Yale Corporation’s bi-monthly meeting. Although the reporter was briefed by Lorimer, Yale President Richard Levin, and the Yale College Council president, not once does the story suggest that the Corporation discussed the Yale-NUS controversy, surely one of the most pressing developments since its previous meeting, if only because the New York Times and Yale’s faculty had called into question the corporation’s own judgment.
At least the reporter should have asked about it and written something like this: “Asked whether the corporation had discussed the Yale-NUS controversy, a spokesman declined comment, noting that some of the body’s discussions are private.”
But Is It Good for the Jews?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these Singaporeans’ mix of sober realism, prickly humor, spunky defiance reminded me of some people I’d known in another small country. In 2009, when I knew nothing about Yale’s planning with Singapore, I remarked to my wife as we watched office parks and eight-lane expressways gliding by my window on a Tel Aviv-to-Haifa train that Israel is the Singapore of the Middle East.
I didn’t know that many others had had the same thought, or that Singapore has long been much closer being the Israel of Southeast Asia than I had ever imagined. This has been true not only economically and geo-politically, as a glance at a couple of maps and statistical tables will make clear, but militarily, and with all intimacy of what the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz called “A Deep, Dark, Secret Love Affair” nearly 50 years old.
The similarities of these two little engines that could (and did) become models of state capitalism with high per capita incomes and growth rates need little elaboration here. Nor need we dwell on the fact that both have been governed and stamped by the British or that both have populations of 5 or 6 million, including 2 or 3 million second-class citizens and non-citizens, some of them migrants, some of them openly despised.
It is worth noting that both are non-Muslim and face much larger, less-than-friendly Muslim neighbors — in Singapore’s case, Indonesia and Malaysia, the latter of which expelled Singapore in 1965 (or lost it, depending on who’s telling), amid high racial tensions.
Yet another striking analogy involves the fact that the politically dominant majority of Singapore’s population consists not of indigenous natives but of “overseas” Han Chinese,” whose literary and commercial strengths long ago earned them the sobriquet “the Jews of Southeast Asia” and the envy and resentment due a wealthy, elitist, and supple minority.
Like Jews who live outside Israel, the Han Chinese are minorities in most countries outside China, but here a real difference dogs the similarity. The similarity is that in Singapore, the Chinese are 75% of the population, and Malays are 15%, Indians 8%’ in Israel, Jews are 76%, with the rest mostly Palestinian Arabs, most of them Muslim some of them Christian. In Singapore the Chinese have a status, power, and reputation that will sound familiar to Palestinians and others who regard Israel’s Jews as arrogant interlopers.
The difference is that Israel’s Jews, unlike Singapore’s Chinese, have never been the rooted, dominant majority in any other country besides ancient Israel itself, where Hebrew was spoken 700 years before Arabic. And there are other differences of consequence: Singapore is an island, a micro-state smaller in area and population than New York City’s five boroughs. Israel is 30 times larger, geographically, and in some ways more dangerous and endangered.
That said, Singapore’s and Israel’s situations at international crossroads of trade and power at opposite ends of the Asian continent incline them both to serve as investment and cultural entrepots and as political mediators. Without oil, water, or minerals to speak of, both live mainly by their wits, which is to say by trade. But both are compelled to militarize, and both have formidable armed forces, with defense budgets that consume 5 or 6% of GDP, a proportion much higher than that of all but a few other nations, including even China.
The International Political Review calls Singapore’s armed forces “the most technologically advanced military in Southeast Asia” and notes that while everyone in the region fears China and no one could prevail against a Chinese onslaught, China fears that any such onslaught would bring a very painful Singapore Sting.
The punch line to all this, not very funny but very, very true, is that no sooner had Singapore gained its independence in August 1965 than its British-educated founder and first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, now the nation’s “Minister Mentor” (his eldest son is the prime minister), invited Israel to organize his armed forces, because he saw all the parallels between the two young nations that I’ve just noted.
On Christmas Eve, 1965, six Israel Defense Force officers and their families moved to Singapore, followed by waves of consulting teams that established the country’s “Total Defense” combat doctrines, its recruitment and training regimens, its intelligence services, and its state-of-art arms procurement.
“We are not going to turn Singapore into an Israeli colony,” chief of staff and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin admonished these teams. He needn’t have worried. Singapore’s highly intelligent, eloquent, ruthlessly energetic dictator knew how to collaborate without being colonized, something one couldn’t say about some of the Americans he’s been collaborating with most recently. He was as deft and determined as the Han Chinese in other countries who, even as minorities, dominate major industries, banks, and even English-language media in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
The Israelis militarized Singaporean society, even with Israeli military songs, to which Lee’s soldiers marched in one of Singapore’s first real Independence Day parades. Less symbolically, they showed Singapore how to establish military conscription in a hitherto un-militaristic populace that, according to at least one survey, ranked the profession of soldier far below that of thief, while placing artists, teachers and merchants on top.
So determined was Lee to adjust this that when Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, vindicating his decision to work with it and boosting Singaporeans’ confidence in their Jewish military mentors, Singapore’s UN delegation surprised other Third World nations by abstaining on a resolution condemning Israel.
Israelis persuaded Lee to make conscription universal to tap well-educated, prosperous Han Chinese as well as the Malay, Indian, and other minorities. That produced an intelligent, dynamic army and a disciplined male student population: Singaporean university students receive substantial tuition subsidies after military service but must accept what the National University of Singapore calls “a service bond under the terms of the tuition grant to work for a Singapore-registered company for three years upon completion of their degrees so as to discharge some of their obligations to the Singapore public.” In some professions, the mandatory service is to government agencies, for up to six years. The whole regimen, as most Israelis would recognize, produces more than a little griping, but little softness or self-indulgence.
All this has posed an exquisitely discomfiting dilemma for Yale’s neoconservatives. They never hesitate to ridicule leftists who’ve collaborated with authoritarian “Third World” regimes, but now they find themselves looking into a mirror and falling spookily silent about Yale’s collaboration with Singapore.
As American nationalists and self-styled champions of academic freedom, neoconservatives would have to condemn the Yale Corporation’s arrangement with Singapore, some of it borne of business relationships that, in the neo-cons’ perfervid imaginations, resemble certain other Yale investors’ extensive relationships with certain regimes the 1930s.
Sure enough, when Shaun Tan published his damning essay about Yale’s and other Western universities’ collaborations with such regimes, Michael Rubin of the neoconservative flagship Commentary Magazine commented , rightly enough, that:
“Foreigners flock to American universities because of their freedom and opportunity. How sad it is then, as Tan describes, that so many American university presidents are willing to compromise basic values in order to make a quick buck, often padding endowments which already reach billions of dollars. That will not bring progress; it is simply intellectual prostitution.”
One big difference between Yale’s gamble in Singapore and Israel’s investment there is that Israel, unlike its neo-con cheerleaders, was smart enough to keep its name out of the public eye, eager though it was to advance its national interests and prestige. The Yale Corporation hasn’t been that smart, and now it is watching Singaporeans’ triumphal display of its own stolen name, in exchange for what?
Some neoconservatives may yet be induced by the Yale administration to utter hollow endorsements of the deal: A regime like Singapore’s can’t be that bad, they’ll rationalize, if it serves American interests in the struggle against Communism or terrorism.
That was the logic of the neoconservative heroine Jeanne Kirkpatrick in “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a Commentary Magazine essay that enchanted Ronald Reagan, who made her his ambassador to the U.N. Kirkpatrick excused even Argentina’s murderous junta, at least until the generals tortured the Jewish journalist Jacobo Timmerman – and even then, Commentaryleapt to the junta’s defense at his expense.
So it’s noteworthy that last month Commentary blogger Rubin condemned Yale and other universities for accommodating authoritarian regimes, even the one that has worked so closely with Israelis as well as Americans.
At least this should teach other neoconservatives what Yitzhak Rabin and Lee Kuan Yew always understood and what I learned after my epiphany on the road to Haifa: matters like these cannot be viewed clearly through binary, left-vs.-right lenses: Leftists who supported “people’s liberation struggles” by helping to harvest sugar cane in Cuba or crops in early Israeli socialist kibbutzim believed that nation-building requires disciplined struggle and sacrifice to lay the groundwork for prosperity and, with it, national pride, often at cost to individual freedom.
But so does Singapore’s Ambassador Chan, who cites Fareed Zakaria’s arguments for illiberal democracies, observing that “Our first generation political leaders in Singapore began by wanting to construct a political system that would help not hinder economic growth and development of the unlikely nation. It was a matter of survival.”
But that was then. Now, she says, the government’s new “responsiveness” has mooted Zakaria’s doctrine. But even in the 1960’s, when Singapore was getting underway, Israel’s nation-building was less authoritarian – among Jews themselves, of course, though also among the Arabs who became citizens of Israel — perhaps because Jews, fleeing recent destruction and facing new/ancient enemies with Western Enlightenment traditions, some of them as socialists, bonded in relatively more democratic, egalitarian ways. The reason I found out about Israel’s long-secret collaboration with Singapore is that Israeli journalists have been much freer to report and interpret such developments than their counterparts in Singapore — and even in the United States, where self-censorship involving Israel and many other subjects has been insinuated into American news organizations, political institutions, and workplaces, even while receding in more personal matters.
Although Singaporean society hasn’t had to be on military alert as much as Israel, neither has it become the Switzerland of Southeast Asia, a region that is bristling with huge armies. Singapore does have enough economic and military power to take another bit of advice that the Israelis gave it and should take more seriously themselves: Keep your vast military under the radar, if possible while strengthening and showcasing your diplomatic, cultural, and educational offerings. Singapore is trying to become the education center of Southeast Asia by setting up a liberal arts college that bears Yale’s imprimatur, while controlling the showcase as tightly as it does the military. “Increasingly we are noted for taking up the knowledge industries and doing cutting edge stuff,” says Ambassador Chan.
Note, though, that, in this official view, education is an “industry,” perhaps even a “cutting edge” weapon of sorts. And gay rights is a profit-center. But can liberal education flourish while pacing a gilded cage?
Guns and Books
The culture of surveillance and seduction is far more polished in Singapore than it is here. The state-capitalist regime, flush with cash, licenses media corporations that depend on public contracts; it doesn’t have to censor them, because they censor themselves. Nor need it enforce its draconian laws against freedom of expression very often, because one or two exemplary punishments and a few subtle warnings to others that their law-breaking has been noted will chill most dissent.
So can the cooptation of dissidents who haven’t taken too strong a stand against the regime: “They’re really good at telling you that you can do great things and giving you apparent opportunities that leave you in their power,” a writer who frequently visits Singapore told me. With some books and internet sites blocked or monitored, and legal associations tamed, everyone is extremely civil. No one has any alternative, if the state is omnipresent, even in private corporations and universities.
Only those familiar locutions – “Close the door, and I’ll tell you what I really think” – remind one of the possibility of being brought in after a knock in the night or of the sudden, unexplained termination of a work permit. You thought you were free, but one night you find that you’d been led up a garden path away from your rights and your public voice. What the “Singapore UnCensored” panelists didn’t want to admit but couldn’t deny is that Singapore is like this. E-Ching was less reluctant to remind her audience that America is becoming like it, too.
It is “tempting to see in this sequence of events a kind of ‘Singaporification’ of American free speech via linking Yale with NUS,” Jill Campbell writes, adding, however, that “The manner of Yale’s instituting of Yale-NUS- – the declaration by our President… that Yale College Faculty have no say in its establishment, the failures of consultation with faculty knowledgeable about Southeast Asia, the many forces assembled to discourage real debate about the wisdom of pursuing the venture, the characterization of critics of the venture as outrageous, parochial, and engaging in ‘unbecoming’ speech — have dramatized American-style constraints on free inquiry and debate at the native core of Yale itself.”
Singapore isn’t to blame for this, but “the fit between Singaporean governmental authority and American institutional authority has been all too smooth. What the two kinds of power have in common is a dislike for the counter-force of free inquiry and open debate.”
There will always be trade-offs between ordered safety and prosperity, on the one hand, and personal freedom and political democracy, on the other — between civilization and its discontents. Up to a point, Yale’s engagement with Singapore reminds us of that – or teaches it to us. But the actions of America’s own increasingly absentee elites remind us that the trade-offs aren’t as inevitable, legitimate, or humane as Zakaria claims and as much of Yale therefore believes.
More than decade of embarrassments and outrages perpetrated by American elites have led many of us to a slow and for some of us exceedingly painful realization that many of the people running much this country aren’t as different from those running Singapore as some of us have spent a lot our lives trying dearly to believe. Whether foolishly or malevolently, American leaders have been servicing and gilding a global wrecking ball that’s dispossessing too many people who are more decent than they are.
And when these leaders begin chanting that there could be a lot less repression and a lot more reward if only the people they’ve betrayed and degraded would show the discipline, hard work and self-restraint of Yale students climbing the ladder of global meritocracy, it’s time to ignore the dithering that passes for commentary in the mouths of Zakaria and David Brooks and to take our recent experiences to touchstone of nature and of reason, by whose lights even nice guys like Levin and certain justices of the Supreme Court seem duplicitous or naïve.
Yale faculty are organizing to win the share in governance that some other university faculties enjoy. The whole Yale community will be better for their having it. We might hope that they’ll curb some of the university’s official duplicity by demanding full disclosure of the terms of the Yale-NUS contract, a full reaffirmation of the Woodward statement on Freedom of Expression, and a withdrawal of Yale’s name from the new college in Singapore.
Toward that last end I commend a column, “Yale-NUS is not Yale,” by Yale Computer Science Professor Michael Fischer. He has urged that Yale’s name be withdrawn from a college that won’t be governed by the Yale Corporation; whose faculty appointments won’t be subject to critical examination by Yale faculty; whose students won’t have competed with actual Yale students for admission; whose curriculum won’t be subject to review by the Yale faculty; and that won’t be able to offer a liberal education in an environment of free expression in and out of the classroom, that Yale’s own principles so clearly demand. Fischer concludes that since the college meets none of these conditions and was never approved by a vote of Yale’s faculty, “the presence of the word ‘Yale’ in its name is innately deceptive.”
A lengthening train of abuses and affronts by American public and private leaders has turned a once-promising (or at least possible) republic into a slippery web of premises and practices that are no longer legitimate or sustainable. At pivotal moments in American history, the civic-republican Yale of Nathan Hale, Dwight Macdonald, John Lindsay, Kingman Brewster, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Cyrus Vance, Garry Trudeau, Howard Dean, and countless others has found enough civic savvy, courage, and grace to correct the Yale that made Levin, Zakaria, and other political nullities the croupiers of our democratic dignity and hope.
Correction: An earlier version of this post quoted an inaccurate report, from The Politic, that Yale Economics Department Chairman Ben Polak opposed a faculty resolution criticizing Singapore. In fact, Polak supported the resolution.
In response to several comments, a few minor corrections and clarifications of the original text were made on May 7.
Surely the worst way to characterize Yale administrators’ intentions in establishing an undergraduate liberal-arts college within the National University of Singapore would be to liken them to the intentions of Eduardo Saverin, a Harvard graduate and Facebook’s co-creator. But I’m going to try.
These two “Ivy Leaguers” (Saverin, and Yale itself) have ventured beyond the U.S. to Singapore partly to escape problems at home and partly to find new opportunities and pleasures. But they may find that in trying to win the world this way, they’ll lose their souls and corrupt the city-state that is hosting them.
I know that this sounds like what some have called Yale’s “taint me not” moralism and snobbery. But actually it reflects genuine worries about what’s happening to the dignity of republican citizenship and to the liberal education that is supposed to nurture republican citizenship. Saverin is emblematic of what’s happening. Yale’s venture may be emblematic of it, too, despite its professions to the contrary.
Republican citizenship matters – and flourishes – when it doesn’t only advance personal interests through self-discipline and smart reckonings but also contributes to certain larger, deeper, “public” interests that a liberal education should stimulate in future leaders and ordinary citizens.
A republic’s survival really depends on this. A liberal-capitalist republic, especially, depends on its citizens’ upholding certain public virtues and beliefs that aren’t rewarded by markets – whose genius comes from approaching people as narrowly self-interested consumers and investors – or by liberal states – which don’t judge among different ways of life, or, when they do judge, tend to do it with too much authoritarian surveillance and suppression..
That leaves only liberal education, or, in some societies, certain kinds of religion, to nourish public virtues such as: a) a commitment to advance a whole society’s justice, not just your own gain; b) an ability and inclination to deliberate openly and fairly with others about that justice, sometimes by mastering the arts and disciplines of honest journalism and literature; and c) a willingness to sacrifice some of your own personal prerogatives to achieve this kind of public trust, which none of us can achieve on his own.
These virtues don’t require saintly self-sacrifice. Nor should they require submission to an authoritarian state. But they do need to be cultivated – not by the state or markets but by other institutions, in civil society – to be strong enough to resist the allure of rewards such as those Saverin has been going for.
This real Saverin doesn’t resemble the character in the movie “The Social Network” who is played by Andrew Garfield, whose physiognomy and earnest good faith suggest an “old Ivy League” character that some of us wouldn’t mind reviving, albeit without its old racist, sexist context. The real-life Saverin moved to Singapore a few years ago to escape the ugly notoriety and bad faith he’d reaped in battles with his Harvard business partner Mark Zuckerberg; and Saverin recently renounced his U.S. citizenship to escape taxes on the $3.84 billion he’s expected to gain from Facebook’s first public offering on the stock market. No civic-republican virtue there!
Reportedly he’s been “living the high life” in Singapore, driving supermodels around in a Bentley while investing in Asia and South America and designing games for Facebook. In short, he’s been reproducing the breadth and shallowness of Facebook’s and globalization’s imperative to “connect” everyone and everything until – as the writer Zadie Smith showed unforgettably in an essay about Facebook – the “connecting” drains all humane depth from everything being connected.
What can this have to do with Yale, which is a venerable institution, not a roving young investor? And what can it have to do with Singapore, which is not just a commercial hub and resort but a nation and society in which people grow up and to whose well-being many of them want to contribute creatively, not just tactically and obediently?
The answer, I fear, is that both Yale and Singapore are becoming a bit more like Saverin and that’s really why Yale and Singapore are undertaking the Yale-NUS partnership.
Of course, Yale didn’t come to Singapore to escape controversy or taxes back home. Indeed, it remains anchored in New Haven, and, as a non-profit institution, it doesn’t pay U.S. taxes or make business investments, at home or abroad. Or does it? And is the shallowness of Saverin’s mode of connection infecting and inflecting Ivy Leaguers and Singaporeans alike?
Even in New Haven, liberal education hasn’t always nourished the public virtues I’ve mentioned. It’s often just an ornament or lineament for a college education that supplies mainly top-flight career training for a global elite that’s no longer responsive to any actual polity or moral code.
True enough, the Yale-NUS venture isn’t the missionary sort that Yale’s Protestant evangelists brought to China and Korea a century ago. Nor is it the capitalist empire-building that crushed or over-awed indigenous peoples. Nor is it the Cold War ideological crusading for “democracy” of Henry R. Luce, Yale Class of 1920, a son of Yale missionaries in China and the founder of TIME, whose 1941 manifesto “The American Century” carried a dark underside of “The Quiet American,” whose grand strategies led to folly in Vietnam and Iraq. Yale’s latest venture may have remnants and echoes of all these, but, really, it’s something new.
In its promotional rhetoric, the new college claims that liberal education will help leading Singaporeans and others to reflect deeply on complex challenges facing the world. It also promises to broaden the old Yale’s own traditional, elite-Western variant of liberal education into something more inter-disciplinary, worldly, and serviceable to globalization and its graduates’ best interests as grand strategists and problem solvers.
I’m in no position to assess Singapore’s side of this dubious equation. But here is a rather severe assessment of it by a student from Georgia who took my course at Yale on “Global Journalism, National Identities.”
Whenever I’ve gestured in the direction of such an assessment, as I did in this Huffington Post essay in March, some Singaporeans, quite understandably, have become defensive. A very few have slid into nastiness and a whiff of Occidentalism that almost welcomes Western decadence. Thus a commenter at the Kent Ridge Common identifying herself as Kaddy Mutu wrote:
“I don’t see why we need to have a partnership with an institution that has produced the talents who along with their fellow Ivy League compatriots have morally and financially bankrupted their once great nation. Your nation’s economy is in a depression as your central bank robs the general population with its easy money policies transferring more wealth to the bankers. Your political parties are both bought and paid for. Your men and women are sent to die in senseless wars to protect the reserve currency status of the petrodollar. Before this decade is through the Treasury market will be in free fall and so will the dollar along with your living standards.
“Call us authoritarian all you want but we are a prudent state while yours is a once great nation that is a banana republic on its way to fascism. And your nation owes us and other authoritarian regimes A LOT of money. All made possible in part by the notables graduates of Yale and other Ivies.
“I suggest that debt slaves adopt a more courteous attitude toward their creditors instead of name calling and stereotyping. Btw Feel free to come grovel for a job once this comes to pass.”
Two contradictory tensions here are worth noting.
First, when Americans, who are relatively free to criticize their own government, criticize Singapore’s government, we generate such excruciating discomfort among some well-educated Singaporeans that they hurl invective at us for doing precisely what they cannot do (or at least have not done) in Singapore.
Second, however, almost all of Mutu’s account of what American and global capitalism are doing to republican virtues and prospects is true. But therefore the American moralism she derides isn’t really a reflection of “taint me not” arrogance and hypocrisy; it’s a reflection of genuine worries about what we ourselves are indeed becoming.
Any Singaporeans who think that their tidy, tightly governed city-state is immune to this may find that liberal education urges them to think again. No regime is likely to keep the lid on the greed and decadence that anomic, algorithmically accelerated investment and disinvestment are generating, not only in many Westerners like Saverin but in many Asians, as well.
So it needn’t really matter that, for some of us Americans, controversy over the Yale-NUS experiment is less about what it portends for a Singapore that’s in transition toward liberalism than about what it portends for an America that’s in transition toward disorder and, perhaps, in response, repression.
Both societies are converging in troubling ways, prompting some of their leaders to join to recalibrate state-capitalist governance. How they balance economic and social liberalism and seduction, on the one hand, with selective state surveillance and suppression, on the other, may be somewhat looser in Singapore than – with some of the undesirable consequences that Mutu attributes to the U.S. – and somewhat tighter in America, with many of the undesirable consequences that my student’s paper describes in Singapore.
Missing from either country’s new “balance” will be the voluntaristic, self-disciplined republican spirit I’ve mentioned. Neoliberal apostles of the new elite dispensation such as Yale Corporation member and global journalist Fareed Zakaria insist that order and prosperity in illiberal regimes like Singapore’s lead eventually to fuller democracy and public virtue. And they want the Yale-NUS partnership to vindicate that thesis and that noble progression.
But some of us doubt that either society will achieve a healthy, humane balance between order and prosperity, on the one hand, and true creativity and conscience, on the other. Neither will do it if Yale and Singapore collude in making Eduardo Saverin’s way of life more secure and rewarding for people like him.
Saverin is young, so perhaps life will teach him what Harvard failed to do. By many accounts, he’s a nice guy. But one of liberal education’s many lessons is that not everyone who does the wrong thing does it malevolently. Some people do it foolishly, because they lack the necessary moral and social compass that liberal education can implant, cultivate, and sustain but that, somehow, Saverin’s and Zuckerberg’s Harvard did not.
Will Yale succeed in Singapore when it has failed at home? Or has it come to Singapore to escape and recover from its failings – and to enable some lucrative but otherwise dubious investments for its endowment on the side?
.
Jim Sleeper
* Jim Sleeper lectures in political science at Yale and posts frequently at TPM. He has been a New York newspaper columnist and is the author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism. His website is www.jimsleeper.com.
As Yale’s Blunder Deepens, Singapore Bares its Teeth
Jim Sleeper
Lecturer in Political Science, Yale
When the Yale College Faculty passed a resolution in April condemning the “lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore, host of the proposed Yale-National University of Singapore College” and urged “Yale-NUS “to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society,” Yale’s president Richard Levin declared that the resolution — passed in his presence and over his objection — “carried a sense of moral superiority that I found unbecoming.”
Levin then unbecame what he ought to be as president of a liberal-arts university by going to Singapore and giving a speech at the end of last month, the same month in which that authoritarian corporate city-state had committed yet another of its abuses against basic civil liberties that have been monitored and condemned by many international observers and advocates — liberties that, as the Yale faculty resolution emphasized, “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 or negotiations with the Singaporean authorities.”
When Levin gave his speech touting the appointment of the ill-prepared but energetically pliable Yale professor Pericles Lewis as Yale-NUS’ first president, Singapore had only recently prevented Chee Soon Juan, Secretary-General of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), from leaving the country to give a speech of his own at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Not only wasn’t Chee allowed to leave Singapore; the International human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam, counsel to the SDP and Chee’s representative internationally, was detained and turned back at Singapore’s Changi Airport when he tried to visit Chee on May 20, days before Levin’s visit.
So the Yale faculty resolution was right on target, and Levin’s reaction to it was way off. Singapore’s action prompted Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, to publish an open letter, here in the Huffington Post, to Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, urging the government to grant permission to Dr Chee to attend the event:
“In the last 20 years he has been jailed for more than 130 days on charges including contempt of Parliament, speaking in public without a permit, selling books improperly, and attempting to leave the country without a permit. Today, your government prevents Dr. Chee from leaving Singapore because of his bankrupt status…. It is our considered judgment that having already persecuted, prosecuted, bankrupted, and silenced Dr. Chee inside Singapore, you now wish to render him silent beyond your own borders.”
According to the Associated Press, the Singapore “government’s bankruptcy office denied Chee permission to travel to the conference because he has failed to make a contribution to his bankruptcy estate.” But Singapore is infamous for prosecuting dissenters and opposition leaders for “defamation,” thereby bankrupting them with legal costs and fines:
“Supremely confident of the reliability of his judiciary, the prime minister [Lee Hsieng Loong] uses the courts … to intimidate, bankrupt, or cripple the political opposition while ventilating his political agenda. Distinguishing himself in a caseful of legal suits commenced against dissidents and detractors for alleged defamation in Singapore courts, he has won them all,” writes Francis T. Seow, a former solicitor general of the country. of
Opposition Leader Chee Soon Juan Singapore P. M. Lee Hsieng Loong
For example, as I’ve recounted here, the first opposition politician to win a seat in parliament after Singapore’s independence in 1965, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, was soon charged with defamation in a suit that bankrupted him and forced him out of public life. His was only the first prominent case in a relentless tide of prosecutions that shuttle dissenters, including NUS faculty, out of their jobs and homes and into unemployment, prison, or exile.
Chee himself, who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia and once taught at NUS, was fired from his post there as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined the SDP party. When he attempted to contest his dismissal, he, too, was sued for defamation, bankrupted, imprisoned, and then barred from leaving the country.
When Singapore’s apologists at Yale are forced to acknowledge such abuses, they explain them away as cultural differences or assure us that the country is changing. Yale astronomer Charles Bailyn, Yale-NUS’ “inaugural dean,” explains Singapore’s bans on speaking at public demonstrations without a permit by saying. “What we think of as freedom, they think of as an affront to public order, and I think the two societies differ in that respect.”
They differ in more ways than that: The SDP reports that “Chee declared bankruptcy in 2006 after he was unable to pay the fines imposed after he lost defamation suits initiated by Singapore’s then-prime minister Goh Chok Tong and then-senior minister Lee Kuan Yew. He was also convicted on charges of libel during the 2006 General Election after both Lee Kuan Yew and the current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, sued him for implying corruption in an SDP newsletter. On top of not being able to travel out of the country, he has also been barred from standing for elections.”
Amsterdam, the human-rights lawyer, has written a long white paper on such abuses by Singapore. Bailyn can’t explain these away, but If he’s still in doubt, he can learn more about the country’s record and continuing practices from Yale student Luka Kalandarishvili, who wrote a paper on the subject for a seminar on “Global Journalism, National Identities” that I taught last spring.
Why is Yale disgracing itself this way? It’s one thing for a business corporation to roll with the punches while dealing with clients, customers, and investors in countries that do things differently than ours does. It’s also okay for a university to establish a small center or professional school that limits itself to transferring skills. It’s quite something else for a liberal-arts college to transform itself, as Yale is already doing in New Haven, from the crucible of civic-republican leadership it has been into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a global managerial elite that answers to no republican polity or moral code.
A liberal education is supposed to show the young that the world isn’t flat, as neoliberal economists like Levin think, but that it has abysses that yawn suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that require insights and coordinates far deeper than those offered by markets and the states that serve them — as Singapore’s state does to a fault.
Then again, Yale is a business corporation now. As Amsterdam was being denied entry into Singapore last month, I was seated at a dinner in Germany next to a very high official of a European university who’d been to Singapore a few times himself. “There’s $300 million for Yale in its deal with NUS,” he confided to me.
“What? How do you know that?” I asked. “Yale claims it’s not getting a dime from Singapore, although Singapore is paying all the costs of constructing and staffing the college itself.”
“Oh, it’s not a direct payment,” my interlocutor explained. “It’s what you call insider trading: Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund. These will be only investments, not payments, so there’s some risk. But you’ll see that Yale’s endowment will swell by several hundred million in consequence of its getting in on these ventures.”
–
This hit me with some force because, only a few weeks before, I’d written here that the real scandal in Yale’s Singapore venture is Yale Corporation members’ blithe assurance that they can do well by doing good, as long as they ignore the costs to republican liberty and the creativity and citizenship such liberty yields. When I think of Levin’s envisioning the Yale-NUS arrangement, first at Davos, where it began, and then with his recent Yale Corporation members G. Leonard Baker, Charles Ellis (who maintains an investment business in Singapore and is married to the Secretary of Yale, Linda Koch Lorimer), and with Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV (once the CEO-designate of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, now a member of the Yale Corporation), the European university official’s comment sounds right.
Take a look at this short video of yet another Yale Corporation member and Yale-NUS champion, Fareed Zakaria, interviewing Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong at the Davos World Economic Forum last January, and notice the nuances of subservience: Zakaria, who would take to the pages of the Yale Daily News in April to disparage, as “provincial,” those faculty supporting the resolution criticizing Singapore’s abuses, never mentions Yale’s venture with Singapore in the January interview, nor does he ask Lee about any of Singapore’s human rights abuses.
The prime minister is a piece of work here — British-educated, well-buffed and modulated, dispensing pellets of charm, a studied dignity in informality, and sinuous liberal bromides, with just the right hint of tempered steel behind the smile. In this, he’s not unlike what Zakaria used to be, but study Zakaria’s countenance and see the perfect mask of complicity and obeisance that recalls W. H. Auden’s observation, in the Europe of the 1930s: “Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face.”
American college administrators, struggling to balance truth-seeking with power-wielding and wealth-making, are readily disarmed by operators like Lee and Zakaria. Our liberal arts colleges are vulnerable to market riptides, to putsches by would-be donors and moneyed interest groups, and to the stomach-turning descent of America’s civic culture into brutal political speech, gladiatorial sports and degrading entertainments, all of it accelerated by those market riptides and the global capitalist wrecking ball. Small wonder that to the beleaguered Levin and his globe-trotting trustees, Singapore seems a port in the storm: The little city-state need “liberalize” only a little, and Yale need “Singaporize” a little, they think, for the fit to be as perfect as the mask that is Fareed Zakaria’s face. They find the Yale College Faculty resolution “unbecoming” because it disrupts that fit and discredits that mask.
To its designers, the Singapore undertaking seems all the more harmonious a convergence because, throughout Levin’s presidency, Yale has compared poorly with other American universities in its support and practice freedom of speech, as I showed here at some length and as Stephen Walt noted last week in a Foreign Policy post, “Yale Flunks Academic Freedom.”
The Yale Alumni Magazine, which, unlike Harvard’s equivalent, functions dutifully as a press office for Levin, finessing controversy after controversy to minimize its effects on his administration, has yet to inform Yale alumni that even though Yale-NUS graduates will not earn bona fide Yale degrees, they’ll find the Yale name and logo on their diplomas and will be “fully integrated into the Association of Yale Alumni Network” — a puzzling first, for reasons I’ve reported here.
The Yale Daily News has allowed its reporter covering the Yale administration to serve as a press officer for the administration, failing to report any of the irregularities in the Yale-NUS venture. (Find the section, “A Telling Default,” in this long post.)
Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs now has undergraduates sign agreements not to disclose anything taught and said in seminars with “professors” such as Stanley McChrystal and other power-celebrities.
And the Yale Law School, of all places, has been obdurately, shamefully silent about the abuses by Singapore that I’ve mentioned. The law school can redeem itself by inviting Chee’s lawyer, Bob Amsterdam, and Yale alumnus Bo Tedards, the global democracy activist who’s been writing to Levin about the Singapore regime, to speak to what I’m sure would be a capacity crowd in the Yale Law School auditorium. Will it issue the invitations? If not, what is the law school for?
The Singapore venture has compromised Yale deeply not because Singapore is such an evil place in the larger scheme of things – it’s an authoritarian, corporate city-state with a well-educated, prosperous populace that may surprise us someday by curbing and licensing its governors — but because Yale itself has been led so crudely, cluelessly, and prematurely into this place where it need not have gone and where, pedagogically, can ill afford to go right now.
In his nearly twenty years as president, Levin has been invaluable to Yale as the pilot of its enhancement fiscally, physically, and in town-gown and labor relations, and just last September, I congratulated him for an address to incoming freshmen, whom he implored to be true to liberal education’s skepticism of dogmas and over-simplifications. But now I think that I missed the note of desperation in his address: It was almost as if he were imploring 18-year-olds to save Yale from itself — and perhaps from what he has done by choosing the Singapore venture as a way to make his mark and seize the future. He has been a very good manager with a very bad sense of liberal education’s purposes and stakes and of what courage and choices are necessary to vindicate them in this world.
In the 1950s, Yale’s president A. Whitney Griswold crusaded for liberal education against both McCarthyism and Communism, no easy task for a university president in those dark years. Levin has outsourced the equivalent challenge of our time by presuming to bring liberal education to Singapore, which becomes a laboratory for the decorous prostitution of liberal education to market riptides here at home — all while enhancing Yale’s brand name and market share, of course. The real cost is already being felt in the Singaporization, not cosmopolitanization, of Yale.
Varsities say Yale not being given special access to investment opportunities here
04:45 AM Jun 12, 2012
by Ng Jing Yng
SINGAPORE – There is no “backroom” deal in the National University of Singapore’s partnership with Yale University to set up the Yale-NUS College, and the American university is not being given special access to investment opportunities in Singapore as a quid pro quo – as suggested in a commentary by a Yale political science lecturer published on US news website The Huffington Post last week.
Responding to TODAY’s queries, both NUS and Yale yesterday denied the allegations which were attributed by Dr Jim Sleeper – who wrote the article – to an unnamed “very high official of a European university who’d been to Singapore a few times”.
In his article – published on June 5 – which was largely critical of the Yale-NUS partnership, Dr Sleeper, a former journalist at the New York Daily News, wrote that the source whom he met “at a dinner in Germany” said that there was “US$300 million for Yale in its deal with NUS”.
Dr Sleeper quoted the source describing the financial gains for Yale as “what you call insider trading: Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund. These will be only investments, not payments, so there’s some risk. But … Yale’s endowment will swell by several hundred million in consequence of its getting in on these ventures”.
Dr Sleeper also likened Yale University to a “business corporation” and claimed that some members of Yale Corporation – the governing board and policymaking body for Yale University – have business and investment links to Singapore, including Dr Charles Ellis.
Dr Ellis is currently an adviser emeritus to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation’s Investment Strategies Committee.
Dr Sleeper’s claims were rebuked by Yale University Press Secretary Tom Conroy. He said: “Jim Sleeper has written repeatedly in recent months about his opposition to Yale-NUS College. He was a political journalist for a daily newspaper before he came to teach at Yale, and thus it is particularly disappointing that his most recent commentary in the Huffington Post once again contains errors of fact.”
“Yale is not, as Sleeper asserts, a business corporation. It is a not-for-profit organisation recognised around the globe as one of the world’s great research and teaching institutions.”
Mr Conroy also reiterated that Yale is not getting any financial gain from the partnership with NUS, apart from reimbursement of expenses.
He said: “Sleeper makes the claim – based on the conversational speculation of an unnamed European – that Yale is receiving special access to investment opportunities in Singapore as a quid pro quo for pursuing a partnership with NUS to create Yale-NUS College. This claim is false.”
He added: “Sleeper also makes the claim that former Yale trustee Charles Ellis ‘maintains an investment business in Singapore’. This is false.”
In a separate response, an NUS spokesperson said there “is no ‘backroom’ deal as alleged”. She added: “Yale University is reimbursed only for work done in connection with Yale-NUS College.”
According to the spokesperson, the reimbursement to Yale is for teaching replacements for Yale faculty members who had been involved in the joint planning processes for the college.
The Government has said that it is funding the college. According to its budget book this year, the infrastructure cost for the Yale-NUS college campus is S$114 million.
Contacted by TODAY, Dr Sleeper claimed in an email response that he did not make the allegations.
He said: “My post does not say – in fact, it denies – that there is any payment or quid pro quo from Singapore or any of its government affiliates to Yale. My post does not say – in fact, it denies – that there is anything illegal about what the person I quoted suggested will be arranged.”
He added: “My post does not say that there has been any agreement to allow Yale to participate in restricted investment opportunities. It merely quotes someone saying that he is convinced that that is a possibility.”
Why is Yale-NUS coming on so strong about the Huffington post by Yale political science lecturer Jim Sleeper? Yale University Press Secretary Tom Conroy is adamant Yale will not be getting any financial gain from the partnership with NUS, apart from reimbursement of expenses. The NUS spokesperson parrots similar script, “Yale University is reimbursed only for work done in connection with Yale-NUS College.”
But both are not denying the fact that Yale trustee Dr Charles Ellis, and member of Yale Corporation, is currently an adviser emeritus to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation’s Investment Strategies Committee. [Please note corrections and updates kindly provided by Mr Sleeper below.]
Sleeper makes it clear: “My post does not say that there has been any agreement to allow Yale to participate in restricted investment opportunities. It merely quotes someone saying that he is convinced that that is a possibility.” And that quote qualifies the potential financial gains for Yale as “what you call insider trading: Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund. These will be only investments, not payments, so there’s some risk. But … Yale’s endowment will swell by several hundred million in consequence of its getting in on these ventures”.
Insider trading has long been regarded as reprehensible as far as securities regulation is concerned in Singapore – it is worse than the extra egg that goes with the char kway teow, local parlance for justifying unsolicited discounts in condominium purchases. The main regulatory frame work is the Securities and Futures Act (SFA), which has replaced the repealed Securities Industries Act (SIA). The relevant Section 218 of the SFA lists the types of prohibited conduct by connected persons in possession of inside information. The most important of the provisions regulating insider trading is Section 219 of the SFA, which adopts an “information-connected” approach towards insider trading:
Prohibited conduct by other persons in possession of inside information 219.—(1) Subject to this Division, where — (a) a person who is not a connected person referred to in section 218 (referred to in this section as the insider) possesses information that is not generally available but, if the information were generally available, a reasonable person would expect it to have a material effect on the price or value of securities; and (b) the insider knows that — (i) the information is not generally available; and (ii) if it were generally available, it might have a material effect on the price or value of those securities, subsections (2) and (3) shall apply.
It is fair to conclude that someone, anyone, may be convinced that participation in restricted investment opportunities is a real possibility, given the unique position afforded to Dr Charles Ellis as adviser emeritus to the GSIC Investment Strategies Committee. It is up to Dr Ellis to prove everyone wrong. Meanwhile, it would be pertinent to watch if Yale’s endowment will be swelling by several hundred millions in the near future. As the idiom goes, forewarned is forearmed.
All this while I had been wondering why the heck would Yale University ever want to set up a branch in Singapore, given our apparently such a poor record for respecting and upholding civil liberties ?
So looks like someone tried to led the cat out of the bag to hint at the prize catch for Yale ? So now the big question is whether to believe both NUS & Yale that Yale was more than happy to be reimbursed only for all their troubles and yet risk their own reputation ?
Alan Wong is right. Why would an ivy-league university set up shop in Singapore, a well known dictatorship? Unless there is a carrot dangling in front of the Yale governing board. Yale in singapore is not the same as the Yale in US. It is still a local University with local characteristics. Don’t expect any mind expanding experience when you come in.
But I thot Yale loves Singapore’s long tradition of academic freedom. That is why they come here. We are the hub of LIBERAL; a.liberal arts, b.liberal politics c.liberal thinking
Yale is coming here to help liberalize our ISA also.
//..The Singapore venture has compromised Yale deeply not because Singapore is such an evil place in the larger scheme of things – it’s an authoritarian, corporate city-state …//
Now is this where you can call in the CPIB to investigate? I mean, how financially skewed are they against the white-collars of executives in real life? I would go after those seafood chefs, ministerial corrupt officials etc, but do they have a clue how to go after those well hidden behind the banks and institutions such as MAS, SWF etc?
In fact, we should be told where is our CPF money. CPIB may as well start its investigation at the same time.
I have done a simple calculation but still could not understand why our Reserves is still so low. Lets say we have 2 million working adults (out of 6 million)and each contributing $500 per month (self & Company), CPF should have collected $1b or $12b in a year. Since CPF started, we should have tens of Trillions somewhere, even after some payout. So how come our national reserves is still in hundreds of billions and not trillions?
Columbia and NYU are the largest landowners in Manhattan and they each have billion dollar endowments. And the interesting anecdote is “Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund”. Dear Professor Balding, could that be your missing trillion?
When IMF needed money, they called Singapore. When UBS and Merrill Lynch needed capital, they called Singapore. Dear Professor Balding, could that be your missing trillion?
One correction: Charles Ellis is no longer a member of the Yale Corporation, but he did work with and for the Singapore Government Investment Corporation while a trustee of Yale. He is the husband of Yale University Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer, who one of is Yale President Richard Levin’s closest advisers.
A current member of the Yale Corporation, Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, was CEO-designate of Singapore’s Temasek sovereign wealth fund in 2009 but was not yet a Yale trustee at that time.
So a pattern emerges here — I’ve said more about it in other posts at Huffington Post — that gives the European university official’s prediction a certain plausibility. I noted that prediction and its plausibility in the post that you’ve kindly linked. But the post is mainly about the awkwardness of Yale, a liberal-arts university, venturing into a partnership with a university and government whose current as well as past record on civil liberties is what I described. My expression of this deeper political and pedagogical concern seems only to have stupefied Yale’s press office into silence.
But there was no silence. The mainstream press has rubbished it as another conspiracy one would read in fiction book.
Even if such an investment deal were to exist or come through for Yale, there is no way one could tell given the massive and global apparatus of the SWF. How good and independent is our CPIB really?
Yale’s claim Charles Ellis does not have investment interests in SG, and it was reported (uncritically once again) by the Straits Times & CNA is false to begin with.
Mr Charles Ellis is still a Senior Advisor in Greenwich with branch office in Singapore. The MSM couldn’t even get their facts right.
May I invite you to take a short, reading-comprehension test like one you might take on the GMAT for graduate school? First, here’s the passage you’d have to read; then, a couple of questions and possible answers; and, then, the right (and wrong) answers.
The passage:
It’s one thing for a business corporation to roll with the punches while dealing with clients, customers, and investors in countries that do things differently than ours does. It’s also okay for a university to establish a small center or professional school in another country that limits itself to transferring skills. But it’s quite something else for a liberal-arts college to transform itself abroad, as Yale is already doing in New Haven, from the crucible of civic-republican leadership it has been into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a global managerial elite that answers to no republican polity or moral code….
Then again, Yale is a business corporation now. As the human-rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam was being denied entry into Singapore last month, I was seated at a dinner in Germany next to a very high official of a European university who’d been to Singapore a few times himself. “There’s $300 million for Yale in its partnership with the National University of Singapore” he confided to me.
“‘What? How do you know that?” I asked. “Yale claims it’s not getting a dime from Singapore, although Singapore is paying all the costs of constructing and staffing the new college itself.”
“Oh, it’s not a direct payment,” my interlocutor explained. “It’s what you call insider trading: Yale will be cut in on prime investments that Singapore controls and restricts through its sovereign wealth fund. These will be only investments, not payments, so there’s some risk. But you’ll see Yale’s endowment swell by several hundred million in consequence of its getting in on these ventures.”
This hit me with some force because, only a few weeks before, I’d written that the real scandal in Yale’s Singapore venture is Yale Corporation members’ blithe assurance that they can do well by doing good, as long as they ignore the costs to republican liberty and the creativity and citizenship such liberty yields.
When I think of Yale President Richard Levin’s envisioning the Yale-NUS arrangement with recent Yale Corporation members G. Leonard Baker, Charles Ellis (who maintains an investment business in Singapore and is married to the Secretary of Yale, Linda Koch Lorimer), and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV (once the CEO-designate of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, now a member of the Yale Corporation), the European university official’s comment sounds right.
Now, here are two questions to test your comprehension of what you’ve just read:
1. Where the passage says, “Then again, Yale is a business corporation,” does the writer mean this literally?
[a.] Yes, that’s what the passage asserts, so it’s what the writer means.
[b.] No, the meaning isn’t literal, because the passage also draws a distinction between a university and a business corporation, making clear that Yale is not the latter. So it means that Yale is behaving like a business corporation, even though it shouldn’t.
[c.] The writer knows that Yale isn’t really a business corporation but wants to mislead readers into thinking that it is.
2. Does the passage claim that Yale is receiving preferred access to certain investments as a form of payment or quid pro quo for establishing a new college in partnership with Singapore?
[a.] Yes, that’s what the passage reports.
[b.] No, the passage reports that someone has predicted that Yale will receive investment access in exchange for its services and imprimatur. But the passage does not assert that this is actually happening.
If your reading comprehension is good, you know that the right answers to both questions are [b]. Unfortunately, the long-serving, much-beleaguered press secretary of Yale’s Office of Public Affairs & Communications, Tom Conroy, didn’t pass this test, possibly because couldn’t, but also possibly because he didn’t want to because he doesn’t want you to pass it, either. In other words, it is possible he wants to mislead you. But he has become so inured to doing such things that probably he has also misled himself.
Conroy mis-answered the two questions in an official statement that Yale produced after I wrote and posted this passage on June 5. (I’ve changed only a few, minor words in the excerpt here to make it intelligible outside the rest of the post; this has no effect whatever on the questions or their answers).
Conroy’s answer to the first question is [a]: He claims that the passage means literally, albeit mistakenly, that Yale is a business corporation. After all, one sentence of the passage says so, so he pounces on it!
Yale is not, as Sleeper asserts, a business corporation. It is a not-for-profit organization recognized around the globe as one of the world’s great research and teaching institutions.
Why does Conroy’s second sentence here remind me of a smallish, regional airport putting up banners announcing that it’s “A World-Class Airport”? But let that pass. Conroy’s answer to the second question, too, is [a]: He tells you that the passage claims, literally (albeit wrongly), that Yale is in it for the money:
Sleeper makes the claim — based on the conversational speculation of an unnamed European — that Yale is receiving special access to investment opportunities in Singapore as a quid pro quo for pursuing a partnership with NUS to create Yale-NUS College. This claim is false. Yale is receiving no financial gain other than reimbursement of expenses.
But the passage doesn’t claim that Yale is getting anything! It reports someone’s prediction that it will and suggests that, given the thick nexus of Yale-Singapore business connections, that “sounds right.”
Conroy then compounds his folly or duplicity by reading one part of the passage correctly and then lying about it:
Sleeper also makes the claim that former Yale trustee Charles Ellis “maintains an investment business in Singapore.” This is false.
But actually, my claim is true. Charles Ellis, a former member of the Yale Corporation, the husband of Yale’s Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer, and a long-time adviser to Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation, is a founder and senior advisor of Greenwich Associates, which maintains an office in Singapore. Ellis has written to the Huffington Post to say that he has never seen this office. But the Singapore newspaper TODAYnotes accurately (as Conroy does not) that Dr Ellis is currently an adviser emeritus to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation’s Investment Strategies Committee.
As a continuing contact for the Government Investment Corporation and a senior advisor to the firm he founded, Ellis is himself the connection which he has denied exists between the GIC and his Greenwich Associates. More important, he is one of three recent and current Yale trustees — the others are Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, G. Leonard Baker — who have intimate knowledge of Yale’s governance and investments as well as of Singapore’s. Ellis left the Yale Corporation in 2008, just as Yale’s negotiations with Singapore to establish the new college were beginning in earnest, but his wife, who is one of Yale President Richard Levin’s highest and closest assistants, has been very aggressively involved in planning and promoting the new college in Singapore and will be a member of its governing board.
Let’s mitigate Conroy’s duplicity here with the suggestion that he should work on his reading comprehension. This isn’t what we should expect from a university whose motto is “Light and Truth.” Yet, for more than a decade, I and others have watched this man mislead clumsily to protect people at Yale who were lying, and we’ve watched him mislead just as clumsily about truth-tellers (like me in this case and in another I’d describe if I had more time and more bile).
The problem has only gotten worse now that Yale is collaborating so intensely with people who crow like Conroy on cue, driven by an excess of Confucianism or of anti-Communism (don’t they know that Communism has become corporatism?), or out of spasms of a perverse neo-colonialism that has kept a few of them searching for something Anglo-American to hail ever since the end of the Raj and the Hong Kong handover.
The moment Conroy issued his statement — paralleled by a disclaimer from the National University of Singapore that anyone was paying anyone for anything beyond reimbursements — this sturdy chorus crowed dutifully, “NUS-Yale Rubbishes Professor’s Claims of Conspiracy.” The government-controlled, ever-Orwellian Straits Times and its ChannelNewsAsia did just that. But I found more amusing, if also pathetic, passages by the rubbishers such as this one:
Dr Sleeper meanwhile continued to believe that Singapore is another Myanmar of sorts, where citizens are not allowed any social liberties. Perhaps he did not read about a 17-year-old lashing out at a minister and not being charged for it.
Even Conroy should feel unclean. He and the curdled yea-sayers who write such things have needlessly compounded Yale’s blunder by calling attention to what’s ludicrous and dangerous about it. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” warns Singapore Notes, a dissident website that assessed my post against Singapore’s murky laws on insider trading.
Yale asserts that there’s no fire, but, if that’s true, why say so much that’s false? In an undertaking as fragile as liberal education, the cover-up can be worse than the crime. (Note to Conroy: “crime” in this passage is a metaphor, not a charge, as would be clear to some whose reading comprehension exceeds that of a business-corporation spokesman who reads everything only for its implications for his company’s legal liability, brand name, and market share.)
Perhaps the biggest irony is that my post and its predecessors on this subject aren’t an attempted exposé of financial and business conflicts of interest. They’re warnings about underestimating the danger to liberal values and virtues in universities’ hasty and often top-down accommodations to regimes whose repressions of liberty, even inside their own national universities, mesh only-too well with the increasingly obvious repressions that are now encircling and violating Americans in the United States itself.
Even on their own home campuses, Yale and other old American colleges, formerly crucibles of civic-republican leadership for the world as well as the United States, have been turning themselves almost mindlessly, because desperately, into military and national-security cockpits, commercial career-networking centers, and cultural galleria for a new global elite that will answer to no republican polity or moral code. Universities’ mad scramble abroad (and online) is happening in ways that only compound their growing pedagogical hollowness and perversity at home.
There may be irresistible reasons why the administrators, trustees, and their celebrants are tempted, even desperate, to stampede in these directions. Unlike the embarrassing Conroy, many of them aren’t clueless or perverse; they’re just trying to ride swift cross-currents instead of trying to critique them from any depth.
However necessary that may seem for institutions struggling to survive, a liberal education should stimulate the critique even more than the ride.
When only a few colleges like Yale have the resources necessary to stay true to that mission, their default on it is all the more reprehensible. Why don’t they use their prestige to withdraw from the U.S. News college rankings and to rebuff feelers from donors with the wrong agendas? Why don’t they cherish those who are trying to remind them, and their weak courtiers, neo-colonial cheerleaders, crude enforcers, and earnest youths yearning to salute, that they’re losing something invaluable even when collaborations like Yale’s with Singapore seem legal, commercially pure, and “cosmopolitan” in the manner preferred by elites who are bankrupting our societies and our souls?
What’s being lost could be rescued, but that would take guts and depth as well as money and savvy from donors wise enough not to think that they’re investing in productivity or in conscripting the humanities to providing commercial and military voyages with better-disciplined crews and tighter rigging. A liberal education will provide that, too, but only if it’s nourishing more critics than conformists — more people who are free.
As I wrote in the post that so confuses today’s Yale, a liberal education is supposed to show that the world isn’t flat, as neo-liberal economists like Levin think, but that it has abysses that yawn suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that require insights far deeper than those offered by markets and the states that serve them — as Singapore’s state serves them to a fault.
It would be amusing if it weren’t so distressing that what really set off all those alarm bells in New Haven and Singapore wasn’t this critique and the growing bewilderment, foreboding, heartbreak, and anger over its asphyxiation by a thousand bromides from gilded functionaries, but rather my one, passing account of one man’s prediction over dinner that, in exchange for Yale’s name and services, Singapore will give it some preferred investments.
In “Quarrels With Providence,” his magisterial and, to my mind, unforgettable essay of 2001 about his alma mater’s past glories and contemporary travails, Lewis Lapham noted a bit impishly that “Institutions as venerable as Yale ordinarily arrange [their announcements] with considerable care, the press releases staged in a sequence indicative of sound judgment, good feeling, and the dawn of a bright new day.”
This month Yale tried to keep up that pretense as its new, star-crossed liberal arts college — undertaken with and paid for entirely by the authoritarian city-state of Singapore and its National University of Singapore — announced that “Students at the new Yale-NUS College will be able to express themselves freely on campus.”
Skepticism about this among Yale’s own faculty “would fade as people see the “successful education experiment,” Business Week was told by Pericles Lewis, the energetically pliable former Yale English professor who is now the new college’s president. “We expect students to express all kinds of opinions on campus,” he said. “The issue is about going off campus and, there, students will have to abide by the laws of Singapore.” The college’s first students, who are now being admitted, will arrive just over a year from now.
But something was missing from these on-campus freedoms, I thought — especially as I read the comments posted by young Singaporeans below a Bloomberg version of the story that was carried on the Singapore website Tremeritus.
I expected a “clarification” of these policies to follow very soon from Yale-NUS, in a manner staged to indicate sound judgment, good feeling, and the dawn of a bright new day. My suspicions only intensified as I conversed online with Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary general of Singapore’s small opposition Reform Party, which is constrained and sometimes harassed by the slick, duplicitous, and steely ruling People’s Action Party.
Jeyaretnam, who holds a Double First Class Honours degree in Economics from Cambridge University, told me that “Our son was denied a place here at one of Singapore’s so-called elite schools… clearly politically motivated to isolate me.” He also recounted that when he was invited last year to speak at candidates’ forums at the National University of Singapore and other Singapore universities, each invitation was rescinded at the last minute. Would that happen again, I wondered, now that Pericles had spoken?
Partly because Jeyaretnam’s father, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, an early opposition leader, had been persecuted mercilessly and infamously by the regime, Kenneth has not been treated as harshly. His own political contemporary Chee Soon Juan, leader of another opposition party, the Singapore Democratic Party who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, was fired by the National University of Singapore from his position as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined the opposition party; he was sued for defamation, bankrupted, and imprisoned when he attempted to contest his dismissal.
Although relations among Singapore’s opposition parties are not cordial, Kenneth Jeyaretnam, with courage and nobility reminiscent of his father’s, spoke out against renewed persecution of Chee two months ago, when the latter was barred from leaving Singapore to give a speech to a human rights organization in Oslo — the same month, ironically, when Yale University President Richard Levin came to Singapore to give a speech celebrating Pericles Lewis’ ascent to the Yale-NUS presidency.
What a disgrace for Yale, I noted in “As Yale’s Blunder Deepens, and Singapore Bears Its Teeth,” a post that’s been read and shared widely. And last night I was about to write another, asking Pericles Lewis what he and the Yale-NUS governing board would do if, say, Yale-NUS students, seeking to exercise their promised freedom to “express all kinds of opinions… freely on campus,” invited Jeyaretnam to give a talk on campus..
Before I could even pose that question, a Wall Street Journal story provided the answer: “The Singapore campus won’t allow political protests, nor will it permit students to form partisan political societies.”
“Students at the new school ‘are going to be totally free to express their views,’ but they won’t be allowed to organize political protests on campus, said Pericles Lewis, the college’s new president, in an interview last week.
“Although groups will be allowed to discuss political issues, he said, ‘we won’t have partisan politics or be forming political parties on campus,’ including societies linked to local political groups akin to college groups supporting Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., he said.”
At this posting, Lewis is telling Yale faculty that he was misquoted and never said that there could be no protests on campus. But the new policy still dashes any hope that Yale-NUS will widen space for free political debate and organizing in that young, energetic, but assiduously self-censoring city-state.
By reporting the truth, the Journal bested the New York Times, which has never reported that Yale faculty actually passed a resolution expressing concern about their university’s collaboration with such a regime — a surprising lapse by the paper, since it did run a long story about faculty discontent the morning of the fateful meeting at which the resolution was passed. The Times never followed up to report that the faculty passed the resolution, by a wide margin, over President Richard Levin’s objection and in his presence.
Worse yet, the Times’ next story on Singapore, “Activism Grows as Singapore Loosens Restrictions,” made no mention of the regime’s assiduous suppression of political expression and of opposition leaders, in ways that generate extensive self-censorship. Impressed with the loosening of restrictions against gays, Times reporter Andrew Jacobs engaged unintentionally in what some people call “pink-washing” — helping a regime that tolerates gay life (as a profit center or a harmless showcase for its “liberalism”) to distract attention from its ongoing repression of political freedoms.
A few people at Yale — which some consider the gay friendly Ivy — have been gulled by such “loosening.” They and the Times reporter need to read William Dobson’s new book, The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which, although it barely mentions Singapore and doesn’t address gay rights, shows how deft some of today’s authoritarian regimes have become at disguising their brutality.
Such regimes have learned how to use overt repression against a few, in sparing but exemplary ways, to frighten others into thinking that it could happen to them: “Fear leaves no fingerprints,” Dobson, Slate’s politics and foreign-affairs editor, told NPR a few weeks ago while discussing his book. Some authoritarian corporate states asphyxiate dissent without administering too many beatings and imprisonments that might spark uprisings and worldwide condemnation.
A “friendly” tip to a dissenter that the regime has recorded but refrained from punishing some small infraction he or she committed years earlier can prompt dread of surveillance, of knocks in the night, and of prosecutions for “defaming” the state that Singapore’s ruling party uses to send its vocal critics into bankruptcy and worse. For example: Singapore still has draconian laws against homosexuality. Although it has backed off from enforcing them, they remain in its arsenal.
The larger tragedy in all this for a compliant Yale beggars description. A few months ago, after attending an eerily Orwellian forum at Yale called “Singapore Uncensored,” at which a Yale Daily News reporter worked to suppress a full and honest account of a panel discussion staged by Singaporean students to “humanize” the regime under the banner, “Singapore Uncensored,” I described the incident and the Singaporization of Yale — amid a galloping culture of self-censorship among Yale students themselves — in a 13,000-word post, one of the longest the Huffington Post has ever carried.
The point of that chronicle wasn’t to defend Yale’s humanist purity from the sins of Singapore but to show that, wittingly or not, Yale’s president and trustees have embraced Singapore’s model of authoritarian prosperity and have lost any sense of how a real liberal education might strengthen the American republic against market riptides and the seductions of militarism. A liberal capitalist republic has to rely on a critical mass of its citizens upholding certain public virtues and beliefs that markets and armies, necessary though they certainly are, can’t ultimately provide.
American liberal arts colleges did once provide it. Do they still? Yale’s governors have overseen the creation of a strange parallel university that, in some courses of its Directed Studies humanities program, its Grand Strategy program, and its Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, conscripts and distorts the humanities to provide better-disciplined crews and tighter rigging for its graduates’ commercial and military expeditions — perhaps including Yale’s venture into Singapore, as I’ve shown in the other posts with reference to the business ties of Yale’s own trustees.
The ethos in some of these new courses shows that not only a fear of power but the seductions of power can generate cultures of insider networking and enthusiastic self-silencing by students who imagine that this brings them closer to power and freedom. Actually it brings them closer to a culture of bureaucratic self-mutilation that’s amply reinforced in corporate and national-security America but is bottomlessly costly to their souls and to the American republic, as they tend to discover, if at all, only too late in life.
Yale has done this so often and perversely in the past — creating and then staffing the CIA through secret student societies like Skull & Bones, whose alumni sealed themselves off into their national-security strategizing — that you might think the college would have learned something by now from these graduates’ endless blunders on the world stage, from installing the hated Shah in Iran in 1953 and their committing the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam fiascos right up through their handing Iraq to the sphere of influence of Iran’s mullahtocracy through a war waged by Skull & Bones alumnus George W. Bush. Their ideas about where power comes from and how it flows are deeply wrong.
Yet, according to a Wall Street Journal story, when students in Yale’s Studies in Grand Strategy program visited West Point a few years ago to discuss a book about Iraq with cadets there, the Yalies — not the cadets — “decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have ‘views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing'” according to the program’s associate director.
And when recent posts in The Atlanticand Foreign Policy asked why General Stanley McChrystal is teaching an off-the-record course in “leadership” in Yale’s Jackson Institute, his students leaped forward to defend and to “salute” their great teacher, who told his first class that “a seminar is like a team,” but they’ve only wound up proving that what he teaches in a supposedly broad, open discussion can’t be shared with anyone outside it, even with other professors in other courses on related matters that McChrystal’s students happen to take.
The consequences are profound. “The sinister fact about censorship… is that it is largely voluntary,” George Orwell wrote, as his manuscript of Animal Farm was receiving rejection after rejection by frightened British publishers in 1944. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…. Because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. It is not exactly forbidden to say this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness….”
There’s a legitimate difference between being discreet and being silenced — that is, between exercising a sound judgment not to do something and accepting blindly that something is simply “not done.” It’s quite right that some things are” not done,” because agreeing to take certain things off the table can actually help a discussion to proceed and freedom of thought to flourish. But courses like these at Yale and, now, on several other campuses, do little better than the old secret societies have done at teaching students when and how to draw such distinctions on behalf of a real republic, not a corporate state.
Yale administrators’ lack of understanding and their loss of faith in real freedom is ignoble. And it’s heartening to some warped minds elsewhere. A Singaporean who was offended by the Yale faculty’s resolution expressing concern about the university’s drift into Singapore’s “behind closed doors” ethos retorted:
“I don’t see why we need to have a partnership with an institution that has produced the talents who… have morally and financially bankrupted their once great nation. Your nation’s economy is in a depression as your central bank robs the general population with its easy money policies transferring more wealth to the bankers. Your political parties are both bought and paid for. Your men and women are sent to die in senseless wars to protect the reserve currency status of the petrodollar. Before this decade is through the Treasury market will be in free fall and so will the dollar along with your living standards.
“Call us authoritarian all you want but we are a prudent state while yours is a once great nation that is a banana republic on its way to fascism. And your nation owes us and other authoritarian regimes A LOT of money. All made possible in part by the notables graduates of Yale and other Ivies.
“I suggest that debt slaves adopt a more courteous attitude toward their creditors instead of name calling and stereotyping. Btw Feel free to come grovel for a job once this comes to pass.”
Most of what this writer said about what’s happened to American political culture under the tutelage of people who think like Yale’s governors — President Levin and trustees s Fareed Zakaria, Charles Ellis, G. Edwin Baker, and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, the latter three long and deeply involved in business with Singapore’s government investment funds — is true.
They need to be reminded that the university was founded, in 1701, to stop a Harvard-based “social network” from diverting the Puritan effort to balance authority with consent into other efforts, at wealth-creation, in a society increasingly connected and flattened by commerce. The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders tried to remind the settlers. It has abysses, and students need a faith deep and strong enough to plumb them and sometimes even to defy worldly powers in the name of a Higher one.
Students still need a faith that strong, the kind that a real liberal education awakens when it makes them grapple with lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit, not only in their texts but also in their lives as citizen-leaders. At times, the old American colleges have done this extraordinarily well. “To a remarkable extent this place has detected and rejected those who wear the colors of high purpose falsely,” President Kingman Brewster Jr. ’41 told my entering freshman class in 1965. “This is done not by an administrative edict … but by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility… deep in our origins.”
A neoliberal might dismiss Brewster’s admonition as a snob’s boast about an in-crowd. But Brewster, a descendant of Puritans, really wanted students to plumb abysses in order to know true leaders from false, and his college had struggled for three centuries, in Calvinist and classical ways, to balance humanist Truth-seeking with republican Power-wielding.
That balance determines how we live, invest and wage wars, and there’s a lot more to be said for what it accomplished than many now tend to acknowledge. I’ve had the profound pleasure of watching many Yale undergraduates awaken and rise to the challenge of striking better public balances than are being struck by the Machiavellian mice in Yale’s “parallel university” and its Singapore venture.
Yale and other old colleges are morphing from the crucibles of civic-republican leadership that they sometimes were at their best into career-training centers and cultural galleria for a global elite that no longer answers to any republican polity or moral code. Yale teaches that the world is flat thanks to global engines of wealth-creation driven by investors and consumers.
Many a lecture chirps this good news, along with characteristically elegant apercus and tips on how to do well by doing good. Isn’t that what liberal education is for? A flat world may have valleys, but abysses? Please. We’re riding neo-liberalism to Singapore, even the Moon!
So Yale’s governors have thought. But this week’s news warns that they’re leading the college into an abyss. This was anticipated in Lapham’s “Quarrels With Providence” and is rendered chillingly, though not in reference to Yale, by Robert Kaplan in “Was Democracy Just a Moment?,” a 1997 Atlantic essay that Morris Berman summarizes in The Twilight of American Culture:
“Kaplan ends his article… saying that “we are poised to transform ourselves into something perhaps quite different from what we imagine.” … [W]e shall “sell” democracy to hybrid regimes that will, for economic reasons, take on democratic trappings, while the political reality is something else; and in the process of doing that, we too shall become – are becoming – a hybrid regime.”
So Singapore “loosens” a bit to take on democratic trappings, and Yale surrenders some of the hard-won commitments to freedom speech and political expression that I described in the long post mentioned above. To prove that it hasn’t surrendered, the Yale administration would have support students and faculty in New Haven if they want to host Kenneth Jeyaretnam; his fellow opposition leader Chee Soon Juan; Chee’s international human-rights lawyer, Bob Amsterdam (whom Singapore barred from entering the country to see him); Francis Seouw, the former solicitor-general of Singapore and critic of the regime, who now lives in Boston; and other honorable, knowledgeable dissenters to participate in a panel called “Singapore Really Uncensored.”
That’s what freedom of speech and political expression should promise, isn’t it? We’ll see if Yale will countenance it now, or if it has lost its soul in self-censorship and is too terrified of its new partner across the Pacific to do anything but grovel.
A few hours ago Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore’s work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.
But the offense does not end there. Zakaria is a trustee of Yale, which takes a very dim view of plagiarism and suspends or expels students who commit anything like what he has committed here. If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.
Worse still: Lepore, whom Zakaria wronged by misappropriating her work, is herself a Yale PhD. If anyone knows what it means to steal another scholar’s work, it’s Zakaria, who holds a PhD from Harvard.
Zakaria is a busy man, of course. Although he’s been judged by The New Republic to be one of America’s “most-overrated thinkers,” he was interviewed about the state of the world last year by Yale President Richard Levin before a large audience at the kick-off off Yale’s $50 million Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, the new home of “Professor” Stanley McChrystal and of what Lewis Lapham has called “the arts and sciences of career management,” including mastery of “the exchange rate between an awkward truth and a user-friendly lie.”
Zakaria was Harvard’s commencement speaker this June, and, as Paul Starobin reported in the Columbia Journalism Review, he’s also very busy collecting his standard speaking fee of $75,000 for talks he gives at Baker Capital, Catterton Partners, Driehaus Capital Management, ING, Merrill Lynch, Oak Investment Partners, Charles Schwab, and T. Rowe Price.
Might Zakaria have fobbed off the drafting of his ill-fated Time article to an assistant or intern (from Yale, perhaps?) and given the draft his glancing approval before letting it run under his byline in Time? Whatever the truth, he couldn’t have fobbed off the blame on anyone but himself, and so he has issued his clipped but “unreserved” apology to Lepore.
He should also apologize to Yale. Last April Yale’s trustees, under fire for their ill-conceived venture to establish a new liberal arts college bearing Yale’s name in collaboration with the authoritarian city-state of Singapore, wheeled in their fellow trustee and favorite journalist, Zakaria, to write a column defending the venture in the Yale Daily News that, as I noted here in Huffington Post at the time, read as if it had been written by a wind-up toy of Zakaria at his self-important, elitist worst.
After parsing the new Singapore college’s prospective East-West syllabus with affectations of an erudition he doesn’t possess, Zakaria, a consummate player of the “Third World card” against Westerners who dare to criticize his Davos neo-liberalism, discovered in the Singapore venture’s Yale faculty critics “a form of parochialism bordering on chauvinism — on the part of supposedly liberal and open-minded intellectuals” who, he wrote, can’t “see that we too, in America and at Yale, can learn something from Singapore.”
I’ve since had several occasions to explain what exactly we’re learning from Singapore, as well as to note Zakaria’s bad habit of resorting to put-downs of his critics. Last summer, he lit into a leftist critic of President Obama, the academic psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen, by telling Charlie Rose, “I’m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this.”
Zakaria — who hasn’t run for dogcatcher, either, but doesn’t hesitate to advise presidents — can’t help himself at such moments, and he hasn’t been able to help himself now, either. As long as he remains a Yale trustee, he will remain a sad example of Yale’s own transformation from a crucible of civic-republican leadership for America and the world into a global career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new elite that answers to no polity or moral code and that aggrandizes itself by plucking the fruits of others’ work.
Last year I wrote a foreword to a short book by Alex Grobman about the history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Oscar Wilde,” I began, “once said that homosexuality is ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ Today, anti-Semitism is the hate that dare not speak its name.”
A few weeks ago, while going through my father’s effects, I found an issue of Commentary from the 1980s with a cover story by Norman Podhoretz. The title: “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”
I had no conscious memory of the article at the time I wrote the foreword. But the turn of phrase had obviously planted itself in a corner of my brain where I had forgotten it wasn’t my own. Anyway, sorry, Norman: It was an honest mistake. And it’s still a great line.
Pundits who spend their days reading and reading and writing and writing will likely have made mistakes similar to mine. That’s all the more reason to take additional precautions against every form of plagiarism, which can as easily happen inadvertently as it does deliberately. It’s also a reason to apply strict standards of attribution, though these can vary widely across different publications and forms of media. Footnotes, for instance, do not work well on TV.
Associated Press
Then again, I hope my anecdote shows there are degrees of plagiarism, only some of which (such as the recent case of science writer Jonah Lehrer) deserve to be treated as professional capital offenses. Which brings me to the case of Fareed Zakaria, the star pundit who writes columns for Time and the Washington Post, hosts an eponymous show on CNN, and has written a couple of bestselling books.
Last week Mr. Zakaria apologized “unreservedly” to New Yorker writer Jill Lepore after a blogger noticed that a paragraph in his Time column was all-but identical to something Ms. Lepore had written. Mr. Zakaria has now been given a month’s suspension by his employers pending further review of his work.
We’ll see if there are other shoes to drop. Among the more mystifying aspects of this story is that plagiarism in the age of Google is an offense hiding in plain sight, especially when the kind of people who read Mr. Zakaria’s columns are the same kind of people who read the New Yorker. Why couldn’t he have added the words, “As the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore wrote . . .”? What could he possibly have been thinking?
My guess is he wasn’t thinking. That’s never a good thing, but it’s something that might happen to an overcommitted journalist so constantly in the public eye that he forgets he’s there. The proper response is the full apology he has already made, and maybe a reconsideration of whether the current dimensions of Fareed Zakaria Inc. are sustainable. Otherwise, end of story.
But that’s not how Mr. Zakaria is being treated. To some of his critics, nothing less than the Prague Defenestration will do.
Here, for instance, is Jim Sleeper in the Huffington Post—a publication that earns much of its keep piggybacking on the work of others. “Zakaria is a trustee of Yale,” notes Mr. Sleeper. “If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.”
Mr. Sleeper, a one-time tabloid columnist, goes on to impugn Mr. Zakaria for various offenses, such as dissing people Mr. Sleeper obviously likes and commanding speaking fees Mr. Sleeper seems to think are too high. If Mr. Sleeper has ever been offered $75,000 to deliver deep thoughts to a corporate board and turned the money down, it would be interesting to see the evidence. Otherwise, his is the most vulgar voice of envy.
Also gloating are the people who detest Mr. Zakaria for his views. In a recent column in Reason magazine, Ira Stoll—who often insinuates that this editorial page gets all its good ideas from him—more or less gives Mr. Zakaria a plagiarism pass, then lights into him for holding incorrect views on tax rates and the Middle East. Who knew that disagreeing with Ira Stoll was one of the world’s greatest journalistic offenses?
I’m an occasional guest on Mr. Zakaria’s show, for which I get no pay and not much glory. Mr. Zakaria and I have an amicable relationship but have never socialized. And my political views are considerably to the right of his, to say the least.
But I will give Mr. Zakaria this: He anchors one of the few shows that treats foreign policy seriously, that aims for an honest balance of views, and that doesn’t treat its panelists as props for an egomaniacal host. He’s also one of the few prominent liberals I know who’s capable of treating an opposing point of view as something other than a slur on human decency.
In my book, that makes him a good man who’s made a mistake. No similar compliment can be paid to the schadenfreude brigades now calling for his head.
Mr. Stephens writes Global View, the Journal’s foreign-affairs column.
Secretary-General of the opposition Reform Party, Singapore
National Conversation? LOL, as the youngsters would say. It is just propaganda. The outcomes are pre-decided, the PAP model is rigidly entrenched, it has no parliamentary mandate, it is an exercise in deflecting us away from building a functioning democracy. How much tax payer money will be spent on this PAP propaganda machine? It’s not even an election campaign period so doesn’t come out of their own party coffers.
Personally for me the National Conversation is a continuation of the National Silence that I am so used to. Well, until Jim Sleeper of Yale started to make a bit of noise that is. No sooner had he posted an article detailing how I was excluded from National University forums, the National televised debates for GE 2011, National Media and so on than an invite arrived to appear at a forum from the earnestly co-opted NUSSPA. Thanks Jim! I am sure Jim causing embarrassment from Yale is also behind the sudden magnanimous decision by the PAP to accept Soon Juan’s offer of a $30,000 payment of his fine. Or the PAP have finally realised that they risk not only embarrassment but the creation of another National Martyr under virtual house arrest in the manner of Aung San Suu Kyi, if Soon Juan is not able to join us in a proposed visit to Yale later this year.
So we all know it is just a Wayang, a continuation of the National chorus for some , the silence for others. In any case National Conversation is a nice phrase borrowed from the UK, referring to the consultation process on devolution of Scotland and Independence. That resulted in a white paper and a proposed referendum but also complaints from the Opposition parties that it was all Propaganda.
Meanwhile I very much doubt that our Nation’s State controlled Media’s level of English is sufficient to conduct a conversation in English.
Recently, for the first time in years, a reporter spoke to me and then surprise, surprise, a few words of what I said actually went into print. ( As opposed to say all the reporters who attended our IMF case Press Conference but then filed nothing – A lawyer friend of mine said he had been speaking to a Business Times journalist who seemed to know nothing about the IMF case. “Was he just pretending ignorance?”, he wondered. Yes, he was. Business Times were in attendance at the Press Conference and I have photos to prove it. The non reporting is not from a lack of information but censorship)
But to get back to the point and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, what a pity that the reporter’s English and the editing team of Today’s standard of English wasn’t up to even reporting those couple of phrases that found their way from me into print.
However, Reform Party’s (RP) Secretary-General Kenneth Jeyaretnam said the RP is “not taking part in a state-managed exercise” as he demanded for “freedom of expression”.
Ms Yng defined irony by reporting my words in Today as , “State Managed Exercise” ( sic). What I actually said was, we would not be taking part in a STAGE managed exercise. I also used the phrase, stage-managed exercise to refer to a question tabled in our parliament, in my open letter to Christine LaGarde.
“I think the faculty want me out,” Yale President Richard Levin told an emeritus professor glumly last spring after a faculty vote of “no confidence” in his and his trustees’ move to establish a new liberal-arts college, bearing Yale’s name, in collaboration with the authoritarian, corporate city-state of Singapore.
Levin’s announcement last week that he’ll resign effective in June — and Fareed Zakaria’s resignation as a Yale trustee only two weeks earlier — were indeed driven partly by growing faculty resistance to the “world is flat” corporate expansion of American universities that both men championed. But what now, and what kind of leadership should succeed them?
Not so subtly, the liberal arts at Yale are being reinvented “from the ground up,” as one Yale publication put it — instrumentalized, I fear, not only to benefit Asia’s future capitalist leaders but also in a “parallel university” that has been emerging at Yale itself outside of the faculty’s deliberation and control.
On Levin’s watch, that parallel university bestowed an honorary doctorate upon President George W. Bush an honorary doctorate at the 2001 Yale commencement, where Bush told “the C students among you” graduates that this proves that “you can be president.” Levin’s parallel university installed Stanley McChrystal as a professor only a few months after Barack Obama fired him. It has hired Charles Hill, Ryan Crocker, John Negroponte, Tony Blair, and, most recently, David Brooks as instructors for undergraduates who thirst for celebrity, authority, and connections from eminences fighting old wars in Yale’s classrooms.
The “parallel university” does this through its Grand Strategy, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and other programs for Yale undergraduates thirsting for celebrity, career connections, and the “worldly” wisdom of people still fighting old wars.
Yet Levin’s and Zakaria’s new resignations are no occasion for gloating. “If Rick [Levin] leaves, you’ll appreciate how much he was protecting the liberal arts from immense pressures to undermine them and how many other good things depended on him,” one of his defenders told me months before.
She may be right. Levin managed Yale well fiscally and physically. He strengthened its bonds to its workforce and to New Haven, and I’ve credited him with these achievements here before.
He even got the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing bashers of the liberal academy — Robert Whitewater Bartley, John Fund, Bret Stephens — off Yale’s back by touting the Grand Strategy and other national-security oriented programs and Yale’s short lived, neo-con propaganda factory the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, which the university wisely abolished in 2010.
But while Levin and his trustees have been deft managers of their storm-tossed craft, they’ve been poor visionaries and navigators for liberal education, whose course will require different risks and courage.
Unless faculty and students can affirm the liberal arts in better ways, Yale may be even more mindlessly corporate after Levin than it has been under him. A similar challenge faces other universities, I argue in an essay, “With Friends Like These, Who Will Defend Liberal Education?”, that Dissent magazine will post and publish on October 1 in its special issue on higher education.
Those of us who’ve criticized Yale’s Singapore venture know that many wonderful young Singaporeans want a fuller liberal education, but we also see the advance of a slick model of self-censorship in an authoritarian corporate milieu in that country and, increasingly, in public life in the U.S. While self-censorship in Singapore is ubiquitous and routine owing to fear of the state, here it’s embraced almost enthusiastically by some undergraduates who think it will bring them closer to power and commercial advantage.
This old misunderstanding of where power really comes from and how it flows has carried Yale undergraduates from secret, Skull & Bones bonding of yore into countless foreign-policy domestic blunders. Yet some students embrace that kind of self-censorship with refreshed ignorance every year because they want “access” without thinking about what they’re gaining “access” to or recognizing that they’re only cultivating profiles in timidity.
Students need “access” to what the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “the great conversation” of the humanities across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit. They need to learn how to recognize and take responsibility for meeting those challenges, sometimes even by defying established power instead of saluting or fronting for it.
Levin himself glimpsed this in 2010, when he wrote that “… India has a powerful advantage over China” because “it affords faculty members the freedom to pursue their intellectual interests wherever they may lead and allows students and faculty alike to express, and thus test, their most heretical and unconventional theories — freedoms that are an indispensable feature of any great university.”
Singapore’s Han Chinese ruling elite doesn’t favor that. Is Yale’s ruling elite much better? Faculty and students should insist that Levin’s replacement establish new, formal mechanisms that reflect the centrality of the faculty in the life and essence of the university: no more Iron law of oligarchy, in which presidents and other administrators think they’re entitled to rule.
And every university president should be asked publicly to restore balance between the institution’s academic mission and its economic goals. Every president should try to repair the damage being done to universities’ ethos by corporatization.
Conservatives as well as liberals are awakening to dangers in the neo-liberalization of liberal education. What a bitter irony if Yale, which the philosopher George Santayana called the “Mother of Colleges” because it has nourished so many of them and American civil society, has fallen asleep.
15.
The Washington Spectator is a small, online cousin of The Nation. Hamilton Fish, president of the WS’ “Public Concern Foundation,” has long been associated with The Nation Institute and with the magazine.
Jim Sleeper, a journalist and author, is a lecturer in political science at Yale. Since last spring, Sleeper has written more than a dozen columns for the Huffington Post about Yale’s venture to found a new liberal arts undergraduate college in collaboration with the tightly controlled city-state of Singapore. The columns were posted widely on other sites, from openDemocracy in the U.K. to a dissident website in Singapore.
Here, in a talk to members of the Yale student activist organization The Y Syndicate on Sept. 20 at Yale’s Memorial to the War Dead, Sleeper examines the corporatism, self-censorship, and erosion of dissent and protest at the core of the archetypal liberal arts institution. (Our thanks to the Yale Herald, which posted a transcript of the talk.)
Let me begin this little talk with a caveat: Not all protest or free expression advances freedom. First Amendment absolutists who push every envelope of conventional wisdom—whether in street demonstrations, in nasty Super-PAC ads, or just to play political “gotcha” or make quick bucks—tend to forget that the people and institutions they’re pushing against aren’t wholly wrong or bad and are often more vulnerable than even the critics want them to be.
For example, those of us who’ve protested Yale’s sad slide into its dubious adventure in Singapore and into its own business-corporatization here at home are actually trying to affirm, strengthen, and even rescue something that’s vulnerable in this university and that we must be careful not to trash. Little is gained and much lost by shooting off one’s mouth and trying simply to shock the complacent into action.
But that’s not actually the argument I want to emphasize here today. I want to say that discretion and caution at Yale have been carried too far, not only among administrators and faculty but even among students, who should be learning the arts and disciplines of truth-telling as well as power-wielding. In some other parts of the college, I’ve been noticing a galloping culture of self-censorship that requires some comment.
In Singapore and in some American business corporations, self-censorship is prompted by fear of established power. That kind of self-censorship assumes many subtle modulations and guises in daily life. Even here at Yale, as I saw last spring when I attended a panel discussion called “Singapore Uncensored,” this self-censorship of fear, evident among the Singaporeans on the panel, was reinforced by some in the audience who engaged in what I’d call a self-censorship of seduction. It is prompted not by the fear of state or of corporate power but by the allure of power: Some students silence themselves almost enthusiastically, hoping to get closer to insider networking and to high status and power itself by proving they can be relied on never to mention that an emperor has no clothes.
This kind of self-restraint is a terrible delusion. It hastens the decay of trust and freedom both inside and outside the halls of power, and it has a long and quite embarrassing record at Yale, stretching back to Yalies emerging from secret societies in the 1940s and ‘50s to perpetrate blunder after ignorant blunder in American foreign policy, from installing the Shah of Iran and stage-managing the Bay of Pigs fiasco to promoting the Vietnam War and its pathetic successors.
There’s a legitimate difference between being discreet and being silenced—between exercising a sound judgment not to do or say something and accepting blindly that something is simply “not done.” Agreeing to take certain things off the table can help a discussion and freedom of thought at times. But Yale today is doing little better than its old secret societies at teaching students when and how to draw such distinctions on behalf of a real republic, not a corporate state.
I want to tell you about some Yalies who broke courageously and constructively with both the self-censorship of fear and the self-censorship of seduction. I witnessed exactly that right here at this war memorial when I was 19, almost 45 years ago, and it has never left my mind.
One cold, windy, wintry morning in 1968 I was plodding across this plaza on my way to a class when I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three students and the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the three was speaking almost inaudibly because of the gusting wind and also because he was trying to find his voice against fear. “The government claims we’re criminals,” he was saying, as I leaned in to listen. “But we say that it is the government that is criminal in waging this war.” He and the other two were about to hand Coffin their draft cards to refuse conscription into the Vietnam War upon their graduation three months later.
Coffin, speaking in the idiom of an American civil religion that too few liberals these days understand, was there to bless this demonstration of a civic courage that too few national-security conservatives understand. Near us in the Woolsey Hall rotunda were all those names of young Yale graduates, graven in icy marble, under the admonition, “Courage Disdains Fame and Wins It.” The seniors before us were challenging us to join them in disdaining fame, too, but without hope of a memorial’s posthumous regard.
“Believe me,” said Coffin, himself a veteran of the CIA in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, “I know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin’ at a millstone.” It was a burst of Calvinist humor, a jaunty defiance of Established Power in the name of a higher one, and some of us grasped at that ray of hope, because we were scared. For all we knew, these guys were about to be arrested on the spot. Certainly if they refused induction three months later, they’d commit a felony punishable by five years in prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example because we were all carrying draft cards just like theirs in our wallets.
Yet something in these seniors’ bearing made them seem as patriotically American as Rosa Parks had been when she’d refused, only twelve years before, to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery. In both cases, the protesters broke the law openly and non-violently to evoke and elevate something noble in the very concept of law and in the whole society. Parks didn’t use freedom of speech to call the bus driver a racist mo-fo; and while the seniors did say that the government was criminal—and they would be proven right about that—by taking their stand with readiness to accept the penalty, they were also crediting the rest of us, whether we were bystanders or war supporters, with some integrity by speaking to us with clear dignity even as they exposed our shortcomings. By breaking the law in the way I’ve described, they were upholding law.
They were resisting the government in the name of a republic that stands for more than patriotic salutes to nationalist “blood and soil,” more than chants of “Yoo Ess Ay!”, and more even than global free-markets whose riptides are dissolving the republican virtues and sovereignty those Yale seniors were trying to redeem. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at such demonstrations of “constitutional patriotism,” not flag-lapel patriotism.
Nathan Hale affirmed a nascent constitutional patriotism against the established but corrupted government and military of his time, and true Tea Partiers dumped a multi-national corporation’s property into Boston Harbor to protest its collusion with a corrupt government. As I watched the seniors speaking in 1968, that old civil society of the American republic seemed at least briefly to be rising from a long slumber and walking and talking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. And as Coffin intoned Dylan Thomas’ admonition, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” my silent, wild confusion gave way to something like awe.
I tell you this not just because it happened right here where we’re sitting, and not because anyone’s going to criminalize what we say here. I tell it because the Yale administration — which believes and claims that it’s acting on behalf of liberal education as surely as the architects of the Vietnam War believed and claimed that they were acting for freedom and democracy — has signed a pact with, and sold its name to, a tightly controlled corporate city-state that does criminalize and otherwise intimidate people who would speak as I’m doing here.
I’m also trying to make a point about the nature of protest. Good protest requires giving clear reasons for what you are doing, even if others aren’t listening, and it requires making a binding commitment to uphold what you are affirming, not just sounding off against what you are opposing. I and other critics of the Singapore venture aren’t wishing it ill or trying to provoke an upheaval or scandal; we anticipate that the project will proceed all too smoothly, because the subtle, ubiquitous and cunning self-censorship of fear that I witnessed at the “Singapore Uncensored” panel and described in the Huffington Post is meshing all too smoothly these days with the self-censorship of seduction I’ve seen growing at Yale.
The university is transforming the college from the crucible of civic-republican leadership that I saw in 1968 into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new global elite that doesn’t answer to any republican polity or moral code.
I’m not idealizing the past. Although Howard Dean was a freshman here in 1968 and John Kerry had graduated two years before, George W. Bush and his gang lived near me in Davenport—he was president of my roommate’s fraternity, DKE—and not everyone considered the Vietnam War a duplicitous folly. What I’m trying to show is that protest for protest’s sake accomplishes little if the protesters aren’t as serious about making clear what they’re affirming as they are about making clear what they’re exposing and opposing.
What the civil-rights movement learned from Gandhi, and what every generation must re-learn to keep a republic or a liberal-arts college, is that these institutions are fragile because they have to rely on citizens’ or students’ taking to heart and acting on certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the institutions nor markets themselves can do all that much nourish or protect and that, indeed, their wealth and power may actually weaken.
Only a civic love that’s disciplined and canny enough to renew an institution’s or republic’s higher purposes, by challenging its misjudgments without destroying it, can accomplish anything lasting. Otherwise, as we see elsewhere, twitter revolutions and armed upheavals can intensify chaos.
Only an activism that balances group organizing with the irreducibly personal conscience and courage that enabled Rosa Parks and the Yale seniors to risk their standing and security in order to “arrest” others morally can awaken more people to the subtle dangers to freedom.
In other words, a protest strategy has to draw on some wellsprings of civic faith, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and even secular activists like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik in Eastern Europe certainly did.
When self-censorship is generated by fear of a state or a corporate employer, that fear leaves no fingerprints, as Slate political editor William Dobson puts it in his new book The Dictator’s Learning Curve. In university administrations and faculties, too, there are no smoking memos that order people not to say this or that. Yet Yale’s tenurati and emeriti conduct too much of their communication only with arched eyebrows and significant silences, not with the candor and robust give and take that are the oxygen of self-government.
What troubles me even more is the culture of enthusiastic self-censorship that’s been rising among some students, driven not by fear of the state or the Yale Corporation but by the allure of becoming a powerful “inside player” after proving that one can be relied on to keep one’s mouth shut. That self-censorship is destroying the republic far more than riotous street demonstrations are. It is already rendering our political and financial systems illegitimate and unsustainable. The failures of pathological, multi-problem elites in any sector you can name are impossible to gloss over.
Yet that’s precisely what too many of you are being trained to do, and it’s why we read so many books and articles in which Yale is despised. Like fear of power, seduction by power slowly asphyxiates candor and passion in public life and generates cynicism, prurience, and hazing instead.
I’ve already mentioned the “Singapore Uncensored” panel, which no campus publication found the courage to report on honestly. You can read my report in the Huffington Post. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that when Grand Strategy students visited West Point to discuss a book about Iraq with cadets, the Yalies “decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have ‘views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing’” according to Grand Strategy’s associate director, who treated this as something to brag about. Unlike the Yalies, the cadets, who’d soon put their lives on the line to defend free speech, had no fear of recording the session.
And earlier this year, when posts in The Atlantic and Foreign Policy asked why General Stanley McChrystal is teaching an off-the-record course in “leadership” in the Jackson Institute, some of his students leaped into the public arena with a statement insisting robustly that he had never asked them to sign any pledge not to disclose what’s discussed in the class. But, because they refused to talk with anyone about what is said or done in the class, they only wound up proving that their seminar’s supposedly broad, open discussion of “leadership” could not, in fact, be shared even with professors teaching other courses on similar matters who invited McChrystal himself to share his insights, only to be rebuffed.
This sad misunderstanding of scholarly and democratic deliberation bears the same relation to robust freedom of speech as military music bears to music. The students’ claim that freedom is fostered this way unwittingly mimicked the new Yale-National University of Singapore college’s policy of quarantining freedom to the classroom, as if it could flourish that way. Such facile misunderstandings compromised McChrystal’s own leadership on several occasions in Afghanistan before Yale hired him to teach about leadership behind closed doors.
“The sinister fact about censorship…is that it is largely voluntary,” George Orwell wrote in 1944, as his manuscript of Animal Farm was receiving rejection after rejection by frightened British publishers. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…. Because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. It is not exactly forbidden to say this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness….”
A true liberal education would show students how to put words on things in ways that not only expose public corruption but enlarge personal and public hope. Only by doing both can leaders lead in ways that others can trust. What I learned that wintry morning at Yale is that to kindle such trust and the courage it requires, you have to be willing to “think without banisters” at times, as Hannah Arendt put it—she meant, without a predetermined ideology—and to deepen your own and others’ love of a society or an institution by standing intelligently and affirmatively against what’s wrong in it by summoning the better angels of its nature.
We’ve been seduced: by a 6.8 percent acceptance rate, by the extracurricular bazaar and by the career fair. Most of all, we’ve been seduced by Tony Blair and Stanley McChrystal. We’ve been convinced, whether we ever think of ourselves in these terms or not, that we are, to use a phrase once employed to describe my high school, the “joyful elite;” that we are engaged, that we are passionate and that we are on our way to careers of real worth and standing.
We’ve been seduced — and we’ve been silenced.
Yesterday afternoon, Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in the Political Science Department, spoke to a seminar-sized group of students about what he terms “the corporatization of Yale.”
In Sleeper’s account, the University, in pursuing legitimate ends such as global engagement and fundraising, has been caught in a tide overwhelming all academia. Yale has been carried away from the values that undergird its educational mission, towards a model of opaque authority that treats students as customers.
While Sleeper’s critique focuses on the Yale administration, he contends that corporatization has also crept into the student body. Students ingratiate themselves to authority figures and take care not to jeopardize their eventual senatorial prospects. But the confusion about the purpose of the University runs deeper: Too often, we at Yale forget that we came here because we are intellectual omnivores.
We prioritize the extracurricular over the curricular. We are overwhelmed as freshmen by the number of organizations in Payne Whitney — most genuinely interesting, most of genuine value. Nothing wrong with that: Yale really is one of the few places on Earth where so many smart, motivated people are together in one place.
Yet somewhere between being swept away by the energy of our peers and the feeling of obligation to do great things with our lives, we develop unctuous habits of mind and action. We seek to distinguish ourselves within a narrow conception of professional success, prizing high grades over challenging courses, default subjects of study over those that might truly interest us and e-board meetings over office hours. These habits draw us away from the very reason Yale attracts us in the first place: academic excellence.
In short, we come to feel that what sets us apart from the rest of the world — those who didn’t get in — isn’t our intellectual prowess but what we surely will accomplish as alumni. Intrinsic motivation is crowded out by the extrinsic. Who, after all, remembers what Tony Blair studied in his Oxford days?
Hopefully, some among us will do great things in and for the world. But for many, the price of that opportunity is too dear: How many of us would say that, above all else, we are seeking out the kind of first-rate education Yale can still offer?
The Yale administration abets this. It hires with pride world leaders who bring titles with enough sheen to surpass the blemishes of their blunders on the world stage, including such gems as the Iraq War. It gestures towards educational principle by instituting distributional requirements and then abandons all pretense of rigor by offering An Issues Approach to Biology and Planets and Stars.
Even Provost Peter Salovey’s signature class, Great Big Ideas, is based on the premise that intellectual exploration is something students can’t be bothered to do outside a class.
Perhaps worst of all, the Admissions Office fails to emphasize — the way, say, the University of Chicago or Swarthmore does — that one comes to Yale to learn.
It’s easy to treat education solely as a path to gainful employment, especially when that’s so hard to find. But Yale can provide haven from those practical pressures. These are the only four years in our lives when we can devote ourselves to thinking.
As the University selects its 23rd president, we students must do everything in our power to ensure that the first priority of those who lead our institution is to rejuvenate its intellectual climate. Of course, President Levin, over the last two decades, has been invaluable in ensuring that the facilities and faculty are of the highest caliber. But those efforts will have been wasted on Yale College if we take no joy in the life of the mind. Now, from the bottom of this University, we must reclaim our highest intellectual ideals and demand that those at the top do the same.
Gabriel Levine is a junior in Trumbull College. Contact him at gabriel.levine@yale.edu.
I endorse Gabriel Levine’s critique of the college’s policies and priorities and his assessment of the broader societal pressures on students.
A liberal education is both a luxury and a wound. It’s a luxury these days because you do need some freedom from economic and political constraints, as well as from escapist distractions, to really engage a liberal education’s lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit. But it’s a wound because, if you really do grasp those challenges, you’re not likely to become an unctuous conformist.
Here’s the text of the talk yesterday at Beinecke Plaza that Levine describes:
BtL_2012 (Comment posted to Gabriel Levine’s column)
READER’S COMMENT:
Dear Levine,
You seem to have forgotten that educating the whole person requires looking beyond the classroom. Yale does that. Narrower institutions, such as UChicago or Swarthmore, provide focus on academic learning but at the expense of developing every other sort of intelligence, from EQ to the values taught in sports and the organizational skills born of extracurriculars. I suggest taking a few moments away from the books to immerse yourself in one of the vast array of other opportunities that Yale offers. As for the practitioners that Yale brings in, let me say this: the experience they bring is dearly bought. It facilitates a type of learning inaccessible to those who have spent their lives in academia. In the world of politics, business, or international relations, theory often does not survive contact with reality. A whole different set of skills and insights are necessary to be effective in those spheres, and that’s what practitioners teach. I believe that Yale exists to educate its students to how change the world positively. Some will do that by writing books or conducting research. Others will do that by shaping policy. Yale does that positive mission a disservice if it does not offer the resources to teach both sets of skills.
Also, these individuals do little to detract from the academic side of Yale. For instance, the International Security Studies (ISS) program funds numerous predoctoral and postdoctoral programs. (FYI, Jim Sleeper has attacked ISS programs and affiliates repeatedly.) While Yalies were unwilling to give up their newspapers in the dining halls during the budget cuts a few years back, the administration cut graduate student slots instead. ISS created a back door to bring in graduate students who carried out research, helped teach, attended and offered lectures–in short, who acted as the lifeblood of an academic institution. Let’s face it: some of the “corporate interests” that Sleeper decries cover his paycheck. The size of Yale’s endowment is largely due to alumni who “sold out.” That isn’t to say that graduates should “sell out,” but rather to serve as a reminder that, frankly, the University needs a mix of both, and that we ought not categorically castigate a full and legitimate segment of Yale’s population. Please do not belittle the vast array of interests Yalies pursue. It is that array, extending beyond the classroom, that makes Yale such a vibrant place. Historically, Yale was no different. If you think that we’ve only recently been pumping out financiers and lawyers, I’d check your history books again. Finally, every college has a niche–that’s why you get to choose where you go. UChicago and Swarthmore do academics. Yale teaches a full person. That’s Yale’s niche. Maybe it doesn’t do it perfectly. Maybe some people balk when presented with the wide array of choices Yale provides. I’m not saying that Yale is a good fit for everyone. But for most of us it is. btl’12
I’m in agreement here. I think the college system is a big source of Yale College’s virtue. That’s why I hate to see it being weakened in recent years.
For a full explanation of Btl 2012’s observation that people who’ve “sold out” often contribute generously to Yale, I commend an essay about Yale, “Quarrels With Providence,” by Lewis Lapham, that ran in the Yale Alumni Magazine a few months before 9/11. At one point, Lapham recounts,
“I probably talked to as many as 200 people about events at the College in the last quarter of Henry Luce’s century, and if the conversation went the distance of a second drink, I invariably could count on the prophet seated across the table at Mory’s or standing at the bar of the Yale Club to open a vein of idealism…. [Having been ‘wounded’ by liberal education at Yale], ]they expected more of themselves than a fortune in vulcanized rubber or a row of condominiums on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The object of a Yale education they remembered as a joining of the proofs of success to those of conscience, the perfect synthesis of the College dialectic never more perfectly expressed than by James C. Thompson, a member of the Class of 1953 who subsequently became both a Chinese scholar and an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency—’Do good, walk humbly with thy God; but become powerful, famous, and, if possible, affluent.'”
As one of the four professors contacted for “Students Divided over Yale-NUS,” I’d like to make clear what was wrong with the YCC survey’s putting Yale-NUS parenthetically in a question on international presence.
There are many kinds of international presence. It may be great for universities to set up exchanges, collaborative research, even medical and business schools, law clinics and arts programs abroad. For Yale, contracting to set up a whole new liberal-arts college for undergraduates in collaboration with a tightly controlled corporate city-state is not great for Yale in New Haven, especially because the administration won’t disclose the terms of the contract. I’ve written a lot about this since last spring, most recently in a Dissent magazine essay on “global network universities” that I’ll forward to anyone writing to james.sleeper@yale.edu>.
Not all forms of international presence are equal — or equally justified — and students should understand the difference.
Jim Sleeper
The writer is a lecturer in Political Science at Yale.
While We’ve Been Following the Election, Singapore Has Been Romneyizing Yale
Jim Sleeper
Lecturer in Political Science, Yale
Few people combine the moral intensity of prophecy with the strategic savvy of public leadership, but Yale Prof. Christopher Miller has been doing it since May of 2011, when The Chronicle of Higher Education published his dignified, pointed rebuke to his university’s trustees and its president, Richard Levin, for betraying the mission of liberal education.
Miller was the first to criticize Yale outside of the university itself for collaborating with the tightly-controlled, corporate city-state of Singapore to establish a brand-new (and I do mean “brand”) undergraduate college in the National University of Singapore that will bear Yale’s name, Yale-NUS, even though it won’t grant bona-fide Yale degrees.
And now, just before our fateful presidential election, The Chronicle has published an update by Miller depicting the “Frankenyale” that’s emerging from that betrayal more rapidly than anyone but a few other inspired and intrepid faculty had prophesied.
Miller’s first column noted that Human Rights Watch in 2010 called Singapore “the textbook example of a politically repressive state. Individuals who want to criticize or challenge the ruling party’s hold on power can expect to face a life of harassment, lawsuits, and even prison.” For several months, he and others chronicled this perverse ethos’ sickening backwash in academic life in New Haven.
These warnings have had little effect on Yale’s trustees, three of whom worked for a decade as investment advisers to Singapore’s government before spearheading Yale’s new college there. “Singapore is changing,” they and professors they’ve recruited to the project now insist, citing visits to the country that acquainted them with realities “on the ground.”
If trustees spent more time “on the ground” in New Haven, they’d notice that Yale and the U.S. have been changing, too: They’ve been Singaporizing themselves in ways surprising and distressing enough to prompt other Ivies to promise they’ll never commit blunders like Yale’s. (Actually, they and other universities are surfing other riptides of global capital, with consequences I characterized briefly in a Dissent magazine essay sketching New York University’s claim to be a “Global Network University.”)
Now, after six months of instructive, often saddening struggle against the political and academic consequences of Yale’s transformation abroad and at home, Miller is writing to correct any misperception that a Yale faculty resolution of last April that crirticized the Singapore arrangement, followed by Levin’s announcement of his resignation this June, represented a lasting victory over the business corporatization of liberal education that drove the Singapore venture.
The project grind ons, drawing much of Yale into its premises and policies, which are metastasizing into what Miller calls “Frankenyale,”a “Brave New University: full of ‘best practices,’ ‘shared services,’ [business-corporate] vice presidents, and deanlets, and with a name…. franchised to Singapore. A burgeoning administration and an aggressive Board of Trustees (some with financial interests in Singapore) had far outrun the faculty and changed Yale’s profile at home and abroad.”
The Yale faculty is waking up, he says, to the fact that many of its own decisions are made by committees of professors appointed by the administration, not elected by the faculty itself. Even the agendas of monthly Yale College Faculty meetings have been determined by administration-appointed committees and deans. Until this month, there was virtually no way for a few tenured professors to get an item onto the agenda of a meeting unless the item was approved by such a committee. (The April resolution criticizing the Singapore project came to a vote only because proponents managed to get an unusual majority of professors at the March meeting to force it onto the agenda for the next one.)
Absent substantive faculty deliberation, Yale has used its Singapore venture to reconfigure liberal education “from the ground up,” as one university release put it. Yale-NUS is part of a tail that’s wagging the dog of Yale College’s transformation from the crucible of civic-republican leadership that it was at its best into a cross between Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2016 the university expects that 59% of Yale undergraduates will major in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine — worthy and urgent pursuits, but not if they come with a sleek, galloping culture of self-censorship, centralized control, commercialization, and ignorance of the humanities’ lasting challenges to politics and the spirit.
I’ve witnessed and described in several columns here the exfoliation of just such a culture at Yale, one increasingly like Singapore’s, a textbook demonstration that what’s good for business is sometimes bad for liberal education and liberal democracy, whose work isn’t marketable.
Opposition to this model reflects not some clash of ivory tower moralism with “Asian values” and other civilizational differences, as the Singapore project’s defenders insist. We’re witnessing not a clash but a seductive, dangerous convergence of Asian capitalist elites’ marketing and governing principles with those propounded by Mitt Romney other American business and political elites.
Not surprisingly this model is also embraced by students looking for inside fast tracks to “prosperity” and to willed, well-policed ignorance of the real economic, cultural, and planetary costs to others and even to their own jet-setting selves. Opposition comes mainly from Americans and Singaporeans who still uphold civic-republican virtues and beliefs.
Some fine young Singaporeans and opposition political leaders who share those public virtues and beliefs had hope that Yale’s presence might give liberal democracy a little more wiggle room. Miller’s “Frankenyale” column suggests that that’s unlikely. The prospect of change never justified Yale’s risking its own “American values,” which also merit respect and require nurture and defense these days, at home as well as abroad. So does the distinctive college culture that has made places like Yale as valuable to democracy as they are vulnerable to global riptides.
Liberal arts colleges shouldn’t rush to ride those riptides, but rationalizations for doing so have abounded in the Yale administration’s slippery charm offensives, double-talk, and continuing secrecy about Singapore. The university still hasn’t disclosed the terms of its contract and other arrangements with the National University of Singapore and, through it, the ruling national People’s Action Party.
And the project is consuming so much time and resources — and generating so much opportunism among some faculty and indignation among others — that many besides Miller insist that there have to be better ways to engage cultural differences across national borders. (I’d commend Barack Obama’s ways over Mitt Romney’s).
There must be better ways also to renew liberal education’s curricular, pedagogical, and global prospects and to strengthen free inquiry and expression against commercialization and political distortion. Consider the implications:
Academic Freedom: In 2009, as Singapore’s governing and business elites were romancing their counterparts at Yale, the Association of American University Professors and the Canadian Association of University Teachers issued a report – “On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses” – warning that:
as the U.S. and Canadian presence in higher education grows in countries marked by authoritarian rule, basic principles of academic freedom, collegial governance, and nondiscrimination are less likely to be observed. 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.
Ample justifications for this warning are sketched in “Dangerous Liaisons,” a survey of some recent consequences of American universities’ collaborations with authoritarian regimes written in a Yale student magazine, The Politic, by Shaunzhiming Tan, a Malaysian well-acquainted with Singapore who earned a master’s degree in international relations at Yale in 2012.
And the AAUP statement references a UNESCO resolution on academic freedom that can’t be reconciled with Singapore’s policy. Here’s UNESCO’s statement, and, following it, in stark contrast, Singapore’s protocols:
The publication and dissemination of the research results obtained by higher-education teaching personnel should be encouraged and facilitated with a view to assisting them to acquire the reputation which they merit, as well as with a view to promoting the advancement of science, technology, education and culture generally. To this end, higher-education teaching personnel should be free to publish the results of research and scholarship in books, journals and databases of their own choice and under their own names, provided they are the authors or co-authors of the above scholarly works. The intellectual property of higher-education teaching personnel should benefit from appropriate legal protection, and in particular the protection afforded by national and international copyright law.
In contrast, here’s what Yale’s host, the National University of Singapore, states in “Policies Relating to University Intellectual Property”:
The University shall be the sole arbiter as to whether any Intellectual Property is discovered, created or developed in the course of University Research” (p. 9 of 21); The University Member shall be deemed to have granted to the University an irrevocable, unconditional, perpetual, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty free license to use, print, publish, reproduce, copy and publicly distribute the University Member’s Authored Work, in whatever form….” and “The University may at any time require an assignment of the University Member’s copyright over an Authored Work for the purposes of commercialising the Authored Work…
Student Freedom: Even the students’ freedoms of expression are chilled, when not asphyxiated, by Singapore’s Public Order Act, which reads as if it had been written by George Orwell and Franz Kafka. I have covered this controversy, and Yale’s prevarications about it, here before.
As one Yale faculty member characterizes the situation, “Students can hold events on campus, but no one else can witness them, let alone come ‘from outside’ to address them.”
Yale faculty who’ve been recruited to set up and run the new college have been assuring their skeptical colleagues back in New Haven that they’ve reached firm “understandings” with Singapore protecting student freedom, academic freedom, and the autonomy of the college. But they keep declining to disclose the terms fully enough to assure anyone familiar with authoritarian regimes’ Orwellian double-speak and opportunistic promises.
In a nation of only 5.3 million people living on fewer square kilometers than New York City, officials and functionaries of a government and ruling party that have run the country uninterruptedly since 1965 (and have fired several national-university faculty members for reasons arbitrary and obscure) hold very tight control of the university (and of major newspapers and television stations). The student newspaper and dissident blogsites have been much more creditable, but as Singapore is “changing” a little, Yale and the U.S. are Singaporizing a little, too, in ways that Miller and I and others have described.
Whose University? For example, the Yale administration has created a parallel university right in New Haven whose curricula and pedagogy lie outside of most faculty deliberation and assessment in the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and national-security programs funded by conservative donors.
The Jackson Institute advertised its “Gateway to Global Affairs” course last fall with a statement by director James Levinsohn — whose professorship is named for and funded by one of the Yale trustees long active in Singapore as an investment adviser – that in a module of the course, a retired British general and the retired American general Stanley “McChrystal are going to do six weeks on essentially what a Yale College undergrad should know about the Middle East or Iraq. I think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for our students to hear about Iraq and Afghanistan from the guys that ran the war…. It ought to be pretty amazing.”
What’s amazing is the presumption that what a Yale graduate should know about the Middle East and Iraq can be taught by McChrystal, who also teaches another course, on leadership, but whose own leadership came under careful scrutiny in several dimensions until he was fired by President Obama. Discussions in that leadership course have been kept strictly closed to anyone but its students, who’ve collaborated enthusiastically in the silencing.
It’s understandable, and in some ways admirable, that students attune themselves to teachers’ expectations and promises, but a liberal education should nourish rigorous critical thinking.
Ironies in gay struggle. In his first column Miller, who is gay, noted that Singapore’s regime still criminalizes male homosexuality and wrote that “Yale has no business establishing a campus in a state where some of its own faculty members are subject to arrest because of who they are.” That the regime tolerates gay life in practice as a profit center and a showcase for “liberalism” that blunts criticisms from places like Yale has distracted some people’s attention from its sinuous but decisive repression of other minorities, political critics, scholars, and journalists. The regime could still bring criminal charges against gay people whom it wants to silence for political reasons that it wouldn’t need to disclose.
Unlike Miller, some at Yale have been fooled by this or have become active apologists for the regime. Prof. George Chauncey, an historian of gay life in New York, has become an unlikely apologist for Yale’s project. The same week that Miller’s second Chronicle column on Frankenyale appeared, Chauncey organized and introduced a lecture by Lynette Chua, a professor at the National University of Singapore whose research concentrates on the relationship between law and the gay rights movements in Southeast Asia.
Chua didn’t exonerate the regime or make the gay rights struggle look easy. “If you want to get somewhere without ending up in jail,” she said, “you have to employ non-confrontational tactics.” Still, as the Yale Daily News put it, “Despite having a human rights record that has faced significant criticism, Singapore has been developing a grassroots gay rights movement since the 1990s.”
That’s music to the ears of apologists for Yale’s Singapore venture. The same news story reported Chauncey’s hope that the lecture “will provide the Yale community with a more nuanced, fuller understanding of the gay rights movement in Singapore. He added that the lecture was not meant to address the controversy about the establishment of Yale-NUS College,… though he said he thinks the campus debate about Yale-NUS would inevitably provide a context for the event.”
Chauncey’s statement bears an oddly close resemblance to part of a panel discussion, titled “Singapore Uncensored,” that was presented last spring by other Singaporeans at Yale. It opened with a brief slide show of gay dancers in Singapore, and the subsequent discussion included comments, Skyped in from Singapore, by Yi Sheng, a gay-activist brother of one of the panel’s chief apologists for the regime, E Ching Ng.
Like Chauncey last week, the “Singapore Uncensored” panelists emphasized that they weren’t trying to address the controversy about Yale’s venture in Singapore but only to present a “more nuanced” view of actual life there than critics of Yale’s venture had done.
“You can say anything you want on campus,” Yi Sheng told the Yale audience, if only because “the government doesn’t care what most academics say,” but then he modulated that claim by telling of a gay friend whose teaching contracts were suddenly terminated with no explanation. Then Yi Sheng added that he wasn’t sure his friend’s being gay was the reason for his dismissal. It might have been something more political or more strictly academic, because other gay faculty weren’t being dismissed. In fact, there’s been “a rapid rise in acceptance” of gays in recent years, he said, because “the government has realized that the country can make a lot of money from having more gays.”
But other constraints on other freedoms haven’t been loosening. Quite the opposite, as I’ve shown in earlier columns here. On the panel, E-Ching Ng ignored her brother’s warning that academic freedom might escape surveillance and suppression “only if Yale NUS faculty are really willing to exercise their freedom and advocate for it outside of classroom.”
Here was a plea for help that no one in authority at Yale has answered. It occurred to me then that Singapore’s ruling party has figured out that if it lets some Singaporeans showcase gay struggle to liberal American audiences, they’ll decide that while Singapore is far from perfect, it’s moving in the right direction; thus reassured, Yale students and faculty can be relied on not to raise their voices about much else and to acquiesce in arrangements Yale may later regret. Perhaps Chauncey will answer Yi Sheng’s plea by also elucidating struggles against Singapore’s suppression of the rights of migrant workers and academic freedom.
What next? As more of Yale’s faculty bestirs itself to take control of its agendas and decisions and ensure more voice for lectors and others who’ve had no voting power, it may move toward revitalizing an AAUP chapter or creating a faculty senate as strong as those that have saved liberal education from the misapprehensions and misadventures of university trustees and administrators. And it should demand that Yale’s name be removed from the Singapore project, even if that triggers a costly buy-out clause in the contract whose terms the administration won’t disclose.
As Miller warns in the Chronicle, “If the promised ‘feedback loop’ between Singapore and New Haven succeeds, the two institutions in tandem will produce a new generation of conformist, dissent-averse managers and executives, particularly well-suited for the new global boardroom and tea at Davos.”
That may be precisely the Yale trustees’ goal, but liberal education should nourish and provoke something better. Yale may well have gone to Singapore because it sensed that it was failing to do better in New Haven and because its governors have embraced a neo-liberal, “World Is Flat” model, instead.
But the world isn’t flat. It has abysses that are opening suddenly in the ground below our feet and even in our hearts, right here in the United States. The controversy isn’t mainly about the sins of Singapore; it’s about the weaknesses of liberal democracy in the grip of global riptides that are dissolving republican sovereignty and virtues everywhere.
Yale was founded to show future leaders not just how to manage their way around those depths but how to plumb them and face the demons in them. If they can’t do that, they’ll only create more Frankenyales.
Israel’s last big military venture into Gaza began soon after Barack Obama’s 2008 election and before his 2009 inauguration. It’s more than ironic that this is happening again between Obama’s re-election and his coming re-installation.
But here I won’t get into conspiracy theories or into “who started it” in 1936, 1948, 1967, 1973, 2006, 2009, or now. Been there, done that, and, tragically, not enough has changed since the last time.
What I do have now that I didn’t in 2009 is a small part of the story of Israel’s militarization that sheds light on Israel’s inclinations and strategic judgments. Before telling it, let me emphasize that ever since I assessed the first Gaza war, online and on NPR, I’ve considered Hamas’ end game and how it does business inexcusable. But equally so — and arguably more stupid, because unsustainable — has been Israel’s long “holding pen” strategy against Gaza and, arguably, the West Bank.
Now that each side has again provoked the other’s darkest impulses, I can offer only a bit of background to the tactically and technologically clever but strategically and politically bone-headed conduct of Israeli politicians. It concerns a country whose similarities to Israel are a lot more striking than its obvious differences.
In 1965, when Singapore declared its independence, its first prime-minister (and, for many years, its virtual dictator) Lee Kuan Yew asked Israel to design, set up, and supervise its military machine. Israel did precisely that. How successfully? Just this month, the Bonn International Center for Conversion published a world-wide survey ranking Israel the world’s most militarized nation — and Singapore the second-most.
You can read about the Bonn Center’s ranking here. To find out how Israel and Singapore actually got together on this, you’d have to have been reading accounts like this one on “Israel’s Deep Dark Secret Love Affair” with Singapore in Haaretz, one of several Israeli newspapers that, even when partisan, are far more open about Israel itself than major U.S. news organizations are.
I knew nothing about this love affair in 2009, when, while watching office parks and eight-lane expressways gliding by my window on a Tel Aviv-to-Haifa train, I mentioned to my wife that Israel has become the Singapore of the Middle East. I had no idea then that Singapore had long been the Israel of Southeast Asia not only economically and geo-politically — as a glance at a couple of maps and statistical tables will suggest — but militarily, with all the intimacy of that “Deep, Dark, Secret Love Affair” that’s now nearly 50 years old.
The similarities of these two little engines that could (and did) become models of state capitalism with high per capita incomes and growth rates haven’t often been noted. Both have been governed and stamped by the British. Both have populations of 5 or 6 million, including 2 or 3 million second-class citizens and non-citizens, some of them migrants, some of them openly despised.
Both Israel and Singapore are non-Muslim, and both face much larger, less-than-friendly Muslim neighbors — in Singapore’s case, Indonesia and Malaysia, the latter of which expelled Singapore in 1965 (or lost it, depending on who’s telling), amid high racial tensions.
Yet another striking analogy involves the fact that the politically dominant majority of Singapore’s population consists not of indigenous natives but of “overseas” Han Chinese,” whose literary and commercial strengths long ago earned them the sobriquet “the Jews of Southeast Asia” and the envy and resentment due a wealthy, elitist, and supple minority.
Like Jews who live outside Israel, the Han Chinese are minorities in most countries outside China, but here a real difference dogs the similarity. The similarity is that in Singapore, the Chinese are 75% of the population, and Malays are 15%, Indians 8%’ in Israel, Jews are 76%, with the rest mostly Palestinian Arabs, most of them Muslim some of them Christian. In Singapore the Chinese have a status, power, and reputation that will sound familiar to Palestinians and others who regard Israel’s Jews as arrogant interlopers.
The difference is that Israel’s Jews, unlike Singapore’s Chinese, have never been the rooted, dominant majority in any other country besides ancient Israel itself, where Hebrew was spoken 700 years before Arabic. And there are other differences of consequence: Singapore is an island, a micro-state smaller in area and population than New York City’s five boroughs. Israel is 30 times larger, geographically, and in some ways more dangerous and endangered.
That said, Singapore’s and Israel’s situations at international crossroads of trade and power at opposite ends of the Asian continent incline them both to serve as investment and cultural entrepots and as political mediators. Without oil, water, or minerals to speak of, both live mainly by their wits, which is to say by trade. But both are compelled to militarize, and both have formidable armed forces, with defense budgets that consume 5 or 6% of GDP, a proportion much higher than that of all but a few other nations, including even China.
The International Political Review calls Singapore’s armed forces “the most technologically advanced military in Southeast Asia” and notes that while everyone in the region fears China and no one could prevail against a Chinese onslaught, China fears that any such onslaught would bring a very painful Singapore Sting.
The punchline to all this, not very funny but very, very true, is that no sooner had Singapore gained its independence in August 1965 than its British-educated founder and first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew (whose eldest son is now prime minister), invited Israel to organize his armed forces, because he saw all the parallels between the two young nations that I’ve just noted.
On Christmas Eve, 1965, six Israel Defense Force officers and their families moved to Singapore, followed by waves of consulting teams that established the country’s “Total Defense” combat doctrines, its recruitment and training regimens, its intelligence services, and its state-of-art arms procurement.
“We are not going to turn Singapore into an Israeli colony,” chief of staff and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin admonished these teams. He needn’t have worried. Singapore’s highly intelligent, eloquent, ruthlessly energetic dictator knew how to collaborate without being colonized, something one couldn’t say about some of the Americans he’s been collaborating with most recently. He was as deft and determined as the Han Chinese in other countries who, even as minorities, dominate major industries, banks, and even English-language media in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
The Israelis militarized Singaporean society, even with Israeli military songs, to which Lee’s soldiers marched in one of Singapore’s first real Independence Day parades. Less symbolically, they showed Singapore how to establish military conscription in a hitherto un-militaristic populace that, according to at least one survey, ranked the profession of soldier far below that of thief, while placing artists, teachers and merchants on top.
So determined was Lee to adjust this that when Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, vindicating his decision to work with it and boosting Singaporeans’ confidence in their Jewish military mentors, Singapore’s UN delegation surprised other Third World nations by abstaining on a resolution condemning Israel.
Israelis persuaded Lee to make conscription universal to tap well-educated, prosperous Han Chinese as well as the Malay, Indian, and other minorities. That produced an intelligent, dynamic army and a disciplined male student population: Singaporean university students receive substantial tuition subsidies after military service but must accept what the National University of Singapore calls “a service bond under the terms of the tuition grant to work for a Singapore-registered company for three years upon completion of their degrees so as to discharge some of their obligations to the Singapore public.” In some professions, the mandatory service is to government agencies, for up to six years. The whole regimen, as most Israelis would recognize, produces more than a little griping, but little softness or self-indulgence.
All this has posed an exquisitely discomfiting dilemma for Yale’s neoconservatives, who never hesitate to ridicule leftists who’ve collaborated with authoritarian “Third World” regimes. Now they find themselves looking into a mirror and falling spookily silent about Yale’s collaboration with Singapore in setting up an undergraduate liberal arts college.
When Shaunziming Tan published a damning essay about Yale’s and other Western universities’ collaborations with such regimes, Michael Rubin of the neoconservative flagship Commentary Magazine commented, quite rightly, that
“Foreigners flock to American universities because of their freedom and opportunity. How sad it is then, as Tan describes, that so many American university presidents are willing to compromise basic values in order to make a quick buck, often padding endowments which already reach billions of dollars. That will not bring progress; it is simply intellectual prostitution.”
Unlike Yale in Singapore, Israel was smart enough to keep its name out of the public eye at the time, eager though it was to advance its national interests and prestige.
So it’s noteworthy — and perhaps commendable — that Rubin condemned Yale and other universities for accommodating to an authoritarian regime that has worked so closely with Israelis without drawing criticism from defenders of authoritarian regimes at Commentary.
At least this should teach other neoconservatives what Yitzhak Rabin and Lee Kuan Yew always understood and what I learned after my epiphany on the road to Haifa: matters like these cannot be viewed clearly through binary, left-vs.-right lenses: Leftists who supported “people’s liberation struggles” by helping to harvest sugar cane in Cuba or crops in early Israeli socialist kibbutzim believed that nation-building requires disciplined struggle and sacrifice to lay the groundwork for prosperity and, with it, national pride, often at cost to individual freedom.
But even in the 1960’s, when Singapore was getting underway, it was already more authoritarian in its nation-building than Israel had been, at least among its own Jewish citizens, but even to some extent among Arabs who became citizens of Israel. Perhaps that was because Jews, fleeing recent destruction and facing new/ancient enemies with Western Enlightenment traditions, some of them as socialists, bonded in relatively more democratic, egalitarian ways.
Although Singaporean society hasn’t had to be on military alert as much as Israel, neither has it become the Switzerland of Southeast Asia, a region bristling with huge armies. Singapore does have enough economic and military power to take another bit of advice that the Israelis of Rabin’s time gave it and should take more seriously themselves than they have under Netanyahu: Keep your vast military under the radar, if possible while strengthening and showcasing your diplomatic, cultural, and educational offerings.
Singapore is trying to become the education center of Southeast Asia by setting up a liberal arts college that bears Yale’s imprimatur, while controlling the showcase as tightly as it does the military. “Increasingly we are noted for taking up the knowledge industries and doing cutting edge stuff,” says Ambassador Chan.
Note, though, that, in this official view, education is an “industry,” perhaps even a “cutting edge” weapon of sorts. Can any liberal democracy ever hope to flourish while pacing a gilded but iron cage?
Communication among Yale faculty and administrators is so often conducted with arched eyebrows and significant silences that the college, home of Skull and Bones, has been known more for its elite “understandings” than for its freedoms of speech. But that consensus may be disrupted a bit this Friday, November 29, when two brave, whip-smart leaders of Singapore’s beleaguered opposition parties will finally get their say in New Haven.
To appreciate how important this can be, you need to know that, four days before the opposition leaders will speak, a panel discussion was hastily scheduled at Yale last Monday at which Pericles Lewis, the former Yale professor and first president of the undergraduate college-cum global career training center in Singapore, which Yale will open in September in collaboration with that tightly-controlled city-state at its National University of Singapore (NUS), assured listeners that students at the Yale-NUS College “can invite whom they want” to speak to their groups on campus.
But Lewis didn’t say whether everyone whom Yale-NUS students invite will actually be able to come and speak to them. The answer is infamously murky in law and in practice, as Lewis’ Monday session itself unfortunately reminded me: Although it was officially “open to the Yale community,” no one at Yale had received notice of it until that very morning, seven hours before the event, and some had received no notice at all.
This characteristic commingling of lofty principle and shady practice yielded a small audience of 30, almost all of it affiliated with Yale-NUS or aspiring to be. But it also yielded a Yale Daily News student reporter who, told of the event 15 minutes before it began, produced an anodyne account that missed much of what happened, but told “the Yale community” all the administration wanted to hear.
The really important thing Lewis didn’t say was that two Singapore opposition-party leaders who’ve been “disinvited” from speaking at the National University of Singapore itself and who’ve endured years of slick, duplicitous and steely harassment by the country’s eternal ruling party — would speak at Yale four days after his own discussion.
Indeed, they’re speaking at Yale only after the university has hosted three Singapore-friendly panel discussions since last spring (one of them called, disingenuously, “Singapore Uncensored”) in an effort to “dispel misconceptions about Singapore” supposedly spread by critics of Yale’s venture there.
The uniform message: “Singapore isn’t perfect, but it’s changing” — a truism that conceals harsh truths that may be “uncensored” on a platform at Yale for the first time on Friday thanks not to Lewis, Yale-NUS, or Yale’s administration, but to the undergraduate Yale International Relations Association, which approached some faculty on Yale’s Southeast Asia Council last summer. The two organizations are co-sponsoring this unprecedented event.
We may even learn something about why the Johns Hopkins University, Australia’s University of New South Wales, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have all pulled their programs out of Singapore, and about why faculty at the Claremont Colleges rebuffed overtures to establish an undergraduate liberal-arts college in Singapore after Britain’s prestigious Warwick University cancelled its own effort there and before Yale rushed in where they’d declined to tread.
At last, “the Yale community” will hear Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary-general of Singapore’s tiny opposition Reform Party, Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the somewhat larger Singapore Democratic Party, and a commenter (and possible critic) of unquestioned integrity, the political scientist Meredith L. Weiss, a Yale Ph.D. now at the State University of New York in Albany who studies comparative politics in Southeast Asia.
Jeyaretnam himself holds a Double First Class Honours degree in Economics from University of Cambridge and has long experience in finance; he’s been watch-dogging the Singapore government’s investment funds. Partly because his father, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, an early opposition leader in Parliament, was persecuted infamously by Singapore’s eternal ruling party, Jeyaretnam hasn’t been treated as harshly. But not only was he “disinvited” from speaking at NUS last year after receiving an invitation; his own son was rejected by one of Singapore’s elite secondary schools (from which several of Singapore’s defenders at Yale have graduated), a characteristic ruling party move “clearly politically motivated to isolate me,” he says.
Jeyaretnam’s co-panelist on Friday, Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party, was fired by the National University of Singapore from his position as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined the opposition party. In another characteristic ruling party move, Chee, who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, was sued for defamation, convicted of it, bankrupted for it, and imprisoned when he tried to contest his dismissal.
Although relations among Singapore’s opposition parties aren’t cordial, Jeyaretnam, with courage and nobility reminiscent of his father, spoke out against the renewed persecution of Chee several months ago, when the latter was barred from leaving Singapore to give a speech to a human rights organization in Oslo — the same month, ironically, when Yale University President Richard Levin came to Singapore to give a speech celebrating Pericles Lewis’ ascent to the Yale-NUS presidency.
So, when guests of Jeyaretnam’s and Chee’s talent and experience do speak to the Yale community on Friday, will the Yale administration welcome and celebrate them? Or will it be too busy promoting, almost luridly now, Yale’s marketing bid to rising upper-middle class Asian parents and their children who aspire to international careers after a few years under the Yale imprimatur in Singapore?
The Yale-NUS brochure distributed at Lewis’ Monday forum opens with more photos of Yale’s New Haven campus in all its glory than of Singapore, and no wonder: “As one of the first Yale-NUS students, you will start your education on the Yale campus in the United States.” Yes, in the summer of 2013, all new Yale-NUS students and faculty will live in a Yale residential college in-New Haven for a month-long “immersion” experience.
And what will they be “immersed” in? I’m all for collegial bonding and of dialogue across differences, and I don’t begrudge any Singapore-destined freshmen from Southeast Asia a first-class trip to the U.S. that mimics a luxurious Yale Alumni tours of, say, ancient Greece and the old Levant: There will be walking tours of colonial Boston, bus tours through the amazing “diversity of New York City, ecology-sensitive forays to rustic New England sites, a real New England clambake, even a final dinner at the elegant Yale Club of New York, where Yale-NUS grads will later take their business clients to dinner because they’ll join the Yale Alumni “community” even though Yale-NUS won’t grant bona fide Yale degrees.
The brochure guarantees every Yale-NUS student “an internship in Singapore or abroad. Leading multinational companies such as American Express, Chanel, Google and Singapore Airlines and NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund and the UN [mais, bien sur!] are partnering with Yale-NUS to offer top internships.”
The brochure then presents a two-page map of the world showing sites of possible overseas internships in “one of 40 global programs exclusive to Yale and Yale-NUS students. Study at Yale in the United States or at one of the NUS Overseas colleges in entrepreneurial hubs like Silicon Valley.”
There is also, by the way, a place called Singapore — “a global center of business and entrepreneurialism, a cross-roads of diverse cultures, one of the safest cities in the world, with a growing art scene and a devotion to excellence that is just as celebrated as its food.”
Who wrote such pap? Probably the public-relations maestro who orchestrated the brochure‘s glowing testimonials from people who never attended Yale-NUS College, because it hasn’t opened yet, but assure prospective students and their parents that “The NUS ecosystem is very entrepreneurial. Not only did I gain the knowledge required for staring my tech company but I also met like-minded people to do it with.”
“Where will a Yale-NUS Education Take you? Anywhere you want,” crows another page of the brochure, listing “notable graduates” of Yale such as “Mr. Fareed Zakaria, Host of CNN’s Emmy-nominated Fareed Zakaria GPS, Editor at large of TIME, Washington Post columnist, and New York Times bestselling author.”
Oops: Zakaria, with whom I have had my differences, resigned from Yale’s governing corporation after committing plagiarism, but that doesn’t matter to talented young people desperate to get out of Malaysia or Indonesia or Singapore itself and to join the new global elite after a few years at Yale-NUS before transferring or hiring themselves out to people who they dream will carry them to Davos.
Yale-NUS’ repeated hints that its students may get a chance to transfer to Yale itself, coupled with elaborate offerings of global-internships and career-placement services, tell the true story behind this venture, initiated in the first place by three current or recent members of Yale’s governing corporation — G. Leonard Baker, Charles Ellis, and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV — who’ve also been investment advisers to Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds and government investment corporation for more than a decade.
This is no venture to bring liberal education to Asia, but, as its progenitors frankly assert, to re-invent liberal education from the ground up. What this turns out to mean is that liberal education must be fitted out to serve those who are trying to smooth the convergence of Asian state capitalism with American state capitalism.
In other words, Singapore will “loosen up” a little, and a Yale-trained American elite will learn from Singapore how to tighten up a lot: Those striking Chinese migrant bus drivers in Singapore and defiantly absent Wal-Mart workers in the U.S. are part of the same problem for global capital, and you can bet that it isn’t workers of the world whom Yale wants to unite, any more than it wanted to bring Kenneth Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Yuan to New Haven this Friday.
Fortunately, the U.S. isn’t yet as tight as Singapore, and Jeyaretnam and Chee may well hope that liberal education at Yale-NUS can loosen things up a little. But the collaboration is already making things harder here, as Yale Prof. Christopher Miller showed recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he describes the emergence of a new “Frankenyale,” one that I think Singapore’s ruling party would probably love to show how Americans how to run.
At the hastily announced little Monday session that tried to keep dispelling “misconceptions” about Singapore before Friday’s event dispels others, two of the very earnest Singaporean students on a panel did urge Yale administrators to stand up for academic and expressive freedom in their country and to stop sounding so much like Singapore’s own bureaucrats.
And Prof. Mira Seo, a classicist who said she’d left the University of Michigan for Yale-NUS because “the humanities are dying” in many American universities but “growing” in Singapore, slipped her new employer’s harness a bit by describing herself as one of those “passionate and dorky” humanists who believe that “a liberal education is supposed to make you more free” and that students’ “demands on the world around them should be more robust and precise.”
This was met with awkward silence, as was her request — repeated to the audience during the question period by the moderator, Yale Prof. Marvin Chun — that the Yale students present “reflect with us on what you really love about Yale here and what you’d like to change.” That request was met by a long and embarrassing silence because there were only two or three non-Singaporean Yale students in the room.
Perhaps that was because the session had been virtually unannounced. Perhaps it reflected students’ wariness of these endless, stagey put-ons. But will more students and faculty, and even a journalist or two, show up to hear two really brave Singaporeans tell more of the truth at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon?
Singaporeans Speak Freely at Yale — and Against It
Jim Sleeper
Is the Tide Running Out on Liberal Democracy?
In his immodestly titled and even more immodestly influential book of 2007, The Future of Freedom, the journalist and Yale trustee Fareed Zakaria advanced the belief of Margaret Thatcher and the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, that illiberal, authoritarian capitalist regimes like Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile and Lee Kuan Yew’s in the little corporate city-state of Singapore build the strongest foundations for liberal democracy because they stabilize the national wealth-production upon which a democracy ultimately depends.
But while entrepreneurial capitalism was indeed a progenitor of liberal democracy in the 18th century, where the mind of Margaret Thatcher resides, today’s corporate capital, especially in its most recent, casino-finance iterations, has become subversive of democracy. It is undermining the sovereignty and the morals of democratic polities without generating any new frame or faith strong enough to sustain them.
Not surprisingly, democratic movements — Occupy Wall Street, public-sector union uprisings in Wisconsin — have returned the favor by becoming equally subversive of finance capital’s agendas, and they’ll become increasingly so in the years ahead.
Sure, they’ll sometimes be desperate and irresponsible. And that will prompt people like Zakaria to interview people like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his son Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, at the World Economic Forum, helping them to hint to receptive audiences that most people must be ruled because they really can’t govern themselves.
In such hands as these, disparagement of democracy is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that sometimes summons an iron fist against national’ working classes and migrants, as Singapore did so decisively this week.
This doesn’t discomfit Zakaria, who hasn’t a democratic bone in his body and savors a lively and imaginative contempt for left-of-center movements that, in his telling, always turn their promises of democracy into engines of oppression more draconian than any dreamed of by stern paternalists like Pinochet and Lee.
Never mind that Chile had democratic and republican roots as deep as Wisconsin’s before General Pinochet led a coup that murdered his more intelligent and effective predecessor Salvadore Allende and thousands of supporters; Zakaria’s high-capitalist, militaristic music in The Future of Freedom suited Davos’ orchestra of high-minded opinion well enough, and the book became a best-seller.
No surprise, then, that last spring Zakaria joined three fellow Yale trustees, long-time investment advisers to Singapore’s government, to tout Yale’s collaboration with that country’s ruling party in establishing an undergraduate liberal-arts college to boost Singapore as the center of what its ambassador to the U.S. called “the education industry” in Southeast Asia.
Zakaria soon had to resign from Yale’s governing corporation for committing plagiarism in an article for TIME magazine, but by then his neoliberal symphony had already skipped a few bars on its score: Zakaria mistakes the hubbub of capitalist market dynamism for the conversations of citizens deliberating democratically about big decisions shaping their lives.
Zakaria missed or downplayed a reality harsher than any he’s had to face: It’s that the true framers of constitutional democracies can’t just stride onto foundations prepared by illiberal regimes like Singapore’s.
Most such efforts are suppressed energetically by the powers they challenge, and when they seem irrepressible, they may be crushed violently. “Repression is like making love; it’s always easier the second time around,” explained Singapore’s British-educated, eloquent ruthlessly energetic autocrat Lee while refining this “love” into an art form.
Under the country’s Lee’s son Lee Hsien Loong, the country is still deep into an energetic, fine-spun suppression of democracy. And world history lately hasn’t exactly been smoothing Zakaria’s much-herald neo-liberal paths to democratic reform.
At Last, Singapore’s Brave Democrats Speak to Yale
Against this dark background, two brave framers of democracy in Singapore – Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party, and Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary-general of the Reform Party — created a sensation last week, thrilling many who’d been smothering under Yale’s institutional happy talk about Singapore and inciting denial and consternation among the regime’s and the Yale administration’s operatives.
Chee and Jeyaretnam flew many thousands of miles to New Haven to speak out at the invitation of some independent students at the Yale International Relations Association and faculty at the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies. The third panelist was the political scientist Meredith Weiss, a Yale PhD who teaches at the State University of New York in Albany and presented richly researched, nuanced information that tended to reinforce the opposition leaders’ credibility, not because she cast it that way but because of what the reality is:
“The crux of my argument,” Weiss said, “is that the Singapore polity offers more space than voice: non-institutional engagement is possible and increasingly common, but institutional channels to express those preferences or perspectives remain absent or curtailed….. The structure of ‘civic society’ that Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party has crafted allows for a degree of feedback and responsiveness, so at least some demands have been subtly met, but in a way that gives no credit to those generating the ideas the PAP chooses to embrace.”
The panel organizers had also invited three representatives of the Singapore government, including its recent ambassador to the U.S., Chan Heng Chee. But, perhaps wary of according opposition leaders any recognition beyond what the government has given them in smearing and prosecuting them, the officials declined.
These officials’ absence only reinforced Weiss’ description of their modus operandi and prompted the organizers to change its title from “Singapore: The Democratic Divide” to “Singapore Today: Opposition Perspectives.”
Brief but solid accounts of the two-hour session in the New Haven Registerhttp:// and the Yale Daily News, and even in a short report in the Singapore government-controlled Today, have prompted thousands of Singaporeans to clamor for the video that will be posted soon on the website of Council on Southeast Asian Studies. (E-mail the Council at seas@yale.edu).
The video is really worth watching, even if you’re more interested in academic freedom and human rights generally than in Singapore per se, because Singapore thwarts academic freedom and human rights in ways both sinuous and intimidating.
The panel gave Chee and Jeyaretnam an opportunity to speak to more than 100 Yale faculty and students in person, including many Singaporeans studying in the U.S — an audience more open and public than any these men have been able to address in Singapore.
Their account of harsh and often insidious realities hidden by a deluge of Yale-NUS promotional happy talk was as wrenching for Singaporean students who’ve been apologists for their regime, as it was liberating for others who’ve come to the U.S. partly to escape the stifling self-censorship and conformity that make Singapore seem clean and safe to outsiders.
Some Singaporeans listened with their heads down, as if ducking Jeyaretnam and Chee, whom they’d never heard before. The most assiduous and crafty apologist among them, E Ching Ng, sat silently, and “a young woman sitting with her kept running her hands through her hair, braiding and un-braiding, arranging, separating, smoothing, all so anxiously and compulsively throughout the talks that one of us finally had to tap her arm and ask her to put her elbows down so that we could see the speakers,” a Yale faculty member told some of us later.
What You Hadn’t Been Told About Singapore and its Democrats
Chee and Jeyaretnam are seldom seen or heard even on television or radio in Singapore and are slighted or ignored in the print press. The news media are controlled through Government Linked Corporations, or GLCs, that run much else in this country of approximately 6 million, a little over half of them citizens, the rest “permanent residents” and non-resident migrants whose rights are minimal.
The government controls 50% of the economy and owns 80% of the land, in a nation smaller in area than New York City, and it subsidizes 90% of the housing, so it has wields lots of carrots and sticks to silence the independent-minded.
Websites are more open and invigorating to Singaporean twentysomethings, a majority of whom identify them as their first or second sources of information. Whenever my columns are posted on www.tremeritus.com, readers’ comments are numerous, feisty, and enlightening.
But the government still licenses websites and can pull the plug on them legally for any number of infractions, and Weiss reports that while “Online campaigning was legalized in 2011, with limits, and clearly helped opposition parties to get their messages out,… only 25% of all voters…. said that the internet was their first or second source of information in the 2011 general election.”
Singapore’s labyrinthian, omniscient governance comes from the eternal (and eternally-rigged) People’s Action Party, which has a lot more than websites: The PAP took 60% of the vote in the 2011 elections but 93% of the seats in Parliament, the rest going to one “opposition” party whose deputies always vote with the government.
Neither Chee’s nor Jeyaretnam’s party has a deputy in Parliament, and they can explain the reasons why, including some you’d never think of: Anyone contributing more than a certain amount to an opposition party must register his or her name, income and many other details – with the Prime Minister’s office, via the election commission that his PAP alone controls.
Weiss notes that the PAP reacts to every democratic stirring but without true accountability. Few Americans can imagine what this means: In a micro-state with a ruling party that has held power for 50 years, the universities, press, courts, and even civic associations are wired top to bottom with government operatives who dispense punishments from the draconian and punctiliously legal penalties to unofficial and undocumented reprisals.
All these have been visited upon Dr. Chee, who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, was fired from his professorship at the National University of Singapore in 1993 after joining the Singapore Democratic Party that he now leads. To appreciate the significance of his speaking at Yale, it helps to know that earlier this year he was barred by the regime from leaving Singapore to give a speech of at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
“In the last 20 years he has been jailed for more than 130 days on charges including contempt of Parliament, speaking in public without a permit, selling books improperly, and attempting to leave the country without a permit,” wrote Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, in an open letter, published here in the Huffington Post, to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. “It is our considered judgment that having already persecuted, prosecuted, bankrupted, and silenced Dr. Chee inside Singapore, you now wish to render him silent beyond your own borders.”
It may have taken Singapore’s heightened sensitivity to well-publicized criticisms of its collaboration with Yale, such as mine here, to loosen such restrictions on Chee, who is selling his book, Democratically Speakinghttp://yoursdp.org/index/buy/0-13, to help defray the bankruptcy charges and penalties that the government imposed, although it has recently reduced those penalties, as well.
Jeyaretnam, who holds a Double First Class Honours degree in Economics from Cambridge University, is the son of J.B. Jeyaretnam, the first prominent opposition member of Singapore’s Parliament, who was evicted from that body in 1986 after being convicted by the ruling-party-controlled courts on criminal charges of misusing his own Worker’s Party finances.
When the British Commonwealth’s Privy Council declared the case a “miscarriage of justice,” Singapore abolished its ties to the Privy Council, refused to reinstate Jeyaretnam, and sued him for libel years later, bankrupting him and leaving him to walk through transit stations wearing a sandwich board, an aging barrister trying to sell copies of his book, Make It Right For Singapore.
Kenneth Jeyaretnam’s Reform Party has a platform somewhat more centrist than his father’s and than Chee’s SDP, which emphasizes growing disparities in income that can’t be discussed in Singapore as openly as in the U.S. Noting that because the government owns so much of the housing and land, Jeyaretnam observes that it has many ways to silence residents — including NUS students, most of whom live in such housing and, despite Yale-NUS’ assurances of freedom of expression, would jeopardize their families’ access to patronage jobs, services and transit, as others have done in the recent past, if they opposed the ruling party with public statements or gatherings that could be closely monitored on campus. The Reform Party wants to loosen those strings by privatizing housing ownership more explicitly.
Minchin had “abused the social visit pass privileges previously extended to him while he was in Singapore by interfering in our domestic politics and mixing religion with politics,” according to the MHA.
The ministry explained sanctimoniously that “The separation of religion and politics is a long established principle in Singapore, to safeguard the inter-religious and social harmony in our multi-religious society.”
But the harmony is Orwellian: Singapore’s regulations require all foreigners involved in activities directly related to “any seminar, conference, workshop, gathering or talk concerning any religion, race or community, cause or political end” to hold a Miscellaneous Work Pass.
Minchin’s “real” affront was that he had written disparagingly about the nation’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew, and, in August of 2011 had “alleged that the rule of law was bypassed and corrupted in Singapore, and questioned the independence and integrity of the judiciary.”
The week of the panel, a strike by 100 angry migrant Chinese bus drivers exposed not only their employer’s broken promises and their substandard wages and living conditions – Singapore has no minimum wage – but also how forbidden any labor-union action is in Singapore.
The government boasts to investors that it never has strikes or job actions, and it promptly arrested several of the bus drivers for trial and deported most of the rest, prompting the brave writer Vincent Wijeysingha of the Online Citizen website to pen a long, scathingly satirical account of its lies and brutality. It begins:
“The government has acted in our name as is its duty. It purged an industrial action and returned the nation to business as usual. The bus drivers from SMRT recklessly involved themselves in an illegal strike after refusing to bring their grievances to management or their trade union or seek the assistance of the Manpower Ministry. Twenty-nine have been deported, one hundred and fifty more issued a police warning and the five ringleaders will be tried. Industrial harmony has been restored, the tripartite relationship upheld, and public disorder averted.
“As fortunate citizens of this prosperous and stable nation, we can heave a sigh of relief. Those refractory foreigners got what they deserved. How dare they come to our land – which our government built from a fishing village – and demand such indulgences as suitable accommodation and an equal wage…..”
Wijeysingha shows how ephemeral – virtually non-existent — the “trade unions” are and how calculatingly feeble and false the Manpower Ministry is. Coming just as American Wal-Mart workers staged a walkout on black Friday without union or legal protection, Singapore’s retaliation with what Chee called “zero tolerance for industrial action” reminded me that Asian state capitalism and Western state capital are converging to subvert democracy, not enable it.
Do Zakaria and the liberal arts teachers at Yale-NUS mean to help workers of the world to converge, as well? Chee noted that when he arrived at NUS in response to student invitations to speak about civil liberties, he was turned back by police on one occasion and by university officials on another.
“I am not asking Yale to change the country, but do not be complicit in helping the PAP to oppress Singaporeans, and do not seek to advance your interests at the expense of ours,” Chee said in New Haven. “I fear that despite all assurances, making money is the be-all and end-all. I have never yearned so much to be proven wrong.” His fear is that Yale’s claim to defer to the government and laws of Singapore out of respect for supposed “‘Asian values’ has been used” in ways that will prove him right.
While Singapore boasts a per-capita income of $57,000 compared to the U.S.’s $46,000, Chee noted that that’s only because the tiny city-state has seen a 67% increase in centi-millionaires – residents worth at least $100 million. Meanwhile, 5% of Singaporeans earn less than $5000 a year – less than $100 a week – in a city that is 42% more expensive than New York City. Chee then showed slides of people subsisting in miserable living conditions and reminded us of the tiny island’s millions of rights-less migrant workers like the Chinese bus drivers.
“You Americans have just been through an election where income disparity was debated. It is not up for debate in Singapore,” whose famously “disciplined workforce” works longer hours than those of Sao Paulo, Johannesburg and Moscow. “More than half say they’d emigrate if they could, and 10% do leave.”
A More Skeptical, Combative View
Jeyaretnam was more sardonic than Chee, comparing Yale president Richard Levin’s “naivete” about Singapore to that of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s about the Ukraine, whose wonders they touted rapturously upon returning to America, all to the great benefit and probable amusement of the Soviets in the 1930s. “Levin lets us know that Yale has done its homework about Singapore,” Jeyaretnam mocked, adding that if Levin’s delegation ever tried to talk with any opposition leaders, “We must all have been out that when they came calling.”
Growing more serious, Jeyaretman told the Yale audience ruefully that, when he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York, the official checking his passport remarked that “The U.S. has a lot to learn from Singapore.” To which Jeyaratnam added, in New Haven, “There is a lot to learn from Singapore about controlling your own people,” but obviously the officer believed in Singapore’s false front as a “rich, clean nation renowned for its disciplined workforce and its no-nonsense government” – an image that Jeyaretnam unpacked.
He worried that “the authoritarian model” is gaining ground worldwide as people “give away their freedom in exchange for security and prosperity. But Singapore was one of the richest cities in Asia before Lee Kuan Yew arrived. There has been no economic ‘miracle,’ it’s been only a deliberate policy to open the floodgates to immigrant labor, producing a disastrous fall in real income for the bottom quarter. You Americans are losing jobs by outsourcing them; Singapore keeps jobs by bringing in cheap labor and increasing its repression.”
Jeyaretnam’s criticisms of universities in Singapore and of Yale’s feeble accommodations to them were substantially the same as Chee’s. “What Singapore does best is not anything that a liberal college such as Yale should want to learn. I can only hope that they’ll fulfill their commitments to foster open debate at Yale NUS.”
He also noted that while the internet has had positive impacts, “any blog can be required to gain government approval and a license”–I wondered how long Online Citizen can expect to survive – and he made scathing fun of the government’s regulation of campaigns, noting that he was given television time on only a Mandarin-language channel even though, as he noted drily, “English is the national language.”
Few of the Singaporean Yale students in the audience, most of them from elite high schools in Singapore, seemed to have heard of or witnessed anything like this before. The more defensive among them disparaged Jeyaretnam afterward, but they couldn’t help but notice that his and Chee’s presentations received long, vigorous applause from an audience deeply moved, even impassioned, by their example.
By far the most defensive, churlish, amazingly naive comments came from two Yale-NUS faculty members. I’m almost too embarrassed even to quote them here, but you can watch them on the video when it’s posted on the Council on Southeast Asia Studies website.
These teachers of political science actually believed that because Yale is a non-profit institution and because they and other new faculty had sat together on a hilltop in New Haven for two weeks this past summer and then again in Singapore designing a new liberal arts curriculum in perfect freedom, no business or government interests will control them.
The letter poses 16 questions to Yale that the university has yet to answer convincingly because it has refused repeatedly to make public its contract with Singapore in establishing Yale-NUS. “We believe that a healthy atmosphere for shared governance at Yale can only be restored if the Yale Corporation begins by releasing all documents and agreements related to the plan to establish the Yale-National University of Singapore campus,” the AAUP writes, after exhaustive reading and research on every document on the collaboration that has been made public.
This reinforces the political scientist Weiss’ observation on the panel that “Arguably central to efforts to channel and control participation in Singapore has been depoliticizing students and the university since the late 1960s and early 1970s, through measures ranging from restructuring faculty governance at NUS to eliminating the more radicalized Nanyang U to building a new campus at Kent Ridge without a clear central meeting point to prohibition or restructuring of a host of student activities and organizations to a retreat from (then cautious, instrumental return to) the teaching of ‘critical thinking.'”
The AAUP letter discredits claims by Yale-NUS administrators and faculty (and by Zakaria last spring) that their university critics are ivory tower moralists, provincials fearful of engaging cultural differences and respecting so called “Asian” values:
“At stake are not simply ‘cultural differences’ but whether Yale recognizes universal human rights and the protections for academic staff enunciated in the UNESCO Recommendation. Singapore is a modern, industrialized city whose leaders and citizens fully understand these values.”
The center, which had been planned for two years, “was meant to have been funded by a large donation of between $1 million to $3 million from the Japanese philanthropist Dr Haruhisa Handa, who had flown into Singapore last week specially for the launch,” according to the website Singapolitics.
The brilliantly dissident Online Citizen speculated that the Government had a hand in the closure of the center. “Asked by Singapolitics “to respond to this allegation, a Ministry of Education spokesman only said: ‘We were informed by the SMU that it had decided not to go ahead with the launch of the centre.'”
Recall here how small and tightly run Singapore is. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s wife heads the country’s Temasek sovereign wealth fund, whose CEO-designate in 2009 was the current Yale trustee Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, a progenitor and proponent of Yale-NUS. Charles Ellis, another Yale trustee at the time when Yale-NUS arrangements were being negotiated, was also an adviser to Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation and is married to Yale vice president Linda Koch Lorimer, who is a member of the new, fig-leaf governing board of the Yale-NUS, which will be held to Singapore’s corporate laws, which none of Yale-NUS’ boosters seems to have examined carefully.
Yet Yale’s trustees and president have rushed in where these institutions declined to tread, without giving Yale’s faculty a truly deliberative role like that assumed by the faculties at Claremont and Warwick.
What were they thinking? Or, as Evan Thomas kept asking in his book The Very Best Men, about the supposedly worldly, smart Yale men in national intelligence who fomented a hapless coup in Guatemala, installed the Shah in Iran, and staged the Bay of Pigs: “How could they be so dumb?”
I’ve never charged that Yale’s trustees were furthering their own business interests directly by pushing Yale-NUS, nor even that Yale as an institution is “lining its pockets” from the Singapore venture. I’ve reported that someone with pretty good credibility predicts they’ll do so.
What I do charge is that the “business” mindset of Yale trustees who’ve meant to do some good in the world while doing well for themselves has driven this project despite many good reasons for doubting its wisdom pedagogically as well as politically.
I’ve also speculated about likely reasons why the Yale Corporation went this far. A possible line of inquiry for an investigative reporter or dispassionate historian and perhaps a prosecutor would require learning how business is done in Singapore, not to mention in America these days, where “payments” to institutions can be made, and individuals rewarded, without leaving contractual fingerprints.
Imagine that a Yale trustee who had left the Yale Corporation by the time the Corporation approved Yale-NUS had also been intimately and enthusiastically involved with Singapore for many years before then, and imagine that he is married to Yale’s vice president, who has become a member of the new, Potemkin Yale-NUS governing board, an unmarked subsidiary of the National University and hence of the People’s Action Party.
Imagine further that the Yale University endowment’s investment portfolio just happens to be let in on restricted, lucrative investment opportunities that controlled in some measure by Singapore’s government investment and sovereign wealth funds, including Temasek (whose CEO-designate in 2009, Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV, is currently a Yale trustee).
As one Yale faculty member put it, a lot of business and public financing in Singapore “has been perfected by money launderers and high rollers in ways that make every lead that might throw light on the wheeling and dealing disappear into a Gordian knot.”
Shouldn’t we begin by insisting that Yale make public its contract with Singapore for Yale NUS? Why has it refused to do so despite repeated requests from many quarters? Shouldn’t we make it impossible for Yale-NUS to enjoy credibility or dignity until that has been done?
There’s no need to presume that the Yale Corporation members who were most active in conceiving and supporting Yale-NUS were mercenary about it, let alone corrupt. Assume that they’re all good guys, hale fellows well met, knights-errant of a commodious American capitalism, and that they get almost weepily sentimental about their Yale undergraduate encounters with the liberal arts, which they remember fondly and dimly enough to think that by exporting them to Singapore in this fashion they’ll be repaying Singapore and the whole world, by whose gilded graces they have done so well for themselves.
I think that we can doubt the soundness of their judgment, which has been clouded by the “doing well” side of their equation. They should have sat awhile with Jeyaretnam and Chee. And Yale-NUS’ maestros and musicians should have looked more intently at Fareed Zakaria’s symphony before hiring themselves out the play it for the People’s Action Party.
A visit to the U.S.S. Stennis: Photo from Yale-National University of Singapore College’s Facebook page.
JIM SLEEPER
Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University
Posted Sept. 2, 2013, 4:29 pm
Although you wouldn’t know it from watching developments in Syria or Egypt, one of the biggest difficulties in reporting and commenting on authoritarian regimes these days is that many have terrific “democratic” window dressing, designed by western-educated consultants and apologists, some very slick, some sharp-tongued, who easily gull or cow American innocents abroad.
One can’t show this decisively in a newspaper column like mine in this week’s New York Times Sunday Review section. It argues, in 1,200 words, that some American universities are selling out liberal education’s core values in collaborating with the authoritarian regimes to set up whole campuses on their turf.
Fortunately, openDemocracy.net, one of Britain’s most thoughtful, respected websites, has just posted more of the truthabout these university-regime collaborations and their implications for U.S. foreign policy, in a 4,700-word opus I wrote a few weeks ago.
The most obvious problem with these collaborations is authoritarian regimes themselves: Decades ago, anyone reading the Soviet constitution might have thought the USSR a democratic paradise, and you’ll be amazed to see how, for example, Singapore’s seemingly meticulous legal system asphyxiates freedoms of the press and political expression as Americans look the other way.
And that points us to the less-obvious but also important problem: Many Americans who visit and make deals with such countries almost ask to be fooled.
As Malcolm Muggeridge noted about some American idealists visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s, “Their delight in all they saw and were told… constitute unquestionable wonders of the age. There were earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums… earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across Red Square…”
It’s happening again now, as globe trotting university presidents and trustees who are carrying liberal education’s prestige and skill sets to iron-fisted oligarchies decide — as Lincoln Steffens did of the early Soviet Union — that they’ve “seen the Future, and it works” in these apparently orderly, energetic, prospering societies.
Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, and today’s China aren’t as totalitarian as the USSR was, although Kazakhstan is still ruled by the autocrat who ran it in its last years as a Soviet Republic. As such rulers welcome corporate capitalism, they may seed some elements of ordered, liberal democracy in ways they don’t intend.
But they’re also seeding something ominous: It’s becoming even harder, not easier, for investigative reporters, let alone observers like me, to document chilling abuses that are initiated only with arched eyebrows and significant silences at the top and are committed by seemingly ordinary “citizens” or decorously legalistic functionaries, including judges, while the true progenitors of what is becoming a pervasive fear and self-censorship remain smiling and “clean.”
“Fear leaves no fingerprints,” as William Dobson puts it in The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which unpacks some of these deft, unspoken connections really well. Surveillance and seduction are as effective at silencing people as are truncheons and prison cells. But credulous American university visitors barely notice because they’re being welcomed into carefully manicured holding pens.
It’s devilishly hard to track arrangements under which China, Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore are “buying” liberal education’s prestige by bearing all or most costs of constructing the campuses, paying faculty salaries, and subsidizing students’ tuition to lure American university leaders who, thinking like the business corporations on whose boards they also serve, are eager to expand their colleges’ “brand names” and shares of burgeoning new markets among Asian middle classes.
For example, the contract between Yale and Singapore for the brand-new Yale-National University of Singapore College that opened last month remains secret, despite repeated Yale College Faculty demands that it be opened.
Also secret are many of the funding arrangements. “Yale has had no part in financing Yale-NUS, which is largely funded by the Singaporean government, in addition to private contributions,” notes Yale undergraduate Cindi Hwang in “Exporting the Ivory Tower” on the website Foreign Policy in Focus, but not until Kenneth Jeyaretnam, the brave secretary general of Singapore’s oft-harrassed Reform Party, read the official Budget documents for 2013, did anyone tell me that the Development Expenditure for the National University of Singapore had shot up from S$19 million [Singapore dollars] in 2011 to S$54 million in 2012 and estimated to be S$43 million in 2013.
“That could be the cost of construction of the Yale-NUS campus. So, close to S$100 million in capital expenditure likely was spent on building the new campus,” notes Jeyaretnam, who holds double honors in economics from Cambridge University and ran a successful hedge fund for several years. But none of what he has observed has been officially disclosed or discovered by the country’s cowed or government-controlled press.
Nor has anyone dug behind my own report here a year ago that a German university vice-chancellor had told me how he thinks “there’s $300 million for Yale in this deal.” The post set off furious rebukes from the Singapore press and the Yale public information office, but they never disproved the suggestion.
Nor, in regimes whose official reports never clarify what’s done in tangles of money laundering and mutual back-scratching can anyone tell the public whether Singapore was behind one of the top 10 contributors — “Anonymous, for International Studies” — to Yale’s recent $4 billion capital fund-raising campaign, led by Yale trustee G. Leonard Baker, a long-time investor and advisor in Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund and a big moral booster of the Yale-NUS project.
One certainly can’t show things like this in an op-ed piece, which must draw as deftly as it can on reporting that others (including the author) have done at length elsewhere. That’s why, if you want to assess the dangers in American universities’ collaborations with authoritarian regimes, I hope you’ll read the revelatory openDemocracy report as well as the Times column.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors that “a democracy cannot have its universities making partnerships with authoritarian governments,” as the questioner put it.
How could Blake justify his enthusiasm for American universities’ extensive contracts in Kazakhstan, when his own department had reported that country’s “rampant and diverse” human-rights violations and “pervasive corruption.”? Similar assessments have been offered Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House, and also by The Economist magazine’s yearly Democracy Index for 2012, which ranked Kazakhstan 143rd among 167 nations (behind Iraq, Belarus, and Angola) in protecting civil liberties, press freedoms and other elements of liberal democracy.
Blake acknowledged “a trend, not just in Kazakhstan,” toward what he delicately called a “more constrained space for civil society.” But he insisted “we have high expectations of Kazakhstan” and “a very positive and open dialogue” with its government and “we strongly support efforts by various American universities to establish more partnerships with… universities like [Nazarbayev University].”
“[W]e’re really supporting… our own universities who… want to have a diverse student body in the United States, wonderful students like all of you,” he added, finessing the student’s question about why American universities haven’t only welcomed students from authoritarian lands to the U.S. but have also been scrambling to offer their services and prestige to such regimes.
U.S. diplomats do have raisons d’etat to encourage American colleges to collaborate with authoritarian regimes in nations strategically pivotal to American interests. But liberal-arts colleges have even stronger reasons to resist establishing campuses constructed, funded, and ultimately guided by regimes like those in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and China, which are eager to buy liberal education’s “skill sets” and imprimatur, but not its commitment to interrogate the latest flows of power and wealth, not just ride and facilitate them.
It’s one thing, and probably a good thing, for Western research universities to set up research projects and programs in law, business, medicine, and technical training in a wide variety of societies. Nearly 250 are doing so, eight in Kazakhstan alone (including Duke, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh, as well as Wisconsin), dozens in the United Arab Emirates and China, a dozen in Singapore.
Some have been shrewd enough to put down only light footprints: Columbia University’s undergraduate “learning centers” in Europe and Asia can be pulled back fairly quickly if it decides its academic mission and freedoms are being compromised. Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate college in Qatar’s huge, $33-billion “Education City” gives degrees mostly in sciences, in a building it shares with Northwestern University, whose undergraduate curriculum emphasizes journalism and communications. Georgetown offers a bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service in “Education City.”
But it’s another thing entirely for liberal-arts colleges to stake their prestige and strained pedagogical resources on collaborations with repressive authoritarians to introduce their own hand-picked young and transient international students to what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called the “the Great Conversation” of the humanities about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit — all under contract to regimes that have become quite deft at suppressing such conversations with surveillance and seductions, as well as truncheons and prison cells.
We Americans have an infamously bad habit of exporting contradictions and hypocrisies we ought to face and resolve at home. If the British Empire grew “in a fit of absence of mind,” as the historian John Robert Seeley suggested, the single-minded stampede of American liberal educators to share liberal education with the world on the tabs and under the thumbs of illiberal rulers is as delusional as the more Christian collegiate mission early in the last century “to evangelize the world in a generation,” as the slogan of the campus based Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions put it.
If any academic mission is now proclaimed with equal ardor by the proudly public University of Wisconsin at Madison, the venerably private Yale University, and the hard-driving New York University (“a private university in the public service,” it styled itself, before becoming “A Global Network University”), it’s to bring the blessings of liberal education to illiberal societies in a world connected and flattened by commerce.
NYU President John Sexton enthuses that his “Global Network University” will “mirror the flow of talent and creativity that increasingly defines the world.”
Yale University’ claims that the new college it has co-founded with Singapore’s National University will be “a place of revelatory stimulation” that will reinvent liberal education “from the ground up,” in “A community of learning, founded by two great universities, in Asia, for the world.”
Liberal education with an American republican inflection struggles to realize Thomas Jefferson’s vision, in founding for the University of Virginia in 1819, of a crucible for citizen leaders who “are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” its emphasis is on nurturing “citizens who can think critically, understand their own history, and give voice to their beliefs while respecting the views of others,” as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences put it recently in a call to renew the humanities.
Some of us who try hard to teach this way believe that when efforts to sustain the liberal arts as a civic art have worked well, they’ve made democracy more resilient. As Assistant Secretary Blake suggested, they’ve attracted international students who want to escape rote learning in repressive homelands.
But the American Academy worries rightly about the humanities’ prospects in the United States itself, more than in societies where they’ve never taken root. Buffeted by market, political and social pressures, liberal educators whose own public funding is dwindling and whose students’ resources and aspirations are narrowing have set sail for lavish subsidies and burgeoning new student markets. But they’ve forgotten that whoever pays the piper ultimately calls the tune.
* * *
When Kazakhstan approached the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2009 for help in establishing a biotechnology program, the Wisconsonites, flush with liberal idealism, proposed instead a School for the Humanities and Social Sciences “to extend ‘the Wisconsin Idea’ to Kazakhstan and the world,” as their letter of intent put it.
The new school would educate “leaders who will have an impact… like the thousands of UW-Madison graduates who have joined the Peace Corps over the decades,” said Gilles Bousquet, a UW dean and vice-provost, after visiting the country. Kazakhstan approved the proposal, giving Wisconsin nearly $1 million in initial design contracts and the inside track to $55 million in faculty salaries paid by the regime.
But “The Wisconsin Idea” was developed more than a century ago by Progressives (including UW faculty) to strengthen labor rights and democratic procedures and to loosen the grip of robber barons. To say the least, that isn’t Kazakhstan’s idea. Its new, $2 billion Nazarbayev University is named for its President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 72, who ran the country in its final years as a Soviet republic and whose rubber-stamp parliament has anointed him “Leader of the People,” elevating him and his family and state apparatus above the law.
Not surprisingly, Nazarbayev has a representative on his university’s governing board, clouding its promises of academic freedom, which, as in all such regimes, declines to “follow truth wherever it may lead” if it leads to pointed questions about freedom and the rule of law.
Shortly after Wisconsin’s school opened in 2011– a year before Assistant Secretary Blake’s talk — the Peace Corps removed its 117 volunteers from the country “following several sexual assaults and reported instances of harassment by the state intelligence service,” according to the historian Allan Ruff and investigative journalist Steve Horn in an exhaustive account of Wisconsin’s venture there.
At about the same time, Kazakhstan state security forces opened fire on striking oil workers in the Caspian Sea oil company town of Zhanaozen, killing many, detaining and beating many more and blacking out communications from the region. The regime held show trials and even arrested some of the workers’ attorneys.
* * *
Blake did have “reasons of state” for skating around these developments’ implications for liberal education. Although Kazakhstan’s population is only 17 million, its 4,000-mile border with Russia, its 1,400-mile frontier with China, and its billions of dollars in contracts with American firms like Exxon Mobil give the U.S. a foothold and buffer in central Asia.
And Blake was really only emulating his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had made a similar pitch at a 2011 celebration of “people to people” exchanges between the U.S. and China, whose restraints on freedoms of scholarship, journalism, and public expression are well known. Praising New York University’s plan to open a full “NYU Shanghai” campus as a joint venture with the East China Normal University – it has just opened — Clinton invited NYU President John Sexton to stand for a round of applause, praising his “vision” and saying, “we’re very excited about this endeavor.”
NYU’s endeavor in Shanghai follows its opening of a stand-alone “portal” campus in Abu Dhabi, whose Crown Prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, presented the university with a no-strings gift of $50 million even before paying for the entire campus’ construction, faculty salaries, and substantial tuition subsidies.
Abu Dhabi’s “significant human rights problems” in 2012, according to the U.S. State Department, included “arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions, and lengthy pretrial detentions;” limitations on freedoms of speech, press, and association; “reports of police and prison guard brutality’” interference “with citizens’ privacy rights,” and a lack of government “transparency” and “judicial independence.”
In April 2011, five Abu Dhabi dissidents — including Nasser bin Ghaith, who was teaching at the country’s branch of the University of Paris, Sorbonne — were arrested, detained for several months, and given prison sentences for urging direct elections of the Federal National Council. They were pardoned following an international outcry, but no thanks to NYU or the Sorbonne, which were silent.
The State Department was silent, too, and small wonder: The petrol-rich, geographically pivotal emirate is as important to the U.S. as is Kazakhstan. The 70-plus percent of Abu Dhabi residents are migrants with few rights and no nationalist fervor, and they pose little threat to American strategic or economic interests, let alone to Abu Dhabi’s authoritarianism. And the regime and its partners in the United Arab Emirates risk nothing by hosting international students seeking American degrees. The risks are to the essence and spirit of liberal education itself.
* * *
In Singapore, Yale has co-founded “Yale-NUS College” with the National University of Singapore to offer a new, residential liberal education under the strict scrutiny and ultimately the control of that wealthy, tightly-run city-state. Like Abu Dhabi, Singapore is paying virtually all the costs of constructing and operating Yale-NUS’ brand-new panopticon of a campus.
Also like Abu Dhabi and Kazakhstan, the tiny, corporate city-state of Singapore is pivotal in its own way to American interests. It’s a critical base and listening post for foreign policy makers and the American military, an entrepot for global finance competitive with Hong Kong, and now, it hopes, an education hub, “the Boston of Southeast Asia.” The country’s ruling Han Chinese elite knows the Chinese colossus to its north very well, and it speaks English well, owing to its British colonial past: English is Singapore’s official language.
Here, too, the American academic rhetoric has been missionary. Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis, a former Yale professor, announced that deliberations in the summer of 2012 by the new faculty, on a hilltop in New Haven and then in their campus in Singapore, were nothing less than “the liberal arts experience made manifest” in a place where “the forces resisting change do not exist,” as the Yale-NUS faculty’s preliminary Curriculum Report put it.
The college, which opened in August, will “rethink liberal education” in a Common Curriculum fostering “shared belonging… in a community” that will “instill habits of critical judgment and forbearing tolerance that arise from seeing peers struggle with problems one knows well oneself.” Students will keep portfolios of their progress and hone their speaking and writing skills.
But the college’s slick brochure for applicants promises them entry to a global managerial elite that answers not to any republican polity or code but to investors riding the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer marketing. Although their degrees will be granted only by NUS, graduates will be “fully integrated” into “the Yale Alumni community” and so can host clients at the elegant Yale Club of New York on visits to the United States. The first such visit, for many of the new students, was a month-long stay in “one of Yale’s beloved residential colleges” on the New Haven campus, with tours of Boston and New York, before they settled into their Singapore campus.
Although the Yale-NUS admissions office claims that it culled its inaugural class of 157 from among 11,400 eager applicants, making the new college one of the most highly selective of its kind, 9,000 of those applications were made thanks solely to the Yale College admissions office in New Haven’s decision to put a small box on all application forms to Yale that, if checked, would forward the same application, automatically and without elaboration, to the Yale NUS admissions office in Singapore.
“Despite the Admissions Office’s assurances, applicants may have felt that their decision of whether or not to check the NUS box might affect their chances of admission at Yale in New Haven,” wrote Diana Rosen in the Yale Daily News. “Or, the Yale-NUS option on the application may have simply served as way of convincing applicants that they were improving their chances of receiving a diploma with the name ‘Yale’ on it. It’s deceiving and it’s wrong.”
Singapore itself is too infamously Orwellian in its repressions of freedoms of expression to be trusted to honor more than a boutique humanities curriculum. Reporters Without Borders ranks the island 149th out of 179 this year – down from 135th in 2012, owing partly to its recent crackdown on political websites. It has a truly flabbergasting array of legalistic restraints on freedoms of the press, political activity, and labor rights.
Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew, now in his ‘80s, has even tutored Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev in the arts of authoritarian governance, including the control of their universities’ governing boards. (Lee has even persuaded Nazarbayev to make English Kazakhstan’s official language.) The National University of Singapore is one of the institutions partnering with Nazarbeyev University.
Liberal education can’t take root in a bubble. “In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education… will suffer,” warned the American Association of University Professors last year in a letter criticizing Yale’s venture and posing 16 questions that Yale has declined to answer.
Jothie Rajah documents exhaustively Authoritarian Rule of Law that Singapore’s meticulous, sanctimonious, politicized judiciary enforces broad laws on “public order,” the press, and religious and racial expression. These have been rammed through parliament by the ruling party in unvarying sequences of declared “emergencies”; orchestrated denigrations of critics in parliamentary “hearings” that are show trials; the infantilization of citizens in the name of looking after their best interests; and deliberately vague wording of statutes to leave room for the state manipulate the laws at it wishes.
Critics who still protest are charged with “defamation” or “scandalizing the judiciary;” they are invariably convicted; bankrupted by large fines, and imprisoned and/or barred from leaving the country. Chee Soon Juan, who holds a PhD from the American University of Georgia and is now secretary general of the tiny opposition Singapore Democratic Party, was fired by NUS from his position as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined an opposition party; when he attempted to contest his dismissal, he was charged with defaming public officials, imprisoned, bankrupted, and barred from leaving the country.
After Singapore incurred international embarrassment by preventing Chee from accepting a human-rights award in Oslo, I and some others were able to bring him and another opposition leader, Kenneth Jeyaretnam of Singapore’s Reform Party, to speak at Yale. Apparently Singapore thought the better of embarrassing its latest American university partner.
The Singaporean Professor Cherian George, an internationally distinguished scholar of press freedom, was denied tenure at his country’s Nanyang Technological University in a process so heavy handed it was condemned by his own colleagues – who showed unusual bravery — and by distinguished scholars abroad.
Five American universities have pulled out of Singapore, most recently a branch of the University of Chicago’s Business School and two programs established by NYU in arts and in law. Some withdrawals have been prompted by financing and marketing projections that didn’t pan out, but others have been spurred by Singapore’s meddling to thwart the prospects of professors with dissenting opinions and to rein in students’ criticisms of government.
The faculty of Britain’s Warwick University forced its administration to withdraw from Singapore on such grounds before a college it was planning there had opened; California’s Claremont Colleges rebuffed Singapore’s offer to establish a similar college after an animated faculty opposed the president’s inclination to go.
* * *
Yale-NUS students won’t be free to form political associations, much less to protest government policies, even on campus. In this, Singapore isn’t unusual. There’s little precedent for student freedom anywhere in the region.
China’s Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which offers graduate programs in international relations, has experienced draconian restrictions on political discussion and expression such as an attempted on-campus showing of a documentary about the Tienanmen Square uprising and a decorous but short-lived student journal whose distribution off-campus was banned. Chinese authorities are insistent that no such projects touch anyone who isn’t formally enrolled at the center and therefore carefully watched.
Officials at Duke University’s campus in Kunshan, “after pretty good conversations with people at Hopkins,” decided they “would be comfortable drawing similar distinctions between “intra-campus discussion and what you do at large,” Duke President Richard Brodhead told Bloomberg News. “If you want to engage in China, you have to acknowledge that fact.”
“What we [Americans] think of as freedom, they [Singaporeans] think of as an affront to public order,” said Yale-NUS’ inaugural dean Charles Bailyn, explaining Singapore’s curbs on public assembly.
The ease with which Americans accept such restrictions in the name of multicultural engagement is instructive as well as frightening. Liberal educators abroad have begun to sound like business-corporate managers who adjust their labor and other practices downward to their host countries’ standards in order to facilitate their investments there. The Texas-based Houston Community College, under contract to the Qatar government as a vendor of educational services through “Qatar Community College,” segregates its classes by sex.
“I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression,” NYU’s President Sexton declared when some students and faculty in New York protested the virtual indentured servitude of migrant workers constructing the Abu Dhabi campus two years ago. He added that ivory tower moralists should get “out of their comfort zones.” l Faculty “no-confidence” votes against Sexton in five NYU schools and programs didn’t shake him from his owncomfort zone.
And when a Yale faculty resolution warned that university’s administration against dealing with Singapore in ways that compromise “ideals that lie at the heart of liberal arts education and of our civic sense as citizens,” President Richard Levin dismissed it as “unbecoming” and carrying “a sense of moral superiority.” Levin resigned his presidency a few months later, but the Singapore venture proceeds, and Yale has refused to disclose the full terms of the contract.
* * *
Why are university presidents so willing to make such compromises and even to celebrate them? Some, hoping sincerely to carry the blessings of liberal education to humanize globalization and even (sotto voce) to liberalize authoritarian regimes, are beguiled by “democratic” window dressing, designed by western-educated consultants.
The regimes’ smooth and/or sharp-tongued, Western-educated apologists easily fool or cow American innocents abroad, sometimes by wagging accusing fingers at the failures and hypocrisies the Americans left behind. The apologists dare not wag their fingers at failures in their own societies, whose repression displaces and intensifies their projections of disdain for their guests.
Many university leaders are vulnerable to such put-downs because, having come to think like corporate CEOs, they’ve forgotten the difference between the democratic rule of law that most Americans still honor and the simulacra of legalism in the cruel regimes that are hosting them. The more that they learn to characterize those regimes not as “authoritarian” but as “authoritative,” the more their own understandings of democracy and liberal education sound corporate, statist, and unfree.
The suppression or distortion of clear thinking abroad bleeds back into its suppression at home. The University of Wisconsin at Madison has asked the state legislature to exempt it from Wisconsin’s vaunted Open Records Law, a proud legacy of the Wisconsin Idea that enabled Allen Ruff and Steven Horn to produce their account of its Kazakhstan project. “The Wisconsin Idea” has already been rolled back in the state’s revocation of collective bargaining for public-sector workers and even more fatefully for UW with cuts in state funding from almost 50% of the university’s budget in the 1960s to less than 19% today. No wonder that it welcomed Kazakhstan’s offer.
Yale is less strapped for funding than Wisconsin, but three current or recent members of its small governing corporation advised and/or invested in Singapore’s sovereign wealth and investment funds for at least a decade before the Yale-NUS deal was arranged with their ardent support. Charles Goodyear IV, Charles Ellis, and G. Leonard Baker seem to think that they’ve glimpsed the Future in rising, wealthy state-capitalist regimes whose civil societies seem more orderly and energetic than America’s faltering, libertarian-capitalist one.
Another former Yale trustee, the journalist and global political commentator Fareed Zakaria, touted Singapore in TheFuture of Freedom as a model for his claim that societies that liberalize economically will liberalize politically. At Davos Zakaria interviewed Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, almost worshipfully. Months later, Yale President Levin interviewed Zakaria before a New Haven audience inaugurating Yale’s new Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, which brought Tony Blair to teach a course on “faith and freedom.”
Presidents such as Levin lose liberal education’s compasses as they move from being scholars and teachers, of whatever caliber, to serving on multiple business-corporate boards, where they learn to think about expanding any institution’s brand name and market share. When a university president treats liberal education as a game of money, power, and public relations, he has “played the role cast for him by the large forces shaping research universities today, which are the very forces that led the [Harvard] Corporation to think he was the man for the job,” as Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, put it.
If university leaders imagine that they’re advancing America’s highest foreign-policy goals and strategic interests, diplomats such as Blake and Clinton have been happy to indulge them. After all, the diplomats are fiscally strapped, their embassies becoming fortresses, their networks of trust fraying amid leaks of their communications. Universities can accomplish “people-to-people” exchanges far more easily and convincingly.
* * *
The real danger isn’t that these relationships will produce collisions and open conflict between American educators and their hosts in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and Singapore, although they may. It’s really that the relationships will facilitate a smooth, clueless co-dependency on what a special issue of The Economist identified as a convergence of Asian and American “state capitalism:” The Asian model “liberalizes” a bit politically and cosmetically, while the American model becomes more statist and corporatist, inducing educators and diplomats to define liberal expectations down. The “new normal” becomes a neoliberal purgatory where neither Socrates nor Jefferson could breathe.
Just after World War II, a more resilient American democracy opened liberal education to millions of Americans themselves through the G.I. Bill and National Defense Education Act loans, as Daniel Duedney and John Ikenberry note in a Council on Foreign Relations paper that calls for a new “liberal internationalist
American Grand Strategy” that would begin with democratic renewal at home.
* * *
Authoritarian rulers have weaknesses, too, as they try to ride the global tides that have carried Western universities to their shores. They’re expanding state coercion to try to shore up the social cohesion their societies once drew from Confucian, Islamic, or even Western colonial traditions that are dissolving amid riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing that, so far, have generated huge inequalities amid prosperity and loosened restraints on degrading and criminal behavior.
The Economist casts “a sceptical eye” on this variant of state-capitalist control, pioneered by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, whom it characterized as “a tireless advocate of ‘Asian values,’ by which he meant a mixture of family values and authoritarianism.” The Lees have drawn subliminally from Confucian traditions that present the head of state as a paterfamilias in order to rein in the county’s increasingly soulless and demoralizing materialism. “States hover like crows over the nests that nations make,” warned the historian Robert Wiebe in 2001 against these hollow, often brutal invocations of old cultural wellsprings to shore up new concentrations of power and profits.
Similarly, the sheiks of the Emirates – and even Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan– have adapted Islamic traditions to offset the civic and social costs of their own simultaneous promotions of go-go investment and marketing that dissolve pre-market cultures of honor.
These rulers want liberal education to help them finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of these bargains. They want American colleges’ imprimaturs and the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education may provide to regime managers and spokesmen.
The students themselves are often as well-meaning as they are bright, and some hope that the new colleges will give them some intellectual and political wiggle room. But most simply want lucrative careers, just as most American students do: “In an Asian society likes ours,” a Singaporean student in the United States told me, “there is an infatuation with the Ox-bridges, HYP (Harvard Yale Princeton). So much so that joint programmes are the flavour of the day, example Singapore-MIT, Duke-NUS, Yale-NUS, and a now defunct Johns Hopkins-Singapore program.”
* * *
Liberal education does need to make accommodations to wealth and power. At the dawn of the 18th century, Yale’s own Puritan founders, eager to purify a mission they thought was being corrupted by Harvard, found themselves turning for support to Elihu Yale, an officer of one of the world’s first multi-national corporations, the East India Company, which a century would later acquire the island of “Singapura” for the British crown.
But now university leaders are wandering a bit like Alice in Wonderland – or in NYU’s case, like Captain Cook — into fogs of duplicity cast by regimes whose “features of Western-style democracy are worn relatively lightly and combined with a markedly authoritarian mode of rule,” as a recent analysis by the Washington-based Trans-Atlantic Academy put it. Authoritarian rulers must be laughing up their sleeves at their good fortune in capturing American innocents abroad.
No one expects university leaders to pose Socratic questions to such rulers or to captains of commerce and finance who are riding the golden riptides. American colleges are “like ships caught in the same current, some more obviously helpless than others, … but all drifting toward certain destruction on a lee shore,” the American editor Lewis Lapham warned in 2001.
Still, someone should warn them against supplying riders of the storm with little more than well-disciplined crews and tighter rigging. Colleges have to nourish and hold to the understanding, always fragile to begin with, that wise interrogation strengthens a society’s in ways that armies and states can’t.
If American colleges, surfing the golden tides, transform themselves from the crucibles of civic-republican citizen-leadership that they’ve been at their best into career-networking centers and cultural galleria for a global managerial class that answers to no republican polity or moral code, the American republic will lose its own compass and its anchors.
Here is some of the back-and-forth that appeared in the comments on openDemocracy: ·
sieteocho I’m a Singaporean who has lived there for most of my life.
We have a half empty half full situation. I used to get annoyed at how you’d make it your own personal crusade to rail against the Yale NUS collaboration. I too am concerned about the lack of civil rights in Singapore but I saw this as the thin side of the wedge that would so something for our civil rights, one of many things that would help make Singapore look like a properly functioning democracy. It might sound like a dumb idea, but remember that most people thought that Speaker’s Corner would be a complete sham, right up until a major protest actually took place there earlier this year.
So now that we do have Yale, I’m quite happy to have you snapping at the heels of the Singapore government.
I am a little puzzled that the collaboration with Singapore has raised such a stink, given that all the other collaborations you mentioned – with Chicago, MIT, Duke, etc etc created no such reaction. Furthermore, the liberal arts college actually has the potential for the learning to be two-way as opposed to the other collaborations where the Singapore side – though not a slouch – is partnered with another college with a greater reputation. Many of these ventures will fail, but some will succeed. It is the same with start-ups.
A liberal education is a very useful component for preparing people to live in a democracy and I’m a little puzzled by your belief that while this is true for the US, it wouldn’t be true for Singapore. And hopefully we will produce people who are great stalwarts / champions of true democracy like George W Bush and Dick Cheney.
Jeyaretnam’s father will always be a hero to many of us, but maybe this would make pretty clear what many of us think of the son: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
While you are probably correct on most of the restrictions on civil liberties many of those incidents took place in the 90s and earlier. Politically Singapore is a rapidly changing place and the last five years have seen a profound change in the attitudes of the people towards the government.
When you keep yourself appraised of current events you might actually learn something, such as how the mighty PAP regime has actually lost the last two by-elections.
It is not inconceivable (but not yet inevitable) that Singapore will follow the path of Taiwan and South Korea in making the transition to being a true democracy, and in due course, you might have to find another windmill to tilt at.
But anyway thank you for helping us fight against oppression. Peace. I have no grudge about Yale doing to NUS what Asian students are doing to Yale.
I can only assume that the well-informed “sieteocho” knows that The Workers’ Party — the only one besides the ruling People’s Action Party that ever wins by-elections for seats in Parliament — isn’t an opposition party but a virtual adjunct to the PAP whose deputies almost always vote with the government.
I will also assume that “sieteocho” knows that while the ruling PAP’s share in such elections dropped from around 66% of the vote to 60% for the first time, two years ago, the PAP retains more than 90% of the seats in Parliament, with the rest held by the Workers’ Party.
Surely sietoeocho also knows that the leaders of the other two opposition parties, Kenneth Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan, have been subjected to relentless smearing in the government controlled media and to outright intimidation — in Chee’s case by the government itself, in Jeyaretnam’s by Singapore’s legions of dishonest editors and reporters and its swarms of online trolls.
So I would have expected “sieteocho” to acknowledge and to help us deconstruct Singapore’s simulacrum of democracy instead of citing its ploys as evidence that the country is democratizing. It is not.
Can Yale-NUS help open things up? Sieteocho’s concluding sentence obscures the truth that the U.S. is becoming far more like Singapore than Singapore is becoming like the U.S. The Economist magazine got at this a bit in its special issue last year on the convergence in Asian and American “state capitalism,” a development it deplores. Singaporean apologists’ exquisitely fine-spun insinuations are not a substitute for describing these developments straightforwardly.
These dissimulations and insinuations are sad to watch, but we can hope that sietocho will help Singapore’s democratic prospects move from seeming “not inconceivable” to seeming “inevitable.” .
Yes, I’ve often wondered why with the not yet sea-changing but unprecedented developments in the Singapore political scene, the worker’s party does not merit a mention. To say that the rise of the Worker’s party is not a true expression of democracy would be the equivalent of saying that America is not truly a democracy because the Democratic and Republican parties are too similar to each other. It is important to note that neither these two statements are 100% false. As for the assertion that the Worker’s Party is a puppet of the PAP, maybe you’re forgetting who was the long serving secretary general of the Worker’s Party during the 80s and 90s? Let me give you a hint, his last name is Jeyaretnam.
And while the worker’s party has so far not been as outspoken as we had hoped (not surprising – Low Thia Khiang has been in parliament for more than 20 years and we know his style) one of the most divisive issues of late has been a government plan to increase the population to 7 million. The vote in parliament has been split completely down party lines. There is a case to be made that the Worker’s Party is still operating somewhat in stealth mode.
It is true that the recent developments are merely a tear in the fabric at this point. For 40% of the votes to only translate to 10% of the seats is a quirk of the first past the post system, inherited from the British. (I would also like to point out that the electoral college in the US also functions in a similar way, and that is why Barack Obama in 2012 won two thirds of the electoral college with less than 55% of the popular vote).
It is a grand and hallowed American tradition to cast aspersions on political parties which are perceived to go against American interests, in the name of “promoting democracy”. You want there to be some level of dissent, and we don’t disagree on that. But you go a little bit further and you want to stipulate who you want the opposition to be. And I’m not blind to the fact that America does not always respect the will of the people when there is some divergence from what you would like the will of the people to be. We are what we is. Singapore is my country, not yours. I vote, and you don’t.
If I have one concern about Yale being in Singapore, it is the strong connection between Yale and the incompetent buffoons known as the Central Intelligence Agency. Reading about recent revelations about that august institution in a book called “Legacy of Ashes” has been a source of concern because I see what it did to Iran, Guatemala, Cuba and Indonesia (unfortunately I’m only up to the Kennedy administration). But the buffoonery in the book, I must say, is a more than welcome source of comic relief.
In fact I would go a little bit further and speculate that the reason why there was such a strong resistance to Yale-NUS has something to do with the CIA. And I’m wondering – out loud, mind – if you weren’t connected to them in some way.
At the height of the PAP’s success in the polls, there have been many means by which election results are manipulated, and the rules are rigged to favour the PAP. Everybody knows that. But the conduct of the elections itself – albeit within the rigged rules – is above board. No accusation of electoral misconduct has ever stuck. No ballot box stuffing has been proven to take place. No disenfranchisement of minorities takes place. During the good years, the popularity of the PAP was genuine. That is a fact that folks like you don’t really grasp – without the machinations, the PAP would probably have won the elections anyway, just with a reduced margin of victory.
Chee Soon Juan is a guy whose heart is in the right place (although I would not be 100% surprised to find that he’s a CIA agent). His style of politics has been rejected by Singaporeans, although to a lesser extent today than 20 years ago. Ever notice that his party did much better in polls in 2011 than in previous years?
While it is true that his style of politics is somewhat misunderstood by the average Singaporean, it is also true that he does himself no favours sometimes, in the way he’s mismanaged his party’s branding in the past. It is true that plenty of the online trolls have cast aspersions on Chee Soon Juan, but I couldn’t help but notice that those same trolls have become extremely vitriolic about the PAP as well. Anybody who surfs the internet in Singapore would know that.
I’m not even that personally opposed to KJ even though any keen observer of Singapore politics whose head is not stuck up his arse would see that he doesn’t have a political future. I thought his bringing to account Temasek’s financial performance was very useful, although a little hard for many Singaporeans to connect with.
So the question that I leave you with is: does the promotion of democracy mean that you disrespect the outcome of democratic elections because the parties voted in were not “democratic” enough?
Other than that, I would have to say that your latest post is a great source of amusement. Please keep it up!
This is a perfect demonstration of the sinuous apologetics to which close observers of Singapore have become accustomed. Always, there are jabs at the U.S.’s corruptions — the Democratic Party, the Electoral College — as if these somehow mitigated criticism of Singapore’s Worker’s Party and electoral system. Never is there acknowledgment that American critics of Singapore’s regime are just as vigorously and publicly critical of American corruptions — a stance which Singapore’s apologists do not themselves take vigorously against the PAP.
Always, there are cheap debating points: Is the Worker’s Party really okay because J.B. Jeyaretnam, the father of the current opposition Reform Party’s leader, led the Worker’s Party decades ago, before he was driven out mercilessly and crushed by the PAP and his party was reorganized?
And there is weird speculation here about the CIA undermining Singaporean interests when, actually, the PAP government is as congenial to the CIA as were the governments that that agency installed in Iran and Guatemala. Here, Lee Kwan Yew did everything our foreign-policy Cold Warriors and “realists” could have desired.
The Brookings Institution, a prestigious American think thank headed by former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, has just established a Lee Kwan Yew chair, suggesting that the regime in Singapore is closer to being a model for Talbott and other elite American policy intellectuals than it is to being a caution. I have argued at length why it should be a caution, not only in the above post, but elsewhere, sometimes also here at openDemocracy as well as on U.S. sites.
You don’t really get it do you? If the same criticisms of “democracy” in Singapore can be directed towards the USA wouldn’t that be grounds for saying that New Haven isn’t really a suitable place to site Yale University?
As for the PAP having a hand in driving JBJ out of the Worker’s Party, that’s total nonsense. Everybody knows that Low Thia Khiang is a bigger threat to the PAP than JBJ ever was at any point in his life.
It’s pretty understandable if you were to say that PAP hasn’t exactly been too friendly to democracy over the years. But when you go out and criticise the second party like that, cast aspersion on a combined total of 72% of the Singaporean vote, that tells me you have absolutely no respect for the freedom of choice of Singaporeans. SDP and RP are not even the 3rd party in Singapore. In short, it isn’t really democracy unless people rise up and vote for the guy you want them to vote for.
My last response said what needed to be said in an exchange of this kind, but I do think that it would be helpful for me to sign off by commenting on your first paragraph here: The most important argument in most of my posts and published pieces on this topic has been that something IS wrong with liberal education in New Haven and that Yale’s headlong rush into such an ambitious collaboration with Singapore is a reflection of it. A subsidiary point — confirmed, I’m sorry to see, by this exchange — is that we Americans are still free to criticize our own universities and government in ways Singaporeans really are not. Fear leaves no fingerprints; it produces silence — and apologists for the silence.
The recent announcement of the president of Yale University to the effect that he will step down from his office next June, allegedly because of tension about the new Yale-branded college in Singapore, was a small tsunami in the world of academia – and raised a broader question: what role do universities have in today’s society?
“Yale is betraying the spirit of the university”. A blunt statement from the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch issued in July got straight to the point. The infringement of rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly on Yale’s proposed satellite campus in Singapore would prevent the university from fulfilling its explicit primary function: “to discover and disseminate knowledge”. For this, Yale’s Policy on Freedom of Expression states, “a free exchange of ideas is necessary . . . the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”
These core ideas of free dissemination and exchange have framed the controversy surrounding Yale’s decision to set up a Singapore-based campus. From reading the reams of text written about its collaboration with the National University of Singapore to establish “Yale-NUS”, you might think Yale was about to settle a nineteenth-century commercial trading post. If the new venture is able to trade freely in ideas, there’s a chance it will have some impact on Singaporean society; if not – if its discursive trade is curtailed by the state’s draconian laws – we should think again about its worth (see Yang Rui, associate professor of education at the University of Hong Kong quoted here).
Despite protests from Yale academics the deal went ahead. But over the summer Richard Levin, the university’s president, resigned. According to Jim Sleeper, a professor of political science at Yale, this was not just because faculty had kept up their opposition to the Singaporean venture. Courtship of the city-state had been only one project of a “parallel university” that had emerged over several years beyond the control of academic staff, driving a wedge between two rival ideas of the university.
The parallel university had pandered to commerce and power, seeking financial gain in programmes on national security that trained students in the self-censorship required to commit “countless foreign-policy and domestic blunders”. University administrators had laid on courses that brought in the students (and the money) but which gave them an inaccurate impression of how power was and could be wielded for the good. For a more realistic notion of the workings of power, these students would have been served better by the liberal arts education delivered by Yale’s academics – at least according to Sleeper. Unfortunately these were precisely the people shut out of the parallel university’s management. Levin’s departure was a predictable result of their alienation.
Yet however much Yale’s faculty disagree with its administrative staff about what a liberal arts education should be, the two rhetorical positions are really not that far apart: both seem to hold the free trade in ideas up as the model of higher education to be pursued, only one emphasises trade at the expense of freedom, and the other freedom at the expense of trade. It is the free trade in ideas that grants access to Oakeshott’s “great conversation” of the humanities across the ages – and it is through the trickle-down of this great conversation to students and readers that the world will change. The comments released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in July suggest a similar understanding of academia’s power.
HRW’s statement fixed on an extremely important part of the university’s spirit. But not the only part. By restricting themselves to this interpretation of a university’s role, administrators, academics and commentators alike may be obstructing the opportunity to understand and wield power in a more focused way. The idea that power can be exercised in the course of academic research, not just supported or undermined by the publications that emerge from it or catalysed by students’ extra-curricular activities, tends to remain buried under conservative conceptions of the university. True to Oakeshott’s politics, these are conceptions built on values that look to protect freedoms assumed to have been won already, rather than asking whether new good might be achieved by changing old models.
Marx unsettles this comfortable position (and who better to antidote Oakeshott?). He warns that intellectuals “are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world”. Intellectuals, in this case the “Young Hegelians” who were the target of the Marx-Engels polemic The German Ideology, tend to invest phrases themselves with an undeserved power – a power whose magic distracts them from the real business of change. Change can be delivered with words, of course, but to achieve this requires recognition that “real intellectual wealth” amounts to the wealth of “real connections”. That ideas have power insofar as they are “directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men”. Without being attentive to how ideas function in the context of this material activity, we will watch our words melt away.
When universities decide to set down roots they place themselves in the midst of men’s material activity. They may seem like drifting airships only tethered to the ground by a thread, but universities are entangled with their environment. Rather than parachuting packaged qualifications and publications into a host state like conditional food aid, a university abroad has the capacity to take on the role of an embassy, employing diplomatic means to change its adoptive country. But academia has a tendency to reduce itself rhetorically to a trade in words and paper, squeezing out the subtle interweaving required for a more powerful role.
Yale-NUS’s branding does promise something new – an “innovative curriculum” that “maximizes its location in Asia”, having been re-shaped and re-imagined for its new context – but the focus remains on the trade in ideas: the words exchanged in coffee shops or “over tea in a tree-shaded courtyard”. It sounds very pleasant. Still, there are hints of something more interesting here: the “extensive opportunities to learn and work away from the campus” and research projects conducted in collaboration with classmates and faculty mentors. If these opportunities are seized by the right faculty members, Yale-NUS could really make an impression on Singaporean life, pushing into the spaces where universities have in the past used their resources to exercise real power.
There must be numerous examples of this power being exercised, even if they normally pass under the measuring instruments used to detect academic achievement. But here are just two addressing the kind of issues that HRW have brought up: the Human Rights Study Centre at Peking University Law School, whose researchers drafted legislation to protect Chinese citizens from torture and submitted it to the National People’s Congress; and the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, both an academic department and an NGO, established in the 1980s to help fight apartheid. The blurb on Yale-NUS’s new site, though, is not particularly encouraging: there are no specifics here, no ideas from faculty for collaborations with civil society groups or NGOs; the brand still feels mired in a conservative interpretation of academia’s worth.
This could change. A university’s power is, or at least can be, exercised through so much more than the words spoken on its grounds and the texts that it publishes: it encompasses more than just the institution’s success in trading ideas. A university can also create change through its core activities of research and learning and their interweaving with the “material activity and material intercourse of men” outside its walls.
Imagine, for instance, a Singapore-based, Yale-branded centre established to consider practically how to bridge the divide between universalist international law and countries’ historical practices and traditions – not couched as a confrontation between “universal human rights” and regimes “intent on infringing” these rights in the Human Rights Watch vein, but couched in words that leave open the possibility of positive action. Imagine that this centre uses its research to incorporate the knowledge of, for instance, gay Singaporeans under threat of prosecution, but also those politicians more sympathetic to their cause. And imagine that through its research a coalition of different groups is brought together who might not otherwise have worked in collaboration. What is said in the centre’s publications, what is discussed in its meetings and what its mission statement suggests may not be nearly as important as the partnerships and activities it promotes.
Many would balk at the compromising words needed to get this venture off the ground, and many would read in them the end of the Yale brand. But this is the work of effective diplomacy, the science of placing the achievement of goals above ineffectual bluster, and a science that has always had to operate at a level deeper than words alone. Turning the positive actions of our imagined centre back into Yale’s identity – mitigating the damaging force of our compromising words and demonstrating the worth of the actions they enable – would be difficult, but it would be worth it. Imagine how it could be done: at first, by using the example of similar centres run outside universities that have been particularly successful; later, by collecting the testimony of Singaporeans outside the walls of Yale-NUS – activists, academics, even politicians – who have noticed real change. It would be a difficult sell, but it might well be worth it: Yale could emerge stronger, the brand of conservative Singaporean politics weaker.
Yale’s lunge towards Singapore happened, it seems, without a full attempt to address how it might entangle itself in Singapore’s affairs while retaining the respectability of its identity and advancing its espoused aims. Addressing this would, of course, have required a deft piece of diplomacy. It would have required a sophisticated communications exercise, the building of alliances, the crafting of speeches, the making of distinctions and the refinement of values. Words would have been central to its success – though not words alone. But of course these are precisely the skills in which academics are trained.
Partly, perhaps principally, responsible for a split between administrative and academic staff throughout higher education is a dominant order of worth that exalts the power of words, of discourse, above all else. While this model persists, universities will continue to be pulled in two directions. They will remain divided into those who must value words if they value their career and those whose job it is to sell these words to students: those whose minds are fixed on publication and those responsible for herding students through the lecture theatre’s doors. Unless students also value words above all else – which they seem increasingly unlikely to do – academics will fail to produce what they must to render the university financially sustainable. But if the academy’s order of worth were more closely aligned with what students and society at large value, the two groups’ aims might meet. The commercial advantage that Yale’s administration has sought might be achieved more easily if the outputs of academic research were broader.
We are still caught in the mode of “ideological” thinking that Marx identified – one entrenched by a dominant model of scholarly communication and evaluation focused on publication in peer-reviewed journals, and one that encourages notions of academic freedom to centre on the ability to publish freely. The problem with this system is not just that it shuts most people out from accessing academic research (with open access publication, this situation is in any case finally changing); it’s also that it detracts hugely from work that has alternative, and perhaps more meaningful, outputs. Current attempts to sustain this system by incorporating proxy measures of impact fall short. Academics have begun to concern themselves with how much media coverage their work has achieved and whether it has been picked up by policymakers – essentially with how far and wide their words have been traded. But this is a long way off considering how research promotes a university’s values and builds collaborations that are actually going to achieve something worthwhile.
Change is not impossible, especially with the type of external pressures being exerted on universities right now. In a difficult economic climate students may be more attracted to programmes that see them getting involved in projects whose outcomes are measured in more than just words; the tech startup culture is already challenging forms of education that have traditionally centred on narrowly discursive skills, attracting students to training that allows them to integrate ideas into entrepreneurship. If what is valued in academic research is changing, there is already an opening for academics themselves to start valuing what their work achieves rather than what it claims.
Of course one of the biggest obstacles to such a change is academia’s incentive structure: career prospects are largely determined by how much academics publish and in which journals. But as tenured and even post-doctoral positions dry up this incentive structure may shift: it is no longer a sensible strategy for young researchers to devote themselves entirely to publication in journals or presentations at conferences that few, if any, outside academia will benefit from directly. They may need to look beyond academia for their incomes, to sectors where words are valued for the good they achieve rather than the distance they travel or the price they can be traded for.
A newly empowered academia may not be too much to ask for – even from the most traditional academic institutions. In reality the positions taken by both university administrations and academic staff are more subtle than represented here. There are those on both sides who recognise the power of the university to effect change outside the trade in ideas; and there are those who would not recognise any clear divide between administration and academic research in their own work. But rhetorically the conservative interpretation of academia still seems to be winning, even within organisations like Human Rights Watch. Now words intertwined with action are needed to pull academia out of its free-trade slumber and back into a position where its effects are meaningful, its values better-aligned with those outside its walls, and its future sustainable. Singapore might not be a bad place to start.
New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, opened in 2010.
By JIM SLEEPER
CLASSES are beginning at New York University’s new “portal” campus in Shanghai — the latest attempt by an American university to export its teaching and prestige abroad.
But there is no actual campus yet for the inaugural cohort of 295 students, half of whom are Chinese, and half from the United States and other countries. A planned 15-story academic building is still under construction. Classes are being held at East China Normal University, N.Y.U.’s partner in this joint venture. It’s an apt metaphor: a not-quite-real campus for a not-quite-real liberal education.
In April 2011, at a conference in Washington on “people-to-people exchange” between the United States and China, Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, praised N.Y.U.’s president, John Sexton, for his “vision to expand his university internationally while maintaining its reputation for excellence and academic freedom.”
But his meaning of “freedom” seems elastic. “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression,” he told Bloomberg News later that year. “These are two different things.” This was a startling statement, coming from a scholar of constitutional law.
And along with the controversy over a stand-alone campus that N.Y.U. opened in Abu Dhabi in 2010, it contributed to Mr. Sexton’s rising unpopularity back home: the arts and science faculty, N.Y.U.’s largest, voted “no confidence” in him in March. Both overseas campuses were financed primarily with foreign subsidies.
Mr. Sexton seemed oblivious to the experiences of Johns Hopkins University, whose School of Advanced International Studies has a longstanding center in Nanjing, China, that has faced restrictions on political discussion: the halting of an on-campus public screening of a documentary about the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 and a ban on off-campus distribution of a journal started by an American student with articles by classmates.
Diplomats have good reason to encourage educational collaborations with strategically vital nations. And higher education is under great strain in the United States — witness President Obama’s plans to make colleges more affordable and accountable by rating them — so the temptation to raise money by expanding into rapidly growing (or resource rich) countries is understandable.
But if you look past their soaring rhetoric, you’ll see globe-trotting university presidents and trustees who are defining down their expectations of what a liberal education means, much as corporations do when they look the other way at shoddy labor and environmental practices abroad. The difference, of course, is that a university’s mission is to question such arrangements, not to facilitate them.
I’m no opponent of collaborative research programs in law, business, medicine and technical training in countries that are wealthy or authoritarian or both. Many students in those countries may want to broaden their social and political horizons as well as their career skills. But pretending that freedom of inquiry can be separated from freedom of expression is naïve at best, cynical at worst.
There is perhaps no better example of such cynicism than at Yale, where I teach. Its decision to create a new undergraduate college in a joint venture with the National University of Singapore touched off one of the strongest controversies in the 20-year presidency of Richard C. Levin, who retired this summer as Yale’s president — a year after a nonbinding faculty resolution expressed grave reservations about the project.
Yale promised that the newly hired faculty at Yale-N.U.S. would “rethink liberal education from the ground up” in a campus built and financed by Singapore — an authoritarian city-state with severe restrictions on freedom of speech.
“We must look at ‘liberal’ in the sense of broad, rather than free,” Kay Kuok, a businesswoman who leads the Yale-N.U.S. governing board, told the government-controlled Straits Times. “It’s freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.”
Mr. Levin promised that students would be free to form associations “as long as they are not intolerant of racial or religious groups.” But the Singapore campus’s president, Pericles Lewis, said they would not be free to form explicitly political associations, much less stage protests of government policies, even on campus.
“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,” the American Association of University Professors warned last year in a letter criticizing the Singapore venture. The letter posed 16 questions that Yale hasn’t answered; it won’t even disclose to its faculty the full terms of the Singapore deal.
Reporters Without Borders this year ranked Singapore No. 149 out of 179 in press freedom — down from No. 135 last year. Faculty members at the Claremont Colleges, in California, and University of Warwick, in Britain, cited concerns about academic freedom when they rebuffed Singapore’s offers to fund liberal arts colleges there — before Yale accepted.
Academic freedom isn’t the only ideal at risk. In 2009, when the University of Wisconsin at Madison was invited by the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan to help create a biotechnology program, the Americans proposed instead to design a school for the humanities and social sciences, one inspired by “the Wisconsin Idea,” a progressive vision of labor rights and open government. Something very different was built: a $2 billion university, run by a consortium that includes the University of Wisconsin, and named for the autocratic president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who has a representative on the board of trustees.
Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented extensive labor rights violations in the United Arab Emirates, where migrant workers, who make up more than 70 percent of Abu Dhabi’s residents but enjoy few legal protections, are still building the N.Y.U. campus on Saadiyat Island, a luxury tourist and residential site.
When authoritarian regimes buy American universities’ prestige and talent, they “shortcut a process that took centuries to create,” Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, recently wrote in the South China Morning Post.
Universities’ mad scramble to expand reflects not so much grasping, imperialistic overreach as fundamental weakness: not only financial and market pressures, but also a drift in purpose and mission. University presidents have bought into an incorrect premise, espoused by thinkers like Fareed Zakaria and Kishore Mahbubani, that countries that liberalize economically will also liberalize politically. Universities need to recover a more “missionary,” freedom-seeking approach to their host countries, pedagogically and even politically. Or they should follow the model of Columbia and other universities that have created learning centers with much lighter footprints, not full-fledged campuses.
At its best, a liberal education imbues future citizen-leaders with the values and skills that are necessary to question, not merely serve, concentrations of power and profit. Universities that abandon this ideal are lending their good names to the decline of liberal education; turning themselves into career-networking centers for a global managerial work force that answers to no republican polity or moral code; and cheapening the value of the diplomas they hand out, at home and abroad.
Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale and the author of “Liberal Racism.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 1, 2013, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Liberal Education in authoritarian Places.
Personally, from the perspective of a Singaporean, Yale’s collaboration with us is good both at the intellectual and business level. As an educational hub, we must try to attract the best Universities to our land. It is about the business trend of the growing number of international students, and is about an industry that can provide for a good career and income for our people.
However, I do agree with Prof Sleeper, that one of the greatest learning experiences for a young student must be to channel its idealism into the real world of politics. It is when we are young, with the time, the close proximity of friends, the languid nights of shop-talk, that all these questions and problems of society be debated honestly, openly, so that our students are better prepared to be active citizens.
It is also true that this Government has never built our education for active citizenry, but to cater to the industries, towards a career, towards making a living. An authoritarian government which places economic growth as a source for its power and legitimacy. Its justification for such a policy throws us back to the days of students unrest, high unemployment and a general population uncertain of its immediate future.
Our history in the 1950s and early 1960s, became immutable realities whether through trauma or deliberate strategy to justify all sorts of illiberal laws, some are carried over from colonial times and then later some additional ones with local flavor.
Some have questioned whether an active citizenry is necessary for good governance, is it better that discussions be left to the elites, and we just huddle under the effects of laws determined without an iota of our input? That we have no input to the laws of our land, only a right to its protection? But even we, found out what St Augustine of Hippo said: ‘an unjust law is no law at all’. Are we likely to be protected from an unjust law, or be oppressed by such a law?
Even a government such as ours cannot control everything, technology is key, the pitfalls of a government that legitimized itself based on economics performance inevitably must open itself to technology.
From my perspective, Yale is also a technology. And like the technology of printing, travel, the internet, these are tools that we the Citizens of Singapore will use to determine our political future. Yale, needs only to do what it does, which is what Prof Sleeper does, to passionately defend its traditions of intellectual freedom.
Let me say that Yale is in a land of people who are free, despite all the restrictions and the laws. It may sound contradictory, however, it will be reconciled by a citizenry that is enlarging its space both politically and legally.
There should be no fear of pedagogy, we have already educated ourselves there, there should be no fear of politics, we are advancing, and pay no attention to Fareed Zakaria & Kishore Mahbubani, they are just celebrities, we are the real thing.
Below are letters to the editor of the Times that ran on September 9:
I object to how this essay characterizes the political environment at Yale-N.U.S. College, which opened last month in Singapore as a joint venture between Yale and the National University of Singapore.
The guiding principle has been that a campus life full of critical discussion and debate is a central part of the educational experience. Students are already actively engaged in discussion of controversial topics inside the classroom and throughout the campus. They are also free to join off-campus branches of political parties. They may gather freely within the college facilities to hear speakers and express views openly. Under Singaporean law, demonstrations in public outdoor spaces do require advance notice and a special permit.
Paradoxically, Mr. Sleeper says he supports cooperating with authoritarian regimes on technical and professional education, but would have us restrict undergraduate liberal education to societies meeting his political standards. How does he expect those countries to become more open if their students are denied the benefits of a liberal education and the attendant discussion of political issues on campus?
While Mr. Sleeper seems to want to keep a liberal education from any supposed contamination by contact with different political regimes, progress actually depends on encounters with the unfamiliar, which are at the heart of a liberal education.
PERICLES LEWIS Singapore, Sept. 2, 2013
The writer is president and a professor of humanities at Yale-N.U.S. College.
To the Editor:
Jim Sleeper details the profound cynicism of leading universities that have sold their names and resources to authoritarian regimes under the guise of expanding the scope of their liberal educations. In fact, this cynicism being played out overseas is but the latest episode in a decade-long assault on the liberal arts here at home.
When I hear administrators speak of building “strategic ambiguity” into mission statements so that they can be massaged according to the drifting demands of the market, liberal education is deeply imperiled.
Meanwhile, lip service paid to a liberal education serves to mask the careerism endemic to contemporary universities.
A liberal education, in short, has ceased to be what it should be: free inquiries undertaken by free men and women concerning the most important matters of human life and striving.
TIMOTHY SEAN QUINN Cincinnati, Sept. 1, 2013
The writer is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University.
To the Editor:
We disagree with Jim Sleeper in both theory and reality. The fundamental mission of a liberal arts education is to lead students to build the capacity and readiness to critically analyze issues, assumptions and values. Through this educational approach students develop their own sense of what is significant for themselves, their societies and the world to achieve.
Contrary to Mr. Sleeper’s claims, what we are proving in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai is how powerful a liberal arts education is in developing these habits of mind across differing political, social and cultural environments.
America’s own promise of freedom has become more real for all citizens over the past 50 years, thanks in good part to a liberal arts education.
And we are confident that a liberal arts education has the potential to produce citizenship and leadership for a more inclusive, cooperative and peaceful planet.
It is puzzling to us that people who claim to believe in the effectiveness of a liberal arts education should have so little faith in its adaptability and strength.
AL BLOOM
JEFFREY LEHMAN
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Sept. 2, 2013
Mr. Bloom, past president of Swarthmore College, is vice chancellor of New York University Abu Dhabi. Mr. Lehman, past president of Cornell University, is vice chancellor of New York University Shanghai.
NYU-ABU DHABI STUDENTS RESPOND, AND I TO THEM.
Editors at The Gazelle, the student newspaper of NYU in Abu Dhabi, published this account of students’ and others’ responses to my arguments. When I submitted a brief response, a Gazelle editor invited me to expand it into a longer letter that they featured as a column. He linked the longer openDemocracy essay from which my Times column had been condensed and which has more information about Abu Dhabi. Here is the newspaper’s column and my response: http://www.thegazelle.org/issue/14/features/liberal-arts/
In his recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, journalist Jim Sleeper opened his argument with a biting metaphor, describing NYU Shanghai’s unfinished campus as a symbol for the incomplete education that the university is offering its students.
The university inaugurated its first class only a month ago, but Sleeper argued that NYUSH has already failed — not because of any blunder in administration or curricula, but rather due to its very existence.
According to Sleeper, a liberal education cannot survive in countries with an authoritarian government. The goals of such an institution, he said, are doomed to perish among the thorny gnarls of the political, social and legal restrictions of such a state.
“[You’ll] see globe-trotting university presidents and trustees who are defining down their expectations of what a liberal education means, much as corporations do when they look the other way at shoddy labor and environmental practices abroad,” wrote Sleeper, referencing NYU Abu Dhabi, John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in China and Yale-NUS in Singapore with increasing skepticism.
The piece was frankly titled with the words “Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places” suspended over a photo of NYUAD’s current campus, a building that many students have come to see as the purple-and-silver heart of the city’s downtown area. The op-ed is just one out ofthemanyarticles that have criticized NYU’s presence abroad.
Yet NYU Public Affairs deemed this particular article pressing enough to warrant a response, which it published on its blog on Sept. 17. Through personalized letters to the editor, Vice Chancellor Al Bloom, professor Cyrus Patel and professor Matthew Silverstein defended NYUAD and the concept of a liberal arts education outside the West.
“It is puzzling to us that people who claim to believe in the effectiveness of a liberal arts education should have so little faith in its adaptability and strength,” wrote Bloom.
Senior Alexander Wang read The New York Times article and the Public Affairs post, both of which led him to think about the varying definitions of a liberal arts education abroad. There are certainly differences in opinion — what Bloom calls a quest for “a more inclusive, cooperative and peaceful planet,” Sleeper sees as a “mad scramble to expand.”
However, Wang believes that assuming the normative definition of a liberal arts education — a definition that is coded with Western and U.S. standards — is limiting.
“There are certain parts of the world where I think — and China is maybe a better example than Abu Dhabi — you can’t have that Western model [of liberal education],” said Wang. “My sense from Al Bloom’s response is that if you believe in the mission of a liberal arts education … [as] something that does have a global reach, then you need to accept that it’s a concept that is under constant revision.”
In his article, Sleeper also fixated on the political restrictions of the countries he listed, suggesting that the quality of a university is compromised by such regulation.
Patel was quick to respond to such allegations, while also addressing Sleeper’s sly allusion to possible human rights violations in the construction of the Saadiyat campus.
“Rachel Aviv notes in her profile of NYU’s president, John Sexton, in [the Sept. 9 issue of The] New Yorker that ‘none of the professors or students I talked to said that they felt restrictions on what they could study,’” Patel wrote. “Abu Dhabi insists that good working conditions and benefits are the rule on the construction site of its future campus, a fact recognized by the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch in Ms. Aviv’s article.”
Wang also maintains that freedom in the realms of academia and research exists in the UAE.
“I feel that a lot of my research interests and activist interests have revolved around topics that are maybe sensitive and I’ve never felt any pressure from [administration], faculty, anybody to quash those interests,” said Wang.
Wang added, however, that there are differences in social, legal and cultural standards to consider when researching in the UAE. These unique circumstances may require changing one’s academic methods, but don’t necessarily compromise the validity of the research.
“There is some necessity of keeping in mind the cultural, and also legal, norms of operating in this research environment,” said Wang. “At the same time, I don’t think that necessarily limits the kind of inquiry that you can make, but instead shows that you can’t use an American style of social research all over the world.”
Sophomore Geo Kamus expressed a similar sentiment in regard to social outreach and activism.
“We have several outreach organizations within NYUAD that attempt to address [Human Rights] situations in a culturally sensitive manner,” said Kamus. “I don’t think breaking the laws and addressing these issues without first respecting the [political] framework that we’re given is effective. As we’re representing an American institution, for us to just demand and impose what we think is right is unproductive.”
In his response on the post, Silverstein not only justified NYU’s expansion but also highlighted the benefits of shifting the liberal arts across cultures.
“If anything, NYUAD students are receiving an even broader education than is typically found in the U.S.,” wrote Silverstein. “Despite the diversity found at many top liberal arts colleges, there remains a strong American center of gravity.”
Sophomore Lingliang Zhang agreed with this sentiment, mentioning open-minded classroom settings as great catalysts for interesting, constructive dialogue.
“[At NYUAD] there’s more diversity in opinions,” said Zhang. “I also feel that we can better understand the ideals of what it means to have free speech or academic freedom in a context where those things aren’t taken as a given.”
Despite this, Zhang has also been in classes where professors have been less inclined to open the classroom to discussion. He referred to teachers from New York in particular, who are more accustomed to teaching massive, lecture-style courses.
Wang also mentioned the university’s diversity of opinions, recalling one class that launched into in-depth discussion about the separation between church and state.
“During that class discussion, we had so many people who came from different religious but also secular traditions where this separation between church and state is not necessarily a given,” said Wang. “And I think having students who come from those actual traditions, as opposed to studying them in abstract, really changes the nature of the discussion.”
A native Philadelphian passionate about social and political matters, Wang went from working on the Obama campaign and organizing protests in his small town of 3,000 people to living in Abu Dhabi, where he met students hailing from traditions vastly different from his own.
“Coming here was a huge shift,” said Wang. “[It] has made me think that this idea of freedom is something that’s so culturally coded. It’s very difficult for me to think that other students who come from non-American contexts, where they haven’t had the experiences I’ve had of protest or rallies, are somehow less free.”
Ms. Hu’s article cites Vice Chancellor Al Bloom’s puzzlement that people like me “who claim to believe in the effectiveness of a liberal arts education should have so little faith in its adaptability and strength.” Reading that, I thought of the title of one of my essays, “With Friends Like These, Who’ll Defend Liberal Education?” There I criticize John Sexton’s manifesto for his “Global Network University.”
Are NYU administrators who claim to advance liberal education really its true friends? Or are bright, well-intentioned students who believe them being misled? Words like diversity and engagement aren’t answers, if diversity lacks depth and engagement lacks tension. People with liberal educations don’t only keep in mind other people’s customs and norms; they interrogate and challenge them — as well as their own.
To put it differently, a true liberal education shows you that the world isn’t a flat place where everyone respects everyone else and goes shopping. It teaches that the world has abysses, opening at our feet and in our hearts, and it confronts them through what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “The Great Conversation” across the ages about enduring challenges to politics and the human spirit.
Every culture and religion has ways of naming and coping with those challenges, but many of those cultures and religions are being disrupted or dissolved by global tides of financialization, corporatist control of work and consumer marketing. Today’s casino-like financing of what is termed “development” would have horrified Adam Smith, as would the kind of marketing that’s ever more intrusive and intimate, groping and goosing the supposedly sovereign consumer as a narrowly self-interested, impulse-driven individual.
Liberal education asks us to take a step back from all this and think of ourselves as citizens who can decide together, through deliberation, not dollar-chasing, on courses of action that will advance certain social goods in common that we cannot achieve by ourselves. Instead of rushing to ride and serve the juggernaut in exchange for a nice salary, liberal education asks us to engage in rigorously critical thinking and in deep reading and conversing with literatures that plumb the depths I’ve mentioned. Doing that might even help to renew certain aspects of the ancient cultures and religions that are being disrupted. A liberal education in college education should enhance your capacity both to criticize and to renew society while you’re traveling whatever professional or other path you choose.
Liberal education also teaches us to be tolerant, but not relativist: As our search for truth broadens and deepens, we don’t accept that any system is as good as any other. We interrogate and sometimes challenge a lot of what passes for multi-cultural engagement, especially if it’s driven mainly by a desire to ride the golden riptides that are dissolving both old cultures and our republics and democracies.
Acquiring this kind of liberal education during four years in college takes hard work – even in the United States, when a student is also struggling to pay for an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village with a roommate from a very different culture or social class. If liberal education’s self-professed champions in New York aren’t teaching students from affluent suburbs to engage classmates from the South Bronx, they won’t teach real cross-cultural, cross-class engagement just by changing the scenery.
Let me propose that you’re getting a real liberal education in Abu Dhabi if: first, you’re learning Arabic there in the heart of the Middle East; second, you’re learning, for example, about the physical and legal conditions in which roughly 70 percent of Abu Dhabi’s residents who are migrant workers live; third, you’re taking all this to the touchstone of the humanist Great Conversation about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit; and finally, you’re acting on it in one of the outreach organizations that sophomore Geo Kamus mentioned in his article, Volunteerism in Abu Dhabi Broadens Perspectives.
If you’re doing that, great. But it can’t be just talk.
In saying this, by the way, I’m not “fixated” or “sly,” as The Gazelle’s article states. I’m posing a real challenge! I say more about Abu Dhabi in an essay published on openDemocracy.net from which my Times article was condensed.
James Sleeper is a lecturer of Political Science at Yale University. Email him at james.sleeper@yale.edu.
23.
“Innocents Abroad? Liberal Educators in Illiberal Societies”
Carnegie Council journal, Ethics & International Affairs
You can learn a lot about a college faculty and student body from their reaction to criticism, and I’ve learned plenty after publishing three short essays over Labor Day weekend, including one here, that criticized American colleges’ extensive collaborations with authoritarian regimes abroad.
One of those collaborations is Yale’s co-founding of a new, undergraduate liberal-arts “Yale-NUS College” with the National University of Singapore, the tiny, tightly run, deceptively glittering corporate city-state off the southern coast of Malaysia.
What I’ve learned from the reactions to my essays here and in The New York Times and the distinguished U.K. website openDemocracy.net may not be what you expect.
On the one hand, I found more than a hundred mostly heartening e-mail messages in my Yale mailbox, most from strangers, some from Yale alumni, many from academics at other institutions, but all from beyond Yale College itself. Harry Lewis, the far-sighted Dean of Harvard College from 1995-2003 , praised the essays on his blog, where he condemned “the hypocrisy of claiming to run an institution devoted to the liberal arts in the place where political discourse is severely constrained.”
But from Yale College itself came the thundering silence of a certain kind of self-censorship that unintentionally confirms Lewis’ observation: Even student editors at the supposedly independent Yale Daily News and the weekly Herald declined a short column by me that concludes this long one, beginning below with the words, “As the new Yale-NUS College opened in a shower of happy talk.”
That column foresees not scandal or open conflict for Yale in Singapore but an all-too smooth convergence of American and Asian modes of what The Economist magazine calls “state capitalism:” In that convergence, Singapore’s authoritarian variant will loosen up a bit politically, or at least cosmetically, while our own still-somewhat-libertarian but increasingly corporate variant will tighten up, intensifying its surveillance and ensnarement of citizens in coils of statutory and corporate fine print and plying them with degrading, after-hours escapes that drain civic spirit.
Here then, in addition to the original column below, is what I’d have liked to say directly to Yale students and faculty who are sleepwalking into these arrangements.
Two of the most common defenses of Yale’s venture that I’ve heard recently are:
1) Now that the new Yale-NUS College, a self-described “autonomous unit of the National University of Singapore,” has welcomed its first students, critics like me should stop warning darkly that Yale has given its name, its commitment to liberal education, and some of its best pedagogical and administrative efforts to an insidious morphing of liberal education’s mission — to interrogate and sometimes challenge concentrations of power and wealth — into mere career training that facilitates and gilds those concentrations.
Now that the Good Ship Yale-NUS has already sailed, say its apologists, investors, and hangers-on in New Haven, critics like me should wish its faculty reformers and idealistic students bon voyage in heading off to create “a community of learning, founded by two great universities, in Asia, for the world,” as Yale-NUS styles itself.
2) This fledgling community’s real vessel, Singapore, has flaws, its defenders admit, but that’s no reason to class it with the more repressive Abu Dhabi, Kazakhstan, or China, as I did. And it’s no reason, they say, to liken Yale’s venture to those of other American universities that have engaged those regimes in ways and for reasons that look much more commercial and cheap than Yale’s engagement.
Well! The short answer to the first defense is that Yalies in America aren’t really standing on shore waving good-bye. The whole university is on this voyage, too, and while the first-class passengers of Yale-NUS itself are getting to know one another, some of us are noticing the icebergs looming ahead.
A longer answer would scrap these metaphors about ships that have sailed, trains that have left the station, and horses that are out of the barn. It would explain instead how Yale itself has been changing as a new world has inundated and twisted liberal education in New Haven since long before the university’s governors thought of trying to reform it elsewhere.
The changes we’re undergoing are frightening because America’s republican civil society, which Yale helped for centuries to secure its promised rights at least some of the time and even to nourish Americans’ famous civic-republican optimism and good will, is collapsing.
Although advances for non-whites, women and gays have been real and absolutely necessary, have you noticed that most other inequalities have deepened? Have you wondered why the “counterculture” of the 1960s become an over-the-counter culture of lethal rampages at Black Friday store openings; road rage; cage fighting; gun massacres; a deluge of porn and violent entertainment; and an ever-more intimate, intrusive groping of our persons driven commercially, algorithmically, and therefore mindlessly, with even the state now getting into the act through massive surveillance and incarceration and rulings that equate those algorithmically driven profits with the speech of citizens that the First Amendment was written to protect and empower, not surround and drown?
To pursue these questions requires a good liberal education. But the dark currents I’ve just mentioned have influenced decisions about Yale’s corporation, curriculum, and character, morphing the college from the crucible of citizen leaders that it has been at its best into a career-networking center for doomed national-security grand strategists and a cultural galleria for global managers who no longer care for or answer to any republican polity or moral code.
I sketched this bleak transformation some time ago in a very long post here entitled, “Yale Has Gone To Singapore, But Can it Come Back?” Suffice it to say here now that conservatives who’ve blamed American civil society’s decline on the hapless left are discovering that they can no longer reconcile their yearning for ordered, even sacred liberty with their own knee-jerk obeisance to every “free market” whim of the casino-finance, corporate-welfare consumer-marketing juggernaut that they have championed even as it’s been dissolving their cherished republican virtues and sovereignty.
They can’t keep pointing fingers at the “cultural elite,” as Yale’s would-be grand strategist and former Foreign-Service servant Charles Hill did recently in a journal edited by Francis Fukuyama, without ever questioning or even mentioning what’s really driving that juggernaut.
For their part, neoliberals such as Richard Levin, Yale’s recent president and the co-founder of Yale-NUS and his successor Peter Salovey act as if they needn’t worry about these developments.They’ve swallowed the doctrine of former Yale trustee Fareed Zakaria that economic liberalization in authoritarian state-capitalist societies such as Singapore’s will spur political liberalization, with a little help from catalysts of change like Yale-NUS itself.
The danger there isn’t that Yale’s neoliberals are sailing blithely toward a collision with the slick pirates and thugs that operate behind Singapore’s glittering facade. It’s that the Americans’ arrival is only accelerating the inextricable entanglement of both parties to the “state capitalism” that The Economist described as prone to cronyism and authoritarianism of the kind we’ve seen metastasizing in the U.S. since 2008.
In this new entanglement, Singapore’s regime will liberalize a little: Yale Professor of Pinkwashing George Chauncey will teach a course on gay history at Yale-NUS this year, and he won’t be imprisoned or deported for it! And that will make it easier for the keepers of our own corporate state to rationalize its growing surveillance and ensnarement of American citizens in coils of corporate and statutory fine print right here at home, thanks to the NSA, the Citizens United ruling, mass incarceration, and more.
The two societies are heading not toward conflict, then, but toward convergence in a clueless co-dependency on the same juggernaut that’s already dissolving the American republic and that will break the empty materialism and increasingly hollow command of Singapore’s rulers, who tout “Asian” values but are really just Asian Mad Men clinging desperately to some Ivy on their long way down.
A year ago I gave a talk to some Yale students in which I acknowledged — indeed, insisted — that not all protest and “free expression” advances freedom and that First Amendment absolutists who push every envelope forget that the people and institutions they’re hitting with nasty super-PAC ads and political “gotcha” videos aren’t wholly wrong or bad and are often more vulnerable than even their critics want them to be.
But I also insisted on the harder truth is that discretion and caution at Yale have been carried way too far. A galloping culture of self-censorship is enveloping not only administrators and faculty but even students, who should be learning the arts and disciplines of truth-telling from liberal education at least as thoroughly as they’re learning the disciplines of power-wielding and wealth making from neoliberal education as we find it in the Jackson Institute and Grand Strategy programs and more than a few economics and political-science courses.
In Singapore and in some business corporations, self-censorship is prompted by fear of established power. It takes on subtle modulations and guises in daily work and classroom life, and its stress is relieved after hours in the destructive escapes I mentioned above. Yale students’ almost-pathological politeness in class is prompted not by fear of state or corporate power, as in Singapore, however, but by power’s allure:
The self-censorship of seduction here complements the self-censorship of fear over there. Some students here silence themselves almost enthusiastically — except when they’re chirping the conventional wisdom — because they crave the insider status that’s accorded only to those who prove they can be trusted never to suggest that the emperor has no clothes.
Socrates suggested just that about the elders of Athens, who sent him to his death. So did Nathan Hale (Yale Class of 1773) about the only established and “legitimate” government of British America by spying on its movements, for which he was hanged after saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” So has Edward Snowden, who has lifted a veil of denial about our own national-security state.
Young men and women at Yale who’ve known only neoliberal education may think they’re honoring Hale, the patriot of a nascent republic, by saluting the commanders and apologists of what it has now become – “Professors” Stanley McChrystal, John Negroponte, Ryan Crocker, David Brooks and other such recent administrative imports to the faculty. The sad truth is that most of these celebrity “professors” and their most loyal students would have hanged Hale and are ready to hang the Hales of our time.
Self-censorship that’s prompted by power’s allure and seductions rests on a terrible delusion. It hastens the decay of republican trust and freedom, both inside and outside the halls of power. It has a long and quite embarrassing history at Yale, from whose secret societies, such as Skull & Bones, emerged young planners of blunder after ignorant blunder in American foreign policy, from installing the Shah of Iran and stage-managing the Bay of Pigs fiasco to promoting the Vietnam War and its many pathetic successors in our own time.
Those young planners also made an exact replica of the statue of Nathan Hale that stands on Yale’s Old Campus, and they installed it in front of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. Hale, after all, was the first heroic American spy. But he did it for a fledgling republic, not for what riders of the golden tides of casino-finance, corporate welfare, and ever-more intrusive marketing have made of the United States in our time.
Hale was caught, perhaps because he was too bold at the wrong moment. There’s a legitimate difference between being discreet, as anyone trying to exercise power and keep a trust must sometimes be, and being silenced– a difference, that is, between exercising sound judgment not to do or say something, and accepting blindly that something is simply “not done.” Agreeing to take certain things off the table does enhance discussion and freedom of thought at times.
But when Yale promised that the newly hired faculty of Yale-NUS will “rethink liberal education from the ground up” in a campus built and financed by Singapore, it forgot that who pays the piper calls the tune. “We must look at ‘liberal’ in the sense of broad, rather than free,” said Kay Kuok, a businesswoman who leads the Yale-N.U.S. governing board, to the government-controlled Straits Times. “It’s freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.”
By collaborating with Singapore, Yale is doing no better than its old secret societies did at teaching when and how to draw distinctions between discretion and self-censorship. They erred too much toward the latter.
The Yale administration, which believes and insists that it’s acting on behalf of liberal education as surely as architects of the Vietnam and Iraq wars believed and insisted they were acting for freedom and democracy, has signed a pact, its terms undisclosed, with a power that, beneath its façade of meticulous, sanctimonious legalism, intimidates anyone who would write what I’ve written here or give the talk I gave a year ago in a public place.
That brings me to the second most common defense of Yale’s collaboration with Singapore: that it isn’t nearly as bad as Kazakhstan, China, or Abu Dhabi, because it’s highly literate, prosperous, clean, safe, and evolving toward a more liberal society just as ours is moving in the opposite direction.
But Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” which reviles law-enforcement agencies and courts for setting up and convicting the boxer Hurricane Carter, could never be produced or performed publicly in Singapore. He would be convicted of “scandalizing the judiciary” and imprisoned or exiled. Political websites troublesome to the government must post $50,000 bonds which they lose if they don’t immediately remove any item the government finds troublesome.
The 40 percent of the island’s population who are migrant workers are ruthlessly suppressed and deported if they ruffle the country’s vaunted anti-strike practices, as the Wall Street Journal has just described in a five-part series on migrant Chinese bus drivers’ efforts to secure decency and dignity in their work.
No wonder that in British parliamentary hearings two years ago on how Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation had broken the law to harass the parents of a murdered child and perverted government and the liberal public sphere, the mogul’s “most revealing moment,” wroteNew York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “was when he volunteered his admiration of Singapore, calling it the most ‘open and clear society in the world.’ Its leaders are so lavishly paid, he said, that ‘there’s no temptation, and it is the cleanest society you’d find anywhere.’
“It was instructive that Murdoch chose to praise a polished, deeply authoritarian police state,” Dowd added. “Maybe that’s how corporations would live if they didn’t have to believe in people.”
Two days ago I asked Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary general of Singapore’s small opposition Reform Party, a graduate of Cambridge University with double first class honors in economics and a member of the Amsterdam Institute of Finance, how he would gauge the evolution of economic and political liberalization in Singapore.
“I don’t know whether Singapore can claim for much longer to be freer than China, as in some respects the Chinese seem less cowed and more willing to protest,” Jeyaretnam says. “It is much more difficult for the central government there to control such a vast country. While Maoist China was more murderous than even Stalinist Russia, China today is much freer than the Soviet Union was till Gorbachev.
“I think what is so shocking,” he adds, “is that Singapore, a highly educated and literate society with a high standard of living, should have so little freedom. The middle classes have more to lose in material terms than people in Kazakhstan or China. The costs of individual political action are high, with most people unable to see immediate gain from democratization.
“Despite the veneer of economic freedom, Singaporeans perceive themselves in many ways as dependent on their government for housing (the government owns all the land), savings (the Central Provident Fund takes 30% of most people’s income to apply it to compulsory savings for health care and education) and employment [in Government Linked Companies that dominate the domestic economy and muzzle the press]. It’s a bit like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
“People have always before them the example of how you can lose everything for engaging in disapproved political activity, as did my father [opposition leader J.B. Jeyaretnam, who was ruthlessly harassed and crushed by the ruling party] or to a lesser extent Chee Soon Juan [secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party, whose persecution I described here before helping to bring him and Jeyaretnam to New Haven, where they spoke last year].
“While the government runs huge surpluses (representing foregone consumption) the people don’t see the benefit of those surpluses and the [ruling] People’s Action Party try to hide it from them as much as possible… Instead economic pressure is kept on the citizens by the threat they can be replaced with cheap migrant labor.”
Jeyaretnam thinks that Americans, “instead of deferring to countries like China and Singapore and seeing them as orderly, energetic, and rising, should see them as essentially parasites on a free global economic system. They do not have to be innovative because they just have to be efficient at adopting innovations from other free and democratic countries.”
Let me conclude now with the short column, only slightly revised here, that the Yale Daily News and Yale Herald declined to publish:
As the new Yale-NUS College opened in a shower of happy talk last month, I chatted on Yale’s New Haven campus with visiting Yale-NUS students who seemed bright, energetic, and only slightly awed as they sampled residential college life in the United States before settling into a Singapore campus that’s still under construction in every sense.
In criticizing the new college after talking with them I can’t help but feel as if I’m strangling an adorable puppy with my bare hands. Even some Yale-NUS faculty have seemed adorably earnest in planning what their Curriculum Report calls “a collegiate city in words.”
But Jeyaretnam’s observations remind me that this puppy is growing in a strange pen, on a leash held by masters whose goals aren’t liberal education’s at all. Although Yale-NUS defenders insist that Singapore is changing and that, as the puppy grows, liberal education could be the tail that wags the dog, the changes that are really underway suggest that America is becoming more like Singapore than vise versa.
“We have been given an extraordinary opportunity,” insists the Yale-NUS Curriculum Report, “to create a learning community where “forces resisting change do not exist” and where “there are no questions that cannot be asked, no answers that cannot be discussed and debated.”
Yale-NUS claims, with complete sincerity, it will try to “reinvent liberal education from the ground up…. for the world” with a Common Curriculum fostering “shared belonging… in a community” that will “instill habits of critical judgment and forbearing tolerance that arise from seeing peers struggle with problems one knows well oneself.” Students will keep portfolios of their progress and hone their speaking and writing skills.
We need that such reforms in America, not least at Yale College itself! But with liberal education buffeted by market riptides, reduced public funding, and social pressures that are nudging “critical judgment” and “community” toward careerism and conflict, Yale’s leaders have crossed an ocean hoping to reform it abroad.
Yale’s original founders did that, too. They crossed another ocean to set an example for sclerotic old England. They, too, covenanted to “make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together,… always having before our eyes our commission and community,… as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
But those Puritans knew what today’s neoliberal visionaries seem to have forgotten: Even a world “flattened” by commerce has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts. A strong liberal education helps us to face them by entering into what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “the Great Conversation” of the humanities about enduring challenges to politics and the spirit. Doing that prepares us to interrogate power’s flows and concentrations, not just scramble to serve them.
Certainly liberal education must make accommodations to power and wealth: In 1718, Yale’s founders turned for support to Elihu Yale of the first multinational corporation, East India Company (which later acquired the island of Singapura for the British Crown).
But can Yale’s new visionaries balance accommodation with independence by signing a secret contract with forces of resistance to change? What if their city upon a hill has already been mortgaged to powers with other purposes?
What if it’s really a career-networking center for a global managerial elite that surfs the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer marketing riptides and answers to no republican polity or moral code?
Where then will any of us go to vindicate our rights not to be indentured in fine print ratified by legislators who’ve been bought? Where will we find a strong republic?
Already, as Yale undergraduate Diana Rosen observed last winter, Yale College has compromised itself as a crucible of citizen-leadership by tweaking its own application process to generate thousands of ill-informed applicants to Yale-NUS to make the latter seem more selective.
Already, this “autonomous unit of the National University of Singapore,” which grants only NUS degrees, has promised future graduates a welcome to the Yale Alumni community — a nifty fund-raising gambit for Yale, but also an identity shift driven by money, not “shared belonging… in a community.”
Yale itself hasn’t always been a community of Nathan Hales, as the misappropriation of his image by the CIA’s Yale founders reminds us. But it has produced many of them, from Jonathan Edwards, who preceded him, through Dwight Macdonald, William Sloane Coffin, Jr,. John Lindsay, Howard Dean, and, just maybe, someone who’s reading this now.
A college always needs reminding that, as Cindy Hwang, another Yale undergraduate, wrote recently in a remarkable report for Foreign Policy in Focus “accepting vast sums of money” from authoritarian regimes “puts liberal arts universities in a morally compromising situation,” curbing freedoms to explore that require freedoms of expression.
Yet Yale’s administration has denied its faculty a decisive say on this diversion of its college name and academic resources. Its hand-picked faculty “advisory committee” on Yale-NUS should have been elected by professors choosing among colleagues who explained their inclinations and insisted that the terms of Yale’s contract with Singapore be disclosed.
Jeyaretnam’s comments also remind us, as have observers of certain European countries in the century just past, that high literacy and ordered cleanliness don’t guarantee liberty and that Singapore may be a mirror of what we ourselves are becoming.
The adorable puppy we’re feeding there may be growing up to become a lapdog. Or it may be gulping down a tempting piece of meat inside of which is a barbed spring that will uncoil slowly and tear at its innards, leaving it looking sickened and frightened.
Avoiding either of those fates will require the vigilance of liberal educators and students who, since the times of Socrates and Nathan Hale, have found courage to strengthen truth in public life by challenging its compromises, not covering for them. Perhaps some student at Yale will find the courage to print or otherwise distribute these musings to the entire Yale community, as editors at the Yale Daily News and weekly Herald did not.
Wellesley faculty defend an endangered ‘colleague’ – in China
by Jeff Jacoby September 18, 2013
XIA YELIANG knows that he may end up behind bars. He knows that his career in academia — he is a distinguished professor of economics at Peking University — may be about to end. He knows that he may become a social pariah, as friends and colleagues face mounting pressure to avoid him. He knows the anguish his wife may suffer for her loyalty to him.
Economist Xia Yeliang, a professor at Peking University, was among the first signers of Charter 08, a manifesto for human rights and democracy in China. Now he faces a faculty vote on whether he should be fired.
Like his friend Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who has spent much of the past 25 years in Chinese prisons, Xia had few illusions about what he was getting into when he signed Charter 08, a valiant manifesto calling for human rights and an end to one-party rule in China. Since then Xia has grown increasingly outspoken in his defense of liberty and his condemnation of Communist Party censorship and persecution. So when he learned that the economics faculty at his university intends to vote this month on whether to expel him, he understood which way the wind was blowing.
“I prepared myself for the worst long ago,” Xia told me when I reached him by Skype on Tuesday at his home in Beijing. “If I want to see constitutional democracy come to China, I must accept this. If it happens, I will bravely face it. I will not surrender; I will not back down.” In recent years he has been harassed, threatened, and followed by the police. Several times he has been detained for several days and interrogated (“Why did you sign the Charter? What is your relationship with Liu Xiaobo? What instructions have you been given by foreign agents?”) A faculty vote to oust a colleague is virtually unknown in China — the last case Xia knows of happened 30 years ago. Which means, he says, that “this is not coming from Peking University. It is coming from the central leadership.”
With political repression in China growing more severe, Xia doesn’t expect his faculty colleagues to risk their necks for him. Some have approached him privately to commiserate, but few dare say anything openly for fear of endangering their own careers. Profiles in courage are rare in academia anywhere, let alone under a government that recently issued a directive banning discussion of seven “dangerous” Western topics. Among the forbidden subjects: civil rights, judicial independence, and mistakes of communism.
Yet faculty members have come to Xia’s defense. In Wellesley, Massachusetts.
At Wellesley College, more than 130 professors — almost 40 percent of the entire faculty — have signed an open letter vigorously defending Xia’s right to express his political views without fear of retaliation. They weren’t just spouting off. In June, Wellesley and Peking University launched a prestigious academic partnership that will include faculty and student exchanges, joint research, and virtual collaborations. But if Xia is fired because he champions democratic liberties and criticizes the Chinese Communist Party, the Wellesley professors warn, they “would find it very difficult to engage in scholarly exchanges with Peking University.” Confronted with such an inexcusable breach of academic freedom, they will ask Wellesley’s administration to shut down the new program.
If that’s what it comes to, Wellesley’s president says she’ll do it. “We will follow our faculty’s lead,” H. Kim Bottomly told Inside Higher Ed. If Wellesley’s professors rebel at partnering with a university that engineers the punishment of a pro-democracy dissident, the partnership will end.
The presidents of Wellesley College and Peking University signed off in June on an academic partnership that will involve faculty and student exchanges and joint research. Wellesley professors say that makes Peking economist Xia Yeliang their “colleague” — and makes it their duty to defend his academic freedom.
This isn’t the first time that the faculty at a major US institution of higher education has objected to being morally stained by collaboration with an unfree, antidemocratic regime. Faculty members at Yale, for example, last year raised concerns about the “lack of respect for civil and political rights in Singapore,” with whose harsh government Yale has teamed up to create a new school. In a recent essay, Yale political scientist Jim Sleeper argues out that Western universities hungry for the status and dollars such joint ventures generate are pursuing the chimera of “liberal education in authoritarian places.” Professors should object. What kind of message is sent when schools ostensibly dedicated to free minds and unfettered thought ally themselves with some of the world’s most repressive regimes? “Pretending that freedom of inquiry can be separated from freedom of expression,” Sleeper writes, “is naïve at best, cynical at worst.
Wellesley’s faculty show one way to grapple with the moral dilemma: Treat every endangered dissident at a partnering institution as a colleague, and vocally demand the same freedom for him that they would demand for themselves. Wellesley’s collaboration with Peking University makes the fate of Xia Yeliang directly relevant to every Wellesley professor. Xia’s Chinese colleagues may be too intimidated to raise the roof in his defense. His American “colleagues” don’t have that excuse — and, to their credit, they know it. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
Policing University Partnerships in Authoritarian Countries
By KARIN FISCHER | THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATIONOCT. 5, 2014
Prof. Tom Cushman and Prof. Susan Reverby of Wellesley College. He is working to widen his campaign to press for a broader conversation about the agreements struck between American colleges and those in authoritarian countries. Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
Wellesley, Mass. — A year ago, Wellesley College found itself embroiled in a debate about academic freedom in China.
Led by Thomas Cushman, a sociology professor at the college, a group of faculty members rallied support for a Peking University professor who said he was under fire for his political views. Mr. Cushman and others argued that the case raised questions about Wellesley’s work in China and challenged the administration to reconsider a nascent partnership with the university.
A year later, Wellesley, a liberal-arts college, still works with Peking University but has overhauled its process for setting up international collaborations, giving faculty members a bigger say. And although the controversy has died down at Wellesley, Mr. Cushman wants to take his campaign beyond the campus.
He is working with the Chinese professor, Xia Yeliang, who is now a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, to press for a broader conversation about the agreements struck among American colleges and those in China and other authoritarian countries.
Colleges need to examine the consequences of these relationships, they argue, and American faculty members must play a more prominent role in setting the terms for overseas partnerships, particularly in places with differing notions of academic freedom.
Mr. Xia said: “What’s the purpose of education? What’s the purpose of international exchange? You have to keep that principle in mind.”
Otherwise, he warned, international partners may “just want to borrow your good name and ruin that name.”
With its gracious buildings and verdant lawns, Wellesley, a 140-year-old women’s college, seems the picture of serenity. But the atmosphere last fall there was anything but. Over several contentious months of debate, Mr. Cushman and his allies were branded as cultural imperialists seeking to impose Western academic principles. And he was not shy about playing hardball, suggesting that those who wanted to continue the relationship with Peking University had an agenda and even accusing one, a Chinese-born mathematics professor, of promoting the agenda of the Communist Party.
That a relatively modest partnership led to such acrimony highlights what a sensitive issue international projects can become. After all, Peking and Wellesley have no plans to set up a joint campus or joint degree programs, just exchange a handful of students and scholars.
In fact, the debate was really three: one about Mr. Xia, another about Wellesley’s work with Peking and in China, and a third about professors’ part in major initiatives at the college, including its global strategy.
The uproar began when professors at Wellesley learned that Mr. Xia, an economist and human-rights campaigner, said he might be fired by Peking. Mr. Cushman and others drafted a petition, eventually signed by nearly 40 percent of the faculty, protesting Mr. Xia’s possible dismissal and calling on Wellesley to rethink the partnership if he lost his job.
Mr. Xia was indeed dismissed, a year ago, and maintains that the firing was retribution for his criticism of the Chinese government, including his decision to sign Charter 08, an appeal for democracy and human rights in China. Peking administrators have disputed that, saying his contract was terminated because he was a poor teacher.
The contested narrative around Mr. Xia’s firing led several petition signers at Wellesley to withdraw their support.
Philip L. Kohl, a professor of anthropology, was one who came to see the Xia case as less than clear-cut. In the end, he said, he felt that there was a greater chance of effecting change in Chinese higher education by continuing the partnership, rather than dissolving it. “I think positive results are better achieved by being engaged than by condemning from afar,” he said.
Mr. Cushman said he was not out to kill the partnership, pointing out that the Wellesley petition never called for severing connections, only reconsidering the relationship.
Early in his academic career, he studied dissidents in the twilight of the Soviet Union, and he brings a Cold Warrior’s skepticism to working with China.
“You can say that exchanges are a good idea and that we need to be careful,” Mr. Cushman said. “I don’t know why you can’t do both. ‘Make friends with the wolf but keep one hand on the ax,’ as the Russians say.”
Xia Yeliang came under fire at Peking University for his political views. He is now a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
Others on campus viewed Mr. Cushman’s critique as too black-and-white.
“I understand my colleagues’ desire to help the guy,” Charles Bu, the professor accused of having promoted the Communist Party agenda, said of Mr. Xia. (Mr. Bu has denied being a spy.) “But they don’t understand the culture. The way they went about it was just shortsighted.”
The heart of the critique by Mr. Cushman and Mr. Xia is that working with universities in authoritarian countries like China could limit academic freedom on American college campuses.
Will topics taboo in China, like Tibetan independence and democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, be similarly off-limits at Wellesley, at least in the context of the partnership with Peking?
American colleges have not done enough, Mr. Cushman argued, to ensure that core academic values are part of international partnerships. Instead of pressing for these principles, he said American colleges had too often adopted a cautious approach.
“We’re being deferential to realpolitik concerns,” Mr. Cushman said. “We’re being more diplomats than critical intellectuals.”
The agreement signed in June 2013 by the presidents of Peking and Wellesley, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, makes no mention of academic freedom, characterizing the partnership only in the broadest of terms. That will not be the case with new international agreements. A special panel, named in the wake of the Xia case and led by Wellesley’s provost, Andrew Shennan, has drafted a template for future collaborations with foreign universities that includes provisions on academic freedom.
In addition, all institutional partnerships will now have to be vetted by a faculty international-studies committee, though relationships between individual researchers or at the department level won’t be subject to such review.
Mr. Shennan called the past year’s discussion constructive and said faculty members were right to insist that they be “central actors” in overseas projects, like the one with Peking, that have an academic component.
While Mr. Cushman, too, is satisfied with the outcome, he and Mr. Xia said they believed that it was not sufficient for such discussions to happen at Wellesley alone. After all, similar debates over international linkages and professors’ roles have convulsed other institutions, including Duke and New York and Yale universities.
Indeed, such concerns are not limited to American higher education. This summer, Mr. Cushman was asked to give a speech on the subject at the British Parliament, sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank in London. But Rupert Sutton, the author of a report on the influence of foreign sources of revenue on British universities released by the society, said institutions’ decisions to forge connections with and accept funds from abroad were rarely discussed. Instead, the debates that occurred tended to be one-off, on a campus-by-campus basis, and “really only come up when there’s something really big and controversial,” Mr. Sutton said.
Mr. Xia and Mr. Cushman would like to encourage a broader and more sustained conversation about — and scrutiny of — colleges’ overseas activities. They hope to organize a scholarly conference that would bring together academics to examine the implications of overseas partnerships from a variety of perspectives, including economic, political, and anthropological. Mr. Xia is also a visiting fellow at the Freedom Project, a Wellesley academic endeavor that explores the concept of freedom in different societies and is directed by Mr. Cushman. As a sociologist, Mr. Cushman is interested in questions like how international academic exchanges may influence the transmission of knowledge and whether they affect the policies and institutional processes of colleges themselves, a concept known as isomorphism.
Eventually, they want to publish an edited volume. Plans for the meeting and the volume, however, have yet to move from conceptual to concrete. Given Mr. Cushman’s tough view of China and the lingering questions about Mr. Xia’s firing, however, an open question is whether the pair can rally others to rejuvenate a long-simmering debate.
Mr. Cushman is confident that they will. In the end, he said, he hopes that when American college administrators “think about doing business with a sultan or a shah or a premier or a czar or the autocrat du jour, they ask some questions about what they gain, what they lose, what the risks and benefits are.”
Correction: October 8, 2014
An earlier version of this article paraphrased incorrectly from comments Thomas Cushman made about Charles Bu. Mr. Cushman said Mr. Bu was promoting the agenda of the Communist Party of China — not that he was an agent for the party.
Derek Bok was named president of Harvard not once but twice: in 1971, after anti-Vietnam War protests of 1969 had left students’ blood on his predecessor Nathan Pusey’s hands and had shut down the university in 1970; and again in 2006, after a faculty vote of no-confidence in the obstreperous Lawrence Summers prompted the obstreperous Wall Street Journal to claim that Harvard’s faculty has “as much intellectual diversity as the [North Korean] Pyongyang parliament.”
Each time, Bok worked to heal bitter divisions that threatened to make the university ungovernable. Each time, he worked to renew American liberal education’s essential but always fragile mission: not only to serve the liberal capitalist republic on whose Constitution and munificence academic freedom depends, but also to question and sometimes even challenge the very corporate and state powers on whose restraint academic and political freedom also depend.
Each time, Bok succeeded in that high-wire act. “Awesome” is a word I wish my students at Yale would outgrow, but I’ve talked with Bok just often enough since 1998 to know that it characterizes his balancing of an adherence to high principle, an alertness to paradox, and an adroitness in leadership. And now, at 83, he has published Higher Education in America, a magisterial yet often contrarian assessment of challenges facing university governance, teaching, and, indeed, survival.
Wesleyan University President Michael Roth has just reviewed Bok’s new book briefly here in Huffington Post, but my purpose is different. I want to tell a couple of stories about Bok that aren’t in the book and to quote some passages that Yale’s new president, Peter Salovey, and its new provost, Ben Polak, and their deans and functionaries should read, as should faculty at Yale and other institutions who are working to defend academic freedom against manifold encroachments from people who would destroy it in order to save it.
Bok shows why defending academic freedom requires hard judgment calls, such as one he doesn’t mention in the book: Shortly after becoming president in 1971, he unilaterally tenured the eminent political theorist and European Jewish emigre Judith Shklar, naming her the John Cowles Professor of Government in a department where she’d been languishing for nearly 15 years as an untenured lecturer.
A Harvard president has a “constitutional” right to do that. But was Bok’s move an unwarranted encroachment on scholarly self-governance and peer review? Or a long overdue blow against a sexism that hadn’t openly declared itself?
These questions take on new inflections if you imagine Lawrence Summers tenuring someone he favored in a foot-dragging department. Bok was able to do it only after he pondered peculiarities of the case that I won’t go into here and because enough faculty trusted his balance of high principle, alertness to paradox, and nuance in leadership to accept, even welcome, his decision.
Such was Bok’s credibility that not only did he serve as president for 20 continuous years, until 1991; he was called back for a year in 2006 to put Harvard together after the division and debacle of the Summers years.
If American universities are to survive what’s happening to this country, many brave, sound judgments will have to be made by faculty and administrators, often working together, but often by challenging one another. They’ll have to find ways to steer liberal education through cultural, economic, and political riptides without degrading it into a commodity, a grand strategy, or an ornament for a global managerial class that answers to no republican polity or moral code.
With students and even faculty scrambling to serve the casino-like financing of a consumer-groping global juggernaut that’s delivering millions from grinding poverty into soulless depravity, who’ll ensure that universities keep asking the right questions about it and finding answers that haven’t been over-determined by profiteering or political pressure?
Bok doesn’t tell old stories to guide the perplexed. He offers wise judgments and summarizes new research to show liberal educators what to watch out for and how to be better navigators in shifting cross-currents.
Thus the same Derek Bok who elevated Judith Shklar and learned that “Presidents may have a better sense of the real-world constraints and the institution’s needs” also writes that “professors frequently have a clearer appreciation of academic values than do top leadership.” And he warns that presidents who “believe that they will be judged almost entirely by their success in ‘growing’ the institution… are more likely to resort to dubious methods of raising money and to overlook nascent threats to academic values.”
“It is executive authority, after all, not [faculty] governance, that was primarily responsible for such debacles as the well-known excesses of big-time college athletics and the costly failure of for-profit internet ventures undertaken by several prominent universities around the beginning of the century,” he adds. He even finds it “difficult to accept the view of trustees and former presidents who claim that [shared administrative-faculty governance of universities] are dysfunctional and that faculty participation should diminish. Professors have obvious interest in theinternal affairs of universities and their support for decisions affecting teaching and research is so essential to success that there is no real alternative to shared governance.”
Shared governance isn’t achieved if administrators appoint faculty “amen corners” of professorial courtiers who don’t communicate openly with colleagues and aren’t much trusted by them. Such appointments break the faith and trust that universities depend on.
Yale’s president Richard Levin and four of its trustees broke that faith when they unilaterally committed Yale’s name and its administrative and pedagogical resources to a joint venture with the corporatist, manifestly repressive city-state of Singapore. They broke it further by appointing an “advisory committee” of ambitious professors in New Haven to mediate the deal.
Two earlier Yale presidents who savored academic leadership’s paradoxes and nuances without sacrificing its principles were A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of colonial Connecticut governors who crusaded for liberal education against both McCarthyism and Communism during the Cold War, and his successor Kingman Brewster, Jr., a direct descendant of the Elder William Brewster, the Plymouth Pilgrims’ minister, who defended liberal education against both would-be revolutionaries in the streets and conservative reactionaries among Yale alumni who had somehow missed out on liberal education itself.
Doing that took not only immense personal strength but a deep sense of liberal education’s mission and the university’s soul. Brewster once deflated one of his relatives’ preening about their distinguished lineage by joking that he was glad that “you and I had the wisdom to choose such a magnificent ancestor.”
It was out of that sort of confidence that, in 1968, as Columbia University exploded in a police bust of anti-war demonstrators assailing an administration as clueless as Harvard’s would be a year later, Brewster called his old Harvard Law School colleague Archibald Cox, the future Watergate special prosecutor, to propose an emergency strategy session at a secret picnic spot between New Haven and Cambridge.
Cox brought along Bok, who was just then becoming the new dean of Harvard Law School, to the hillside meeting with Brewster near Mystic Seaport, on the Connecticut coast. Bok recalls that Brewster arrived in a limousine bearing a butler who set out a table with white linen service and crystal – another instance of Brewsteresque panache that presaged an intensely serious discussion from which he emerged to become the Ivy president whose adroit balancing of high principle and alertness to paradox prevented Yale from exploding during the 1970 murder and conspiracy trials of several Black Panthers, including Bobby Seale, in New Haven.
Brewster’s public statement, given atop a metaphorical powder keg, that he was “skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.” disarmed some self-styled revolutionaries who were hankering to blow up Yale. But it made him a lightning rod for alumni and other conservative critics whose bitter resentments of the anti-war and black power demonstrators might have fallen even more heavily upon students who were supporting the trial defendants. His strategic opening of the campus, instead of barricading it, may have saved it from being stormed, occupied, and violently vacated, as Harvard’s and Columbia’s had been.
Although Bok didn’t need to head off such violence as Harvard’s president, he did have to cope with its aftermath. And although he doesn’t write about that in this book, academic leaders and scholars will devour his judicious renderings of challenges facing liberal education’s mission now, a mission that is both conservative and radical: As universities struggle toseparate educational fads and mirages from reforms that truly strengthen their capacity to preserve and extend knowledge, they learn to resist the seductions and manic demands of profiteering that stampedes faddists toward dead ends.
Among such dead ends, Bok warns, is the predatory sub-priming of higher education by some for-profit universities.
He notes that only 20 percent of American undergraduates attend four-year, residential colleges and that many of the rest are older, have dependents, and are desperate to find careers. While some profit-driven schools may serve them, too many for-profits play on young people’s yearnings, drawing them into inappropriate environments and insupportable debts.
In the process, universities are transformed from crucibles of a shared civilization and civic cultures into over-the-counter cultures, and students are taught not to be citizens who can deepen their commitments to society while in college, but to be consumers who are out only for themselves.
To keep from drifting toward such degradation of society and individuals, universities need wiser “investors,” some of them public, some private, some intellectual, some economic – civic-minded leaders who “are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in founding the University of Virginia in 1819.
Bok shows that neither a top-down, business-corporate model nor a statist one will encourage universities to “tolerate any error” or to liberate reason to combat it. Doing that requires the artistry and courage of a Whitney Griswold, a Kingman Brewster, or a Derek Bok – not necessarily an American aristocrat, as they were, but anyone who can measure up to the challenges Bok surveys in Higher Education in America.
Repeatedly he urges an understanding of undergraduate liberal education as a resource for citizens who can think critically and give voice effectively to their concerns while listening to the concerns of others – even when they’re “citizens of the world” more than of a particular country. As Bok poses the challenge, “How can colleges prepare their students for a world in which their lives are likely to be linked increasingly with countries and cultures far different from their own?”
If, for example, New York University wants to prepare its students by opening portal campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, shouldn’t it first have proved that it can prepare a student from the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale to “link increasingly” to a student from the South Bronx, where NYU abandoned a handsome campus years ago? Shouldn’t Yale show that it can link its students to those of the radically different cultures and social classes living only a few blocks away?
Or are campuses abroad more a dodge than an engagement of the differences that will really matter in the global village? Bok stops short of endorsing them without strong cautions. He cites enormous political risks and their drain on energies and resources that are increasingly needed at home. And he tells me that he takes a dim view of Singapore, where Yale has co-founded a Yale-National University of Singapore College.
“I had my own run-in with [Singapore’s authoritarian founder] Lee Kuan Yew some years ago,” he told me, “when the government in Singapore jailed the young head of the Harvard Club for ‘consorting with the wrong people.’ I wrote in protest to Lee and was surprised to receive a letter of several typewritten pages from him trying to persuade me that Asian values are different from those in the United States.”
Lee’s concoction of “Asian values” has been widely discredited — and he himself has tempered it — as a deterrent to Western moralists who dare to judge repressive societies. But as authoritarian rulers try to ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing, they’re expanding state coercion to shore up the social cohesion their societies once drew from the Confucian, Islamic, or even Western colonial traditions that are dissolving amid huge new inequalities and degrading and criminal behavior.
The Economist magazine casts “a sceptical eye” on this variant of state-capitalist control, which it says was pioneered by Singapore’s Lee, whom it characterized as “a tireless advocate of ‘Asian values,’ by which he meant a mixture of family values and authoritarianism.”
Such rulers want liberal education to help them finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of their bargains with “go go” economic development in the name of increasing prosperity (and increasing inequality and cultural instability.) They want American colleges’ imprimaturs and the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education may provide to regime managers and spokesmen.
But Bok told me that “Nothing in that experience [with Lee Kwan Yew] would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore.” His commitment is to improving teaching and learning for undergraduates, and while no one questions that many students in burgeoning new Asian markets are energetic and terrifically bright, their regimes are bent on channeling what they learn. Universities have more than enough such “channeling” to contend with in the United States, whose civil society and politics are collapsing before our eyes for want of civic-republican leadership training of the kind that American colleges used to provide.
Bok worries that even most professors are unaware of a large, growing body of rigorous research that discredits their rosy assumptions about what their students are actually learning. Only “efforts from outside the faculty itself” will “make professors aware that the methods of instruction they are using or the assumptions on which their course requirements rely are open to serious question in light of emerging evidence.”
The technological opportunities and social pressures, and, with them, the habits and expectations of undergraduates, have changed so much in recent decades that they retain far less from lectures and spend less time studying than their lecturers assume.
University departments haven’t taken a hard look at what they’re actually teaching to undergraduates who’ll never become scholars but who need to enhance critical thinking and communicating as citizens and professionals – abilities that, the best research now shows, aren’t enhanced by most of their courses:
“Only a small fraction of the questions asked on exams in liberal arts colleges and research universities demanded critical thinking; most questions simply called upon lower levels of skills of memory and comprehension of material.”
“The key to educational reform lies in gathering evidence that will convince the faculty that current teaching methods are not accomplishing the results that professors assume…. Once that is acknowledged, the underlying values of the faculty will usually compel them to seek corrective actions. The critical questions, then, are whether academic leaders will actively seek to identify existing weaknesses and how they can best go about doing so.”
Bok cites devastating, depressing studies of what undergraduates actually take away from coursework, especially in their majors. Here the same Bok who recognizes the indispensability of faculty to university governance notes that professors need to be prodded by others – including enlightened college presidents — to stop using “academic freedom” and “autonomy” to cover for self-interested methodological preoccupations that compromise their teaching of undergraduates who won’t follow them into labyrinths of research.
“The rationale for the discipline-based liberal arts major is far from clear,” he notes, challenging departments to develop learning objectives for students who won’t become academics. And he suggests breaking up lectures into interactive and applied group exercises.
He’s remarkably – and, again, perhaps, paradoxically — open to pedagogical possibilities in emerging technologies, as long as we don’t inflate them for mercenary reasons: “As technology develops, [online] encounters will come to seem more and more similar to classes in which all participants are sitting in the same room.” Even “computer games, along with avatars in virtual words and other vivid simulations, create additional opportunities for engrossing learning activities….”
I haven’t done even rough justice here to Higher Education in America. It has sections on professional schools, research protocols and trends, and more. Bok has also written other books on universities in the marketplace, undergraduate education, and affirmative action.
But university leaders and faculty who want to save liberal education from corporatization and to rescue undergraduates’ preparation for citizenship from consumerism should read this book and put more energy into shared governance as he portrays it and has mastered it, with all its tensions and warts.
Singapore Migrants Riot, Websites Chill, but Yale-in-Singapore Keeps Warm
JIM SLEEPER
Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University
Yesterday a South China Morning Post account of a riot by Indian and Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore noted that “Singapore is persisting with a four-year campaign to reduce its reliance on foreign workers, after years of open immigration policy led to voter discontent over increased competition for housing, jobs and education. The move has led to a labour shortage and pushed up wages, prompting some companies to seek cheaper locations.”
A video of the riot posted by the government-controlled Straits Times predictably emphasized lawlessness and re-establishing control, but not the riot’s likely causes, other than to vow that the government will “investigate” them.
But last summer the Wall Street Journal ran a 5-part series on a strike by migrant Chinese bus drivers in Singapore who felt they’d been cheated in wages and forced to live in miserable conditions. More than 25 of them were promptly deported.
Also last summer, workers building the Yale-National University of Singapore College’s new campus were kept on the job even as air pollution rose beyond acceptable safety standards, again focusing attention on working conditions in Singapore.
You might think that someone in the government would have learned something by now without requiring a new commission to “investigate” the causes.
Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary-general of the tiny opposition Reform Party, tells me that although government-controlled media and spokesmen blame the riot “on the availability of alcohol and racial stereotyping of Indians as peculiarly susceptible to alcohol,… the real reason is that the PAP’s growth strategy is bound up with the exploitation of cheap labour rather than raising wages of SIngaporeans. These workers apparently earn as little as US$14 per day which is not much more than they were getting thirty years ago! Plus they are exploited by middlemen and deeply in debt. …No wonder they feel they have nothing to lose.”
And no wonder the riot has produced the frantic yet already-stale government response, including using Gurkhas, who are basically foreign mercenaries, to quell this disturbance by other foreigners. Inevitably, we’ll also hear renewed calls for “Singapore for Singaporeans.”
The pattern in Singapore isn’t as egregious as in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, more than 60 percent of whose populations are migrant workers living in virtual indentured servitude. But Singapore’s ruling party will be increasingly hard put to keep the lid on this discontent, and while that explains recent efforts to reduce the proportion of migrant laborers in the population, it also suggests how difficult it will be to reduce income inequality without turning the new world order’s go-go investors into “Going, going, gone” ones.
Not only isn’t the government saying much about these dimensions of the Little India riot. It’s also warning internet sites not to spread rumors about the riots, and it has been intensifying its crackdown on internet sites, notes Cherian George the distinguished Singaporean scholar of press freedom whose rejection for tenure at Nanyang Technical University was protested internationally.
“After trying to impose unnecessarily onerous registration requirements on two sites, one of them, Breakfastnetwork.sg, has decided not to comply,” George writes. “The [Singapore government’s] Media Development Authority’s response: ‘Since Breakfast Network has decided not to submit the registration form, and will therefore not be complying with the registration notification, MDA will require that Breakfast Network cease its online service.'”
George judges that the government’s self-described “light touch” regulation of the internet has now been superseded by a heavier hand.
The fallout from these abuses of labor and freedom of speech casts a long shadow on Yale-NUS’ hopes to become an international hub for liberal education. Nearly 70 percent of the new college’s students may be Singaporeans, if you include permanent residents of Singapore who aren’t citizens (the official figure is that 62 percent of Yale-NUS students are Singaporeans). People keep asking why Yale has lent its name and energy to this venture.
Why did Yale even inflate the numbers of Yale-NUS applicants from around the world last year by enabling all applicants to Yale College in New Haven to apply simultaneously to Yale-NUS by doing nothing more than checking a box? The answers to such questions are still secret, in that Yale and NUS keep secret the terms of their agreement, signed and sealed before Yale’s faculty had any say in it.
The Yale College Faculty in New Havenvoted this week to establish an elected faculty Senate for the first time in the institution’s 312-year history. At the meeting, the distinguished Southeast Asian Studies scholar James Scott rose to remind resistant, prevaricating administrators that establishing a Senate must entail a power shift, not least because Yale-NUS was created without faculty deliberation or decision-making.
Yale’s new president, Peter Salovey, should not appoint a faculty committee to scope out the new senate’s powers. The faculty should elect colleagues who indicate their philosophical and policy inclinations. Yes, dear professorial moderates: The governance of universities involves differences between faculty and administration about who should have power to decide certain questions, as retired Harvard President Derek Bok has made amply clear in his new Higher Education in America and as he told me in an interview that I reported here in Huffington Post.
The question of who deliberates and decides is important, as Singaporeans themselves know well. Americans shouldn’t be learning and copying from Singapore in this matter. Yet they are, and this is what Salovey must prove Yale will not do.
Singapore has its own history and challenges. In facing them it has made itself an attractive “port of call” and entrepot for ships coming from and going to other places. But Singapore’s own problems are going to get bigger. Even its successes owe much to its geopolitical situation and its tiny size, which make it too politically anomalous to be a model for large liberal-democratic republics.
In other words, we critics of Yale’s venture in this increasingly troubled island aren’t preoccupied with Singapore’s sins but with Yale’s misjudgments in accommodating itself so readily to them in a joint venture bearing its name. As we challenge those accommodations, we are not being moralistic and passing judgment on Singapore, as its defensive apologists often accuse us critics of doing. We are criticizing the judgment of Levin and four current or recent Yale trustees — Charles Goodyear IV, Charles Ellis, G. Leonard Baker, who have been longtime investors and advisers in Singapore, and Fareed Zakaria, the former Yale trustee who has touted Singapore as a model for economic liberalization that produces political liberalization.
We want to know what these leaders thought they were doing. We sense that they launched Yale on a grand misadventure that — like the repeal of American lawsthat had preventedbankers from behaving like casino operators, or like the launching of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – seemed noble and even triumphant at first but looked myopic and worse before long.
Recall the original enthusiasm for the Iraq venture as a leader in democracy promotion and nation-building. So swept up in the nobility of that venture was the columnist David Brooks that he promoted it while teaching at Yale in the fall semester of 2002, in an article for the Yale Herald, and that he kept his son Joshua up late to watch the statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down by U.S. troops in Baghdad in March of 2003. In 2004, Brooks, supporting George W. Bush, announced on PBS that Bush’s opponent John Kerry hadn’t been able to pass “the Joshua test” because he’d been introduced to Joshua but hadn’t connected with him, “and anyone who can’t connect with at 10-year-old boy can’t connect with the American electorate.”
How wonderful the Iraq War and Bush’s re-election seemed to Brooks and many others teaching at Yale back then! How mercilessly they tweaked feckless liberals who wrote angry columns denouncing both ventures! But Brooks may have gotten a bit more than he’d wished for when Joshua graduated high school and joined the Marines and soon afterward entered the University of Indiana, Class of 2014. Brooks reports that Joshua has loved Indiana, but the father, whose love-hate obsession with the Ivy League is well-known, was back at Yale last year teaching a course on “Humility.”
Far be it from me and other critics of Yale’s venture in Singapore to predict consequences similar to those of American elites’ other recent misadventures. I have not predicted explosive scandals, strikes, or other conflicts at Yale-NUS. What I do fear is that, at the same time thatdisturbances like the Chinese bus drivers’ strike and the Little India riot unfold, we’re witnessing an increasingly seductive, tight convergence of state-capitalist modes of social control in the lives of more privileged residents of both the U.S. and Singapore.
I mean the kind of social control described in William Dobson’s The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which shows how self-censorship spreads when “fear leaves no fingerprints.” I also mean the softer control symbolized in a recent decision by The Brookings Institution, a once-noble Washington think tank headed by a Yale graduate and former deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, to accept hundreds of millions of dollars from Singaporean sources eager to burnish the cloudy reputation of the country’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew, by naming a chair in Southeast Asian Studies for Lee – the first time Brookings has named a chair for a political leader rather than simply for a donor.
Normally I’d favor naming academic posts and buildings for public figures, rather than donors whose only distinction is their largesse. But the public leaders should represent the values of the institution that’s honoring them. The elder Lee has quite a few smooth, even slick, neoliberal American apologists these days, and his role in Singapore’s founding and development is well known. But he hasn’t enough democratic nerve ends in his body – he doesn’t even believe in “one man, one vote” – to be honored even by the cash-hungry Brookings.(I’ll find another occasion to unpack Lee’s record (and his apologists’ rationalizations) as well as the Brookings money.)
Harvard’s Bok isn’t one of Lee’s apologists. “I had my own run-in with Lee kuan Yew some years ago when the government in Singapore jailed the young head of the Harvard Club for consorting with the wrong people. I wrote in protest to Lee and was surprised to receive a letter of several typewritten pages from him trying to persuade me that Asian values are different from those in the United States” — a notion so discredited in contexts like this, as I’ve explained here, that Lee himself has since backed off of it. “Nothing in that experience would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore,” Bok wrote me.
I sketched my worries about the all-too-smooth convergences between Singapore and the U.S. in a column that ran both here and in the independent Singapore website Tremeritus three months ago, so I won’t repeat the rest of those worries here.
I and most critics of Yale-NUS hope that its hand-picked, inaugural class of 157 students and its equally smart, idealistic faculty will have experiences as rewarding as those that Yale journalists visiting Yale-NUS in its first month of classes described in celebratory reports here and here.
But I urge every Yale-NUS student to read about Mae Holland, the bright, wide-eyed protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new, 1984’ish novel The Circle, (here’s an excerpt that ran in the New York Times.) And I hope that they’ll do something that neither she nor anyone else in the novel was able to do: use liberal education to ensure that they aren’t skipping too lightly up a garden path, as she did, into an enticing but soulless Orwellian circle of neoliberal enslavement that the columnist Joe Nocera captured so acutely in a short piece on Eggers’ dystopia.
Singapore’s Little India riot and other disturbances may fire the imaginations and deliberations of Yale-NUS students and faculty. So should the Yale-in-New Haven faculty’s decision to establish a Senate whose actual power and freedom they’ll have to secure with energetic participation, not with the mere appearances of the rule of law that Singapore’s government presents to the world. Yet the Yale administration sometimes seems to be trying to learn from Singapore how to do the same thing in its own university’s governance in America.
Americans who haven’t given up on liberal democracy — as I suspect increasingly that the more pathological of our leaders secretly have — should pay close attention to what’s going on behind Singapore’s glittering facade before they praise Yale’s role in plunging Yale-NUS’ idealistic young students and faculty into a reinvention of liberal education there. Why not join in a struggle to reinvent it right here, in an ailing American republic and amid global riptides that are turning liberal education into a commodity and management skill?
WELLESLEY, Mass. — Members of the Wellesley College faculty reacted strongly when word spread that Peking University might fire Prof. Xia Yeliang, a critic of the Chinese government. Professor Xia, an economist, had visited Wellesley over the summer after the college signed a partnership agreement with Peking University.
In September, 130 Wellesley faculty members sent an open letter to Peking University’s president, warning that if Professor Xia was dismissed for his political views, they would seek reconsideration of the partnership. The next month, Professor Xia was fired. Peking University said it was because of his teaching, not his politics, but many at Wellesley doubted that. Still, after much debate, the faculty voted to keep the partnership, as the college president preferred.
Like American corporations, American colleges and universities have been extending their brands overseas, building campuses, study centers and partnerships, often in countries with autocratic governments. Unlike corporations, universities claim to place ideals and principles, especially academic freedom, over income. But as professors abroad face consequences for what they say, most universities are doing little more than wringing their hands. Unlike foreign programs that used to be faculty-driven, most of the newer ones are driven by administrations and money.
“Globalization raises all kinds of issues that didn’t come up when it was just kids spending junior year in France,” said Susan Reverby, one of the Wellesley professors supporting Professor Xia. “What does it mean to let our name be used? Where do we draw a line in the sand? Does a partnership with another university make their faculty our colleagues, obliging us to stand up for them? Do we wait for another Tiananmen Square?”
Wellesley is hardly alone in wrestling with these issues. Many American universities have partnerships with Peking University, but few reacted to Professor Xia’s dismissal.
“We went into our relationship with Peking University with the knowledge that American standards of academic freedom are the product of 100 years of evolution,” said Richard Saller, dean of the school of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, which opened a $7 million center at Peking University last year. “We think engagement is a better strategy than taking such moral high ground that we can’t engage with some of these universities.”
This week, another prominent professor, Zhang Xuezhong, who teaches at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, lost his job after refusing to apologize for writing that the Communist Party was hostile to the rule of law. That university has many partnerships with foreign institutions, including an exchange program with the law school at Willamette University in Oregon and an executive M.B.A. program offered with the University of Wisconsin law school.
With so many universities seeking a foothold in China — New York University opened a Shanghai campus this year and Duke will open one in Kunshan next year — concern is growing over China’s record of censorship. Earlier this year, the Chinese government banned classroom discussion of seven topics, including human rights and the past mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party.
Of course, similar issues arise elsewhere. Last year, just as Yale was starting a liberal arts college in partnership with the National University of Singapore, the Yale faculty, despite the university president’s objections, passed a resolution expressing concern about Singapore’s “recent history of lack of respect for civil and political rights.”
“There’s a million unanswered questions about Yale and Singapore,” Christopher Miller, a Yale professor, said. “We don’t know how much of the Singapore specialty of self-censorship has taken place. I continue to think the whole setup is inappropriate, and deeply regret that this was set up where it was and the way it was.”
Last month, Frederick M. Lawrence, the president of Brandeis University, suspended a 15-year partnership with Al Quds University, a Palestinian university in Jerusalem, after campus demonstrators in black military garb raised a Nazi-like salute, and the president of Al Quds, asked to condemn the demonstration, responded with a letter that Mr. Lawrence deemed “unacceptable and inflammatory.” Syracuse University followed suit. But Bard College, which offers dual degrees with Al Quds, is staying.
Many American colleges argue that their presence abroad helps to spread liberal values and push other societies toward openness, whereas leaving would accomplish little.
“I think engagement is more important than rules right now,” said Allan Goodman, the president of the Institute of International Education. “It’s in our institute’s DNA to advocate engagement, because that process is what brings change.”
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, cautioned that universities must be prepared to revoke partnerships that violate basic principles of freedom. “I do see value in liberal education, but you have to ask on what terms,” he said. “If a country like China wants to legitimize a cramped version of liberal education by attracting prestigious Western universities, there’s a real possibility of those universities compromising the values on which they were built because they’re so eager to get into China.”
Some universities, including Columbia, have created study centers rather than branch campuses, in part to avoid commitments that would be hard to break.
At Wellesley, the faculty protest did have some effect: Wellesley’s president announced that a faculty group would develop recommendations “for the parameters and elements of the partnership” to be approved by the full faculty. And Professor Xia is being invited to spend two years as a visiting fellow at the Freedom Project, a program at the college.
But given that Chinese universities have many Communist Party representatives in their administration, Thomas Cushman, the sociology professor who leads that project, is still deeply concerned. “We’re not telling them to adopt the Bill of Rights,” he said. “We’re asking what it means for Wellesley to work with a regime that instills fear in people. I’m concerned that a formal relationship could affect how we work here — that maybe in our exchange program, we’d only send people who talk about safe subjects.” ‘
When American universities establish campuses abroad, they usually have explicit agreements guaranteeing free speech for faculty and students within the cloister of the campus — but implicitly accepting local limits on off-campus expression. “As I believe would be true in any country,” Duke’s provost, Peter Lange, said, “your behavior there is governed by the laws of that country.”
That understanding also holds at New York University’s campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, both paid for by those governments. While John Sexton, the university’s president, sees it as the first global university, that vision has many critics. The faculty has voted no confidence in Dr. Sexton partly over this issue.
In 2011, after the arrest of three dissidents in the United Arab Emirates, Human Rights Watch called on N.Y.U. to protest: “Is N.Y.U. going to advertise the magnificence of studying in Abu Dhabi while the government persecutes an academic for his political beliefs?” Sarah Leah Whitson, the group’s Middle East director, said then.
The university responded that in Abu Dhabi or elsewhere, it did not get involved in matters outside its academic mission.
In September, the N.Y.U. chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote to the trustees, describing their concerns about the overseas campuses. “Accepting vast sums of money from foreign governments puts N.Y.U. and every scholar affiliated with the university in a morally compromising situation,” it said. “In such situations, academic freedom is usually the first casualty.”
While working inside a bubble in a country hostile to free speech, the letter said, faculty’s important public role is stifled.
The trustees did not respond, said Andrew Ross, the head of the university’s A.A.U.P. chapter.
Some of us who’ve known Yale well for decades believe that its joint venture with the National University of Singapore is a mistake, even though its first students and faculty seem happy, and even though we wish them well. To understand why we dissent even while Yale-NUS is up and running, please join me in a thought experiment.
Imagine that your oldest, best friend — someone you’ve roomed with, run with, and remain in close touch with — introduces you to a partner he or she has found for an undertaking bigger than a business venture, one that’s meant to advance your friend’s deepest political and personal dreams.
Muting your surprise and initial skepticism, you notice that your friend’s joint-venturer is affluent, pleasant, and smart. Over dinner, you also notice something reserved, calculating, and slightly controlling in this person’s interactions with waiters and responses to well-meant questions. The grace notes of a civilized cosmopolitan are there with the insistent smile. Yet something seems wrong, and you wonder if your old friend has noticed it too.
Apparently not. But, asking around, you find that your friend’s co-venturer has begun several other, similar partnerships that failed because the other parties rebuffed them early or terminated them, complaining of the calculating, controlling qualities you’ve noticed. You also learn that on some occasions your friend’s new partner has often behaved degradingly, even cruelly, to assistants and even to fellow-citizens. Despite the partnership’s cordial veneer and contractual language, this partner has seldom respected the rules and values that you and your friend have honored in all your dealings.
So you confront your friend, who surprises you with a shrug, some eye-rolling, and a slightly cynical curl of the lip you hadn’t seen before. “Grow up!” your friend says in exasperation. “Look around! Most people we know are like that. The world we thought we saw while we rambled together across three continents isn’t what we imagined.
“My partner’s not a bad sort,” your friend continues. “You’re forcing your provincial American moralism on someone who knows how the world really works but also wants to learn some things from me about how to navigate and channel it even better.
“This is no romantic engagement,” your friend concludes. “It’s a long-overdue convergence, and we’ll all be better off for it. When I’m my partner’s guest, I’ll obey my partner’s rules. But my host will learn from me and, in a way, from you, too. ”
What your “old friend” said in the last three paragraphs is what Yale-NUS’ inaugural dean Charles Bailyn and other Americans at Yale-NUS have told those of us who’ve challenged Yale’s joint venture with Singapore. And Singapore’s ruling elites, who’ve funded and licensed the new college as “an autonomous unit of the National University of Singapore” and oversee its every move with a “light touch,” are personified by my thought experiment’s new “partner.”
At a February 20 panel on Human Rights in Singapore at Yale Law School, Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch and the international human-rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam explained why Yale has given an extremely repressive regime the kind of legitimacy it craves but doesn’t deserve and that the new college’s efforts to enhance liberal education won’t offset this political damage.
Yale has led in hiring the college’s enthusiastic faculty; has guided it in drafting a high-minded “collegiate city in words,” a vision of liberal education set out in a Curriculum Report; has helped design pedagogical structures inside the bubble of the brand-new panopticon of a campus; and has culled the first 157 students — mostly Singaporeans, under some governmental pressure. By Yale’s account, this has prompted an harmonic convergence, a honeymoon of mutual discovery across differences in background and opinion ever since the college opened late last summer.
That’s great for the terrific students who’ve been confined to strict rules and family ways. Now they can discover one another and more of the world with dedicated mentors guiding what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called humanism’s “Great Conversation” across the ages about enduring challenges to politics and the spirit. But Singapore has tightened its coils around everything a liberal education should encourage. Amsterdam and Robertson challenged New Haven students and faculty to give more visibility to the chilling offenses that they listed and that I’ve described elsewhere. They asked us to protest and to open law clinics to “adopt” prisoners and defend political victims of the regime’s deft impositions of defamation and bankruptcy.
Asphyxiation of news media has increased as government has strengthened its grip on the internet as well as on print and TV. In 2013, Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore 149 of 179 nations in press freedom, worse than its 135 ranking of 2012.
Human Rights Watch’s Robertson noted that Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis has told its students to “be mindful of your local Singaporean context” and has said that Yale-NUS “will not place restrictions beyond those of Singaporean law.” But the country’s scandalous judiciary has been tightening its Orwellian array of restraints on expression, political activity, and labor rights. It also railroads dissident writers, artists, scholars, and political leaders into disgrace, bankruptcy, and imprisonment. Ironically, the more deftly selective and arbitrary the “light touch” of regulation and surveillance in recent years, the more the pervasive self-censorship, chilling the public conversation a healthy society needs.
Amsterdam asserted that Singapore still bans from the Yale-NUS campus his client Chee Soon Juan, a Singapore opposition party leader whom I helped to bring to New Haven two years ago with another leader, Kenneth Jeyaretnam. Amsterdam challenged Yale-NUS to invite Chee as a litmus test of how much Yale kowtowed to “Singaporean law” when it agreed to the joint venture.
You might ask why we should bother to condemn Singapore when the U.S. has its own terrible wrongs. Mightn’t liberal education, even in Yale-NUS’ bubble, pierce the smog of obfuscation and catalyze constructive change in Singapore, as we hope it can in America? Yes, insists Rajeev S. Patke, a NUS professor and early partner in the venture. Patke notes that the West once banned books, as Singapore does now, but insists the books are available on campus for “academic study.”
Human Rights Watch’s Robertson wondered what would happen if a Yale-NUS student took such a book to a discussion off campus or even just blogged about it, now that new internet restrictions are being imposed. But Singapore bristles with apologists like Patke who point fingers at America’s many ills and wrongs. The difference is that we Americans who point fingers at Singapore do it here, too, as apologists like Patke dare not do there.
Liberal educators at Yale do struggle even in New Haven to keep humanism’s Great Conversation going against the pull of market riptides and against tightening coils of government and business surveillance, fine print, and laws that increase your debts and diminish your opportunities. Singapore looks good by comparison only because it’s a tiny, tightly-run city-state. In Singapore, libertarians, civic-republicans, and democratic socialists can barely breathe.
The saddest truth about the Yale-NUS venture is that Singapore’s ways and ours are converging, and I fear that we Americans are becoming more like them than vise versa. In my thought experiment above, your friend — in this case, Yale — has changed after making compromises that should have been resisted. Since Singapore craves the legitimacy we give it, it may respond to pressure, but only if we in New Haven show the political will to push beyond the limits of a contract that should never have been signed.
Jim Sleeper Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University
For Yale in Singapore, It’s Deja-vu All Over Again
Posted: 09/26/2014 9:37 am EDT Updated: 11/26/2014 5:59 am EST
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.”
Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore 149th out of 179 in press freedoms in 2013 — down from 135th in 2012, owing partly to new restrictions on websites. The prime minister and his long-ruling People’s Action Party have a long, well-documented record of using meticulous, Kafkaesque legalism to block freedoms of expression they want to block and to permit whatever they decide to permit in this rich little city-state of 5.6 million, 30 percent of them migrant workers with few rights.
Yet Levin objected that the Yale faculty resolution expressing concern about all this “carried a sense of [Western] moral superiority,” and other Yale-NUS champions insisted Yale must “respect the laws” and “cultural differences” of a country where it’s a guest. Ivory Tower liberals and libertarians shouldn’t condemn Singapore: “What we [Americans] think of as freedom, they think of as an affront to public order,” explained Yale-NUS’s inaugural dean Charles Bailyn.
Singapore wants western tourists, investors, and contractors to enjoy superb seaside dinners and clean, efficient public services and private markets. It doesn’t want them to notice, behind the façade, a tight-fisted governance that generates a subtle but pandemic self-censorship among its citizens that’s even tighter than the self-censorship that some American business corporations generate among their employees. Is American higher education really going to liberalize Singapore, or is it becoming more like it?
A sad precedent for the current dance around the film “To Singapore With Love” took place two years ago. In 2012 Chee Soon Juan, a principled Singaporean opposition-party leader, faced a government ban on leaving the country. Chee, who holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, had been fired from his lectureship in neuropsychology by NUS in 1993 after joining the “wrong” political party. For protesting this, he was railroaded by Singapore’s scandalous judiciary into a “defamation” conviction and fined into bankruptcy. Unable to pay, he was barred from leaving Singapore to accept a human-rights award in Oslo.
But then the Yale International Relations Association and the faculty Southeast Asia Studies Council invited Chee to New Haven. Worried about jeopardizing its grip on Yale’s lucrative name — which helps it stem its brain drain of students who go to universities in the United States and the United Kingdom and don’t return — Singapore suddenly reduced Chee’s debts enough for him to pay them and leave.
And now Singapore’s Orwellian Media Development Authority has decided that “media or related courses… may require access to… films that are classified R21 or NAR,” so it has approved “some leeway” to these institutions to screen films for educational purposes on condition that… prior approval has been sought from the MDA before the films are acquired.”
The film remains otherwise banned in Singapore, and the filmmaker, who’s negotiating with the MDA to “edit” it to be “suitable” for Singaporeans who aren’t taking special courses, has asked Yale-NUS not to show the film she actually made.
Certainly the film needs to reach a wide Singaporean audience. But should it be watered down, under bureaucrats’ direction, to please the government that it’s criticizing? And should an institution bearing Yale’s name accustom itself to bowing and scraping to accommodate this, or should it stand up and pressure Singapore, as a lone filmmaker cannot?
Those of us who consider Yale-NUS a grand misadventure warned not that conflicts would erupt between American and Singaporean values but that both sides would grow all-too accustomed to a genteel, MDA-like convergence between Singapore’s authoritarian state corporatism and America’s increasingly corporatist surveillance and purchased politics. (Since this column is adapted from one in The Yale Daily News,check that site to see if responses suggest anything but a smooth convergence.)
A few liberal “permissions,” “exceptions,” and libertarian grace notes won’t do. “One should not compromise with an authoritarian state on the grounds that towing the line is better for the locals,” says Kenneth Jeyaretnam, another brave Singapore opposition party leader who spoke at Yale with Chee. “This should not be a debate for Singaporeans only. Without outside pressure, there will be little pressure to change, and some Singaporeans will continue to believe that the government has the right to shield them for their own good.” No government has that right, and certainly not with Yale’s blessing.
Can Yale’s “Pivot to India” Offset its Mistakes in Singapore?
Jim Sleeper, lecturer in political science, Yale
For more than a year now, headlines in Singapore’s government-controlled press and some independent outlets have taken shots at the three-year-old Yale-National University of Singapore College, an experiment in liberal-arts education in Asia that some of us warned would encounter obstacles underestimated by Yale’s globe-trotting trustees and administrators. But even the negative headlines veil the real problem here: Liberal-arts colleges shouldn’t commit their good names and their principles to the care of tightly run, authoritarian regimes.
A recent story in Singapore’s Straits Times ballyhooed the impending departures of three of Yale-NUS’ four deans. Another depicted students as dissatisfied with the curriculum, citing “feedback from students about erratic grades and confusing lectures in some science topics.” Singapore’s TODAYonline claimed that “Yale-NUS courses do not match students’ academic expectations” and that “Lack of depth in modules, staffing issues [are] among reasons for students dropping out.”
Most of these stories were so poorly reported and dubiously sourced that they read more like politically motivated warning signals than like serious journalism. But that only suggests a deeper problem — as did Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong himself, in a speech at the October 12 inauguration of the newly-completed Yale-NUS campus.
Speaking in the presence of Yale’s former president Richard Levin, who led Yale into the joint venture, and of current president Peter Salovey, Lee declared that a Yale-NUS education must not be a carbon copy of a Yale liberal education and that Yale will have to adapt to suit Asian ways. “Singapore PM Lee Warns Yale-NUS: This Isn’t New Haven,” read the headline in the Asian Sentinel.
Lee’s rather musty, faux-multiculturalist invocation of “Asian values” was diplo-speak veiling his more narrowly instrumentalist, authoritarian, state-capitalist assertion that Yale-NUS is now in its paymaster Singapore’s pocket. That should prompt us to recall the Yale political theorist Seyla Benhabib’s more prescient warning, sounded four years ago in “Why I Oppose Yale in Singapore”:
“If [Yale’s] purpose is to set a model for a liberal arts education, why not engage India, the country with a free and contentious public sphere and an extra-ordinary intellectual life both in India and in the Indian diaspora? ” she wrote. “Experiments in democratic education are best performed with in genuinely open, multicultural and multi-faith democracies, such as India, rather than in the artificial, boutique-like security of places like Singapore or Abu Dhabi.”
At Benhabib’s urging, Yale College faculty passed a resolution expressing concern about “the lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore,” ideals that “lie at the heart of liberal arts education as well as of our civic sense as citizens,” warning the Yale administration not to compromise those ideals “in any dealings or negotiations with Singaporean authorities.” Four months later, Levin announced that he would resign as Yale’s president. (He now heads Coursera, the MOOC giant in California.)
Yale-NUS does deserve a chance to prove itself, and Singapore’s mean-spirited gestures only suggest that the college is trying to vindicate liberal education in a regime that’s as unreceptive to its letter and spirit as Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and the American Association of University Professors have shown Singapore to be.
Perhaps in belated acknowledgment that those warnings had merit — and possibly in a more immediate response to Prime Minister Lee’s own triumphalist pronouncement that Yale must do things his way — President Salovey on October 15 signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the vice-chancellor of India’s Ashoka University “that codifies and reaffirms how [Yale and Ashoka] universities have previously worked together and establishes a framework for potentially deeper collaboration in the future,” the Yale Daily News reported.
Salovey emphasized, revealingly, I think, that “Yale’s faculty have been involved with Ashoka from its start and the cooperation represents the kind of global engagement that I want to foster — faculty-initiated and faculty-directed activities that benefit students and contribute to the research, teaching and service missions of Yale. Over the last decade, Yale has been deliberately expanding its engagement with India through the Yale India Initiative and this cooperation with Ashoka fits into the goals of the initiative to expand Yale’s ties with India.” It also departs markedly from the model that Salovey’s predecessor pursued with Singapore.
In the hall of blue smoke and mirrors where heads of state and heads of universities seem condemned to tread, Lee’s warning and what we might call Salovey’s pivot to India may, like Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” reflect an eagerness to shift perceptions about past blunders as well as to regain opportunities not taken. Such shifts are always announced with professions of smooth continuity, great good feeling, and the dawn of a bright new day, but Yale’s declarations about faculty initiative and liberal transparency in the India relationship differ almost pointedly from its secret contract with Singapore.
I don’t mean to suggest that Yale is pulling out of Singapore or rebuffing offers from the regime there — as more than twenty universities have done. Just as Obama and the national defense establishment aren’t leaving Afghanistan and the Middle East in their “pivot” to East Asia, Salovey and the Yale Corporation aren’t withdrawing Yale-NUS from Singapore in turning to India.
But both know that their predecessors rushed them into arrangements that have compromised democracy and liberal education, and they’re trying to offset them. Those of us who’ve warned about those blunders extensively here and elsewhere and have urged more constructive advances in liberal education at home and abroad hope that Yale’s venture in India will incorporate the hard lessons of its blunder into a university-to-regime contract in Singapore whose terms have never been disclosed.
Three years after admitting its first class, Yale-NUS continues to receive applications from students who share their Yale College applications with the school rather than apply directly.
Currently, a student can apply to Yale-NUS in three different ways. A student can submit his or her application through Yale-NUS’ own application portal, apply directly to Yale-NUS through its page on the Common Application or share his or her application to Yale College with both schools by simply checking a box on the Common App. Both Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis and Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan said the option to share applications benefits international students who might not get into Yale, because Yale-NUS meets all financial need regardless of nationality, unlike most American liberal arts colleges.
However, Yale-NUS students interviewed said the option often leads to students applying to the school without much thought, thereby inflating the application pool. According to a 2013 Yale-NUS press release, the acceptance rate for its inaugural class was just under 4 percent. Still, the school’s yield rate — which measures how many students chose to matriculate -— was 52 percent, comparable to the yield rates for competitive liberal arts colleges in the U.S.
Of the four Yale-NUS students interviewed, two applied through Yale-NUS’ member screen on the Common App, one applied through Yale-NUS’ own application portal and one applied by sharing his Yale application with Yale-NUS. Students indicated that it was common for applicants to seriously research the school only after they had applied.
“[The choice to share applications] may be perhaps too convenient, and thus sufficient thought is not put into whether that person really wants to come to Yale-NUS,” said Walter Yeo YNUS ’17, who applied through Yale-NUS’ separate portal. “For example, I have some friends who only found out about Yale-NUS after they got in.”
Isabel Perucho YNUS ’18 said the option to share applications left her concerned about the inflation of applicants who “don’t really know what they are getting into” when agreeing to share their Yale application with Yale-NUS.
Perucho said many students shared their applications “without much thought,” adding that one of her friends at Yale-NUS does not even remember answering “yes” to the sharing option but was still admitted.
Regina Marie Lee YNUS ’18 said some students she has spoken with knew nothing about Yale-NUS before sharing their application with the school, but did more research on the college later in the process.
Quinlan said while there was never any initial plan to remove the share option after a set period of time, questions on Yale’s application are evaluated on a yearly basis. He said Yale’s faculty committee on admissions and financial aid evaluated the question two years ago and suggested the language be modified to better describe the similarities and differences between the two institutions.
Quinlan, who previously served as Yale-NUS’ inaugural dean of admissions, said the way the question is framed on the application portal removes any possibility of students applying there as an afterthought, because students have to read through a paragraph of information and actively click “yes.” Currently, the question provides students with a brief description of the college, including the similarities and differences between Yale and Yale-NUS.
“The option to share their applications with Yale-NUS is a benefit to Yale applicants, especially the thousands of international applicants who are not admitted to Yale College and whose options to find universities that offer financial aid to admitted international students are limited,” Lewis said. “At this point, there are no plans to remove or change the question in the coming years.”
Jim Sleeper ’69, a lecturer in political science and a vocal critic of Yale’s partnership in Singapore, criticized the administration’s decision to allow applicants to Yale College to easily share their applications with Yale-NUS. He said that despite the addition of a short paragraph describing the school, he believes the question is an attempt to artificially boost the number of applications to Yale-NUS to make the college appear more competitive than it is.
“Nobody has ever given me a compelling reason why there should be a check box for Yale-NUS on the application to Yale College,” Sleeper said. “Yale-NUS is still in a very experimental stage. It is definitely not Yale in New Haven, and I think they are trying to create more of a synergy between the two than is warranted at this point.”
Ultimately, Quinlan said, the option provides international students an opportunity to apply to a liberal arts college that offers generous financial aid policies and a need-blind admissions process. He said nearly 5,000 international students apply to Yale each year, many of whom are dependent on financial aid. Still, the paragraph on the Common App makes no mention of Yale-NUS’ financial aid policies.
Lewis added that Yale and Yale-NUS will rethink the application-sharing program if applicants to Yale find the option confusing or misleading. But, there is no evidence that this is the case, Lewis said. Quinlan added that his office has received very few, if any, inquiries about the question.
According to Yale-NUS’ admissions website, students sharing their applications with the school receive an email asking them to complete an additional question specific to Yale-NUS, but they are not required to do so. However, Lewis said no applicant is admitted to Yale-NUS without an interview. Therefore, its applicants are clear about the distinctions between a Yale-NUS education and a Yale one.
Students also said the option to share their application is a good way for Yale-NUS to reach out to students who might not learn of the new liberal arts college otherwise.
Manas Punhani YNUS ’17 said that as a small and young college, Yale-NUS is able to reach out to a much larger audience because of the Common App’s sharing option, adding that the paragraph about Yale-NUS raises awareness about the college.
“I would imagine that students would just be intrigued by the option and at least Google the college if they choose not to apply,” said Punhani, who applied to Yale-NUS through the application-sharing option.
According to Yale-NUS’ admissions website, Yale-NUS does not give preference to one type of application over another. Each type of application is given equal weight.
American Leaders Swooning Over Singapore’s Thuggish Founder Are Blind Politically, Not Just Morally
04/02/2015 10:23 am ET | Updated Jun 02, 2015
Jim SleeperLecturer in Political Science, Yale University
AP
To judge only by appearances, the outpouring of grief by a million-and-a half Singaporeans at the funeral of their country’s founder and long-time prime minister Lee Kuan Yew last week resembles that of Americans at the funeral of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. But, it also mirrors North Koreans’ weeping with unfeigned grief in 2011 over their deceased “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il, about whom the less said the better, and of Russians’ in 1953 over the body of Josef Stalin, who had repelled the Nazi invasion and built a superpower with a safety net but terrorized, imprisoned and murdered millions of innocent people in many countries, including his own.
So much for appearances. Lee Kuan Yew was truly quite a bit more like Stalin than like Roosevelt, but, since Singapore is a tiny city-state and world-capitalist entrepot, he also resembled New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, under whom that world city, too — it’s only about 15% larger than Singapore — became cleaner, safer, more prosperous — and more sterile, unequal, and unjust not only for many of its African-American and Latino-American citizens but also for the one-third of its residents who are poor immigrants and whose lives, like those of one-third of Singapore residents, are glimpsed by most of the rest of us only when we see them at work.
Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee was clever, disciplined, effective, prescient, racially divisive, vicious, vindictive, and a control freak. He cleaned the streets and waterways, selected the shade trees, imposed a somewhat robotic examination-driven meritocracy in education, and secured the comforts of investors, and tourists, and tiny Singapore’s 70,000 resident millionaires (in U.S. dollars) and 15 billionaires by importing more than 1.5 million virtually rights-less migrant workers to keep wages down and instill fear and cultural sterility in generations of Singaporeans. And how did he instill it?
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens,” Lee said. “Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters — who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.” (The Straits Times, April 20, 1987)
Many ordinary people kissed his feet for that. Welcome to human history and to the downside of human nature.
At least New York’s Giuliani was curbed by state and federal leaders and an independent judiciary, under a Constitution that had been crafted in open debate among brilliant founders. Lee abolished all curbs, and he virtually wrote and interpreted the constitution by himself. “We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins,” he said in 1986 while imprisoning and cruelly abusing Catholic Church social-justice workers who were certainly opposed to his practices and whom he also claimed but never proved were Communists.
Like many a silver-tongued, anti-colonialist, anti-racist firebrand who turns his colonial masters’ noble rhetoric against them but wound up employing their tactics against those he was leading, Lee very tellingly foreshadowed his own transformation from tribune of the oppressed to autocrat of the oppressed during a 1956 debate in the colonial assembly by condemning Singapore’s British oppressors a bit too deliciously:
“Repression, Sir is a habit that grows,” he taunted Singapore’s British chief minister David Marshall in the island’s colonial legislative assembly. “I am told it is like making love — it is always easier the second time! The first time there may be pangs of conscience, a sense of guilt. But once embarked on this course with constant repetition you get more and more brazen in the attack. All you have to do is to dissolve organizations and societies and banish and detain the key political workers in these societies. Then miraculously everything is tranquil on the surface. Then an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done….”
That is precisely what Lee did as prime minister. When Lee and his wife Kwa Geok Choo read law at Cambridge, they developed a love-hate relationship to British imperial ways. He even took the English nickname Harry, and, late in the 1960s, when he was becoming Singapore’s strongman, British foreign secretary George Brown told him, “Harry, you’re the finest Englishman east of Suez.”
As if acting out his own prescient taunt to the Brits about the delights of their repression, he used a terrified parliament and judiciary and press to smear, bankrupt, imprison, harass, and exile other potential founding fathers. Of J.B. Jeyaretnam, another silver-tongued but more principled member of the opposition in independent Singapore’s first parliament, Lee said: “If you are a troublemaker…it’s our job to politically destroy you. Put it this way. As long as J.B. Jeyaretnam stands for what he stands for — a thoroughly destructive force — we will knock him. Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one.”
And, with incredibly petty vindictiveness, Lee’s government pursued Chee Soon Juan, who was fired in 1993 from his teaching job at the National University of Singapore after he had joined an opposition party, and who was repeatedly imprisoned and bankrupted simply for joining an opposition party and for holding small street demonstrations to air criticisms that state-controlled media wouldn’t publish. When Chee, who couldn’t pay his huge bankruptcy penalty, was prohibited from leaving the country to address a human-rights conference in Oslo, Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, published an open letter to Lee’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, noting that:
“In the last 20 years he has been jailed for more than 130 days on charges including contempt of Parliament, speaking in public without a permit, selling books improperly, and attempting to leave the country without a permit. Today, your government prevents Dr. Chee from leaving Singapore because of his bankrupt status…. It is our considered judgment that having already persecuted, prosecuted, bankrupted, and silenced Dr. Chee inside Singapore, you now wish to render him silent beyond your own borders.”
Another one-time founding father of Singapore, its former solicitor general Francis Seow, had to flee the country after declaring that its Law Society, which he headed, could comment critically on government legislation. Seow was arrested and detained for 72 days under Singapore’s Internal Security Act on allegations that he had received funds from the United States to enter opposition politics. “[T]he prime minister uses the courts … to intimidate, bankrupt, or cripple the political opposition. Distinguishing himself in a caseful of legal suits commenced against dissidents and detractors for alleged defamation…, he has won them all,” wrote Seow, who, convicted and fined in absentia on a tax evasion charge by Singapore’s courts, lives in exile in Massachusetts, where he has been a fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Program and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.
It took the undergraduate Yale International Relations Association and the faculty’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies to embarrass Singapore into letting Jeyaretnam’s son, Kenneth, and Chee come to New Haven to speak in 2012. (Seow did not respond to the invitation.)
Lee’s racism was almost quaint, trading on 19th-Century notions that his British colonial masters had held: “Now if democracy will not work for the Russians, a white Christian people, can we assume that it will naturally work with Asians?” he asked — not rhetorically — on May 9, 1991, at a symposium sponsored by the large Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
Race riots among Chinese, Indian and Muslim Malay residents of Singapore in the 1950s had taught him to impose “harmony” through strict allocations of resources and services along race lines: All Singaporeans carry ethnic identity cards, and Lee even invoked genetics to justify his enforced racial harmony and service distribution:
“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow,” he said in 1997, in an interview for the book Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.
“If I tell Singaporeans — we are all equal regardless of race, language, religion, culture, then they will say, “Look, I’m doing poorly. You are responsible.” But I can show that from British times, certain groups have always done poorly, in mathematics and in science. But I’m not God, I can’t change you….” That was in 2002, in the book Success Stories.
And in 2011, in his book Hard Truths, we read:
“People get educated, the bright ones rise, they marry equally well-educated spouses. The result is their children are smarter than those who are gardeners. Not that all the children of gardeners are duds. Occasionally two grey horses produce a white horse but very few. If you have two white horses, the chances are you breed white horses. It’s seldom spoken publicly because those who are NOT white horses say, ‘You’re degrading me’. But it’s a fact of life. You get a good mare, you don’t want a dud stallion to breed with your good mare. You get a poor foal. Your mental capacity and your EQ and the rest of you, 70 to 80% is genetic. “
Lee dropped his nickname “Harry” while touting his ways against Western criticisms of his mounting offenses against basic freedoms and his — and China’s — embrace of top-down, state capitalist control of all society. In 2012 The Economist magazine explained that state capitalism was pioneered by Lee, “a tireless advocate of ‘Asian values,’ by which he meant a mixture of family values and authoritarianism.”
Liberal, it wasn’t. “I had my own run-in with Lee some years ago,” former Harvard president Derek Bok told me, “when the government in Singapore jailed the young head of the Harvard Club for ‘consorting with the wrong people.’ I wrote in protest to Lee and was surprised to receive a letter of several typewritten pages from him trying to persuade me that Asian values are different from those in the United States. Nothing in that experience [with Lee] would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore.”
Lee’s concoction of “Asian values” was meant partly to deter Westerners from criticizing repressive regimes. And as those regimes try to ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing, they’re turning to ancient Confucian, Islamic, and even Western colonial traditions to shore up and legitimize their control against huge new inequalities, degrading labor practices and consumer marketing, and criminal behavior.
Here’s a short but devastating summary of the legal scholar Jothie Rajah’s Authoritarian Rule of Law, about Lee’s governance, that will require 15 minutes and a strong stomach to read.
“Singapore is improving,” its apologists sometimes insist. But Reporters Without Borders now ranks it an abysmal 151of 180 nations in press freedoms — down from 135 in 2012. The Economist magazine’s rigorous Democracy Index ranks it with Liberia, Palestine, and Haiti. Human Rights Watch calls it “a textbook example of a repressive state.” Two years ago, a five-part Wall Street Journalseries documented its abuses of migrant Chinese bus drivers, a paradigm of how it treats the rights-less migrants who are one-third of its population. The country’s 2014 Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is 0.478, one of the widest in the world.
Alternative views come only on a few brave websites, such as Online Citizen and Tremeritus and in the Yale-NUS bubble, which Singapore is taking care to accommodate: When the government tried a few months ago to ban “To Singapore With Love,” a documentary on leftist activists who had fled the country to escape certain imprisonment and worse, Yale-National University of Singapore College obtained an exemption to show it “for educational purposes” and decided not to use it only after the filmmaker Tan Pin Pin protested that if it couldn’t be shown everywhere in Singapore, it shouldn’t be shown anywhere.
While many Singaporeans are wonderfully astute and fair, owing partly to the very rigor and probity that Lee Kuan Yew demanded, many others are marinating in ressentiment, a curdled bitterness that, unlike clean indignation, blames Singapore’s ills on its critics. The ruling party seems to have hundreds of on-demand trolls who descend upon critical posts, hurling insults, as hundreds did at me when I posted an account here in Huffington Post of Singapore’s long, close, but secret collaboration with Israel in building up its own military. My Wikipedia page was also altered beyond recognition then by voluntary “editors” whose monikers identified them as Singaporean.
A commenter on another post I’d written questioning Yale’s joint venture in founding a new liberal-arts college with the National University of Singapore exhibited the bitterness:
“I don’t see why we need to have a partnership with an institution that has produced the talents who… have morally and financially bankrupted their once great nation,” she wrote. “Call us authoritarian all you want but we are a prudent state while yours is a once great nation that is a banana republic on its way to fascism. And your nation owes us and other authoritarian regimes A LOT of money. All made possible in part by the notables graduates of Yale and other Ivies. I suggest that debt slaves adopt a more courteous attitude toward their creditors instead of name calling and stereotyping. Btw, Feel free to come grovel for a job once this comes to pass.”
The hypocrisy here is worth noting: Much of this commenter’s account of what American and global capitalism are doing to republican virtues and prospects is true, but any suggestion that similar things are happening in Singapore generates such excruciating discomfort among its elite apologists that they denounce critics in ways they wouldn’t dare to denounce their own country’s leaders.
As Singapore flourished as a world-capitalist entrepot, its investors and advisors, including some members of Yale’s governing corporation, paid little attention to the repression and its festering costs. And Lee, in semi-retirement as “Minister Mentor” (his son Lee Hsien Loong is now prime minister and his daughter-in-law Ho Ching is CEO of Temasek, one of Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds), began sounding wise and avuncular, at least to journalists such as Thomas Plate (writing for Singapore’s government-controlled Straits Times) and Fareed Zakaria (who was a Yale Corporation member at the time).
Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee certainly had truths to impart to liberals: Because democracy is messy, its public virtues and beliefs do need assiduous cultivation. “You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools,” Lee said in an interview for Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas. He might have added, rightly enough, that most people even want some authority in their lives. Beyond that, a little island with no natural resources has scant wiggle room. Unlike the sprawling U.S., Singapore certainly has had no blunder room. That makes Lee’s iron grip seem admirable.
But Lee also had many truths to disguise, and, for that, he needed apologists. Thomas Plate, the journalist who became a Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of the Giants Of Asia book series, of whom Lee Kuan Yew was the first, assured readers of his long account of the man’s thinking in the Straits Times newspaper that Lee “hated… uninformed debate,” because he preferred “free, frank speech” among leaders who are well informed and able to debate and govern, over the idea that everyone has a right to speak, no matter how ignorantly or dishonestly.
A veteran Singaporean government manager told me that he considers this distinction “cringe worthy” because Lee had no use for free, frank speech even among his peers. Remember, he crushed his fellow founding fathers. A Singaporean studying at Yale e-mailed me that “Plate is too uncritical about a supposed zero-sum game between ‘truth-telling’ and ‘equal’ speech. Liberal democracy believes in the wisdom of crowds, that people refine their political thinking through the act of participating in politics. But the crowds are going to remain dumb if they don’t speak. (Funny how dumb has that double meaning).”
It’s not so funny. Elites in the United States and at Davos, unnerved by the western civic decay that they themselves have caused, are dancing desperately up Singapore’s garden paths seeking elegant reassurance from Lee Kuan Yew’s achievements that ultimately, “the people” can and must be ruled. But global elites can barely rule themselves.
Let’s hope that they’ll grasp the point of the joke about Lee that tells of two dogs swimming in the waters between Singapore and Borneo, but in opposite directions. The dog headed towards Borneo asks the other one why he’s swimming to Singapore. The answer: “Ah, the shopping, the housing, the air-conditioning, the health care, the schools. But why are you going to Borneo?” The dog swimming away from Singapore answers: “Oh, I just want to bark.”
For dogs, barking is almost as important as breathing; in humans, it means speaking up in ways that nourish the arts and the best political solutions, which emerge from the wisdom of crowds. Without that, a society experiences demoralization, decadence, and brain drain. Liberal democracy may be implausible, but it’s indispensable and irrepressible, and, ultimately, it’s the only way to affirm human potential and dignity. Stalin never learned that, and the Soviet Union paid the price. New York’s Giuliani never learned it, either but, thanks to constitutional democracy, others have replaced him. We can hope that, sooner or later, Singapore and China will learn it, too.
May 2, 2018 Jim Sleeper, Guest Writer
Long before Yale trustees ever thought of co-founding a liberal arts college with NUS, some of them had been coming to Singapore for years as investors, not educators. As a world-capitalist entrepot that’s a tightly run and relatively safe port in the storms of global capitalist exploit, Singapore welcomed the Yale investors as advisors and officers of its sovereign wealth funds — the Government Investment Corporation, chaired by the prime minister, and Temasek Holdings, which at one point even designated Yale trustee, Charles Goodyear IV, as its CEO in 2009.
It was natural for such leaders to consider Yale-NUS College an outgrowth of their collaboration in market and political terms. Of course, they also knew that a liberal arts college is more than a career training and networking center or a cultural finishing school for future global investors and managers. Its deeper purpose is to strengthen young citizens’ freedoms of inquiry and expression by equipping them to question and sometimes challenge their own societies’ arrangements and premises. Arguably, that strengthens societies and humanity’s prospects in the long run.
But how strongly committed to that deeper purpose were Singapore’s political leaders and Yale’s investors? When some of us on Yale’s faculty doubted that commitment, some Singaporeans accused us of practicing what Daryl Yang ‘18 and Paul Jerusalem ‘19, Yale-NUS undergraduates who wrote in The Octant last October, called “moral neoliberal imperialism” and trying to impose Yale’s and America’s values on Singapore. Similar charges of cultural imperialism and elitism have been lodged against other Anglo-American universities that have entered into (and, quite often, withdrawn from) joint ventures with institutional counterparts in Singapore and other host countries.
Let me explain why some of these charges are understandable, but why others underestimate the degree of support and protection that a liberal education needs but isn’t getting in either Singapore or in the United States, for different reasons in each country.
Regarding Cultural Imperialism
First, let me emphasize that most of us who’ve criticized Yale’s joint venture with Singapore are not preoccupied with condemning the country, although we do have serious criticisms that I’ll get to in a minute. Nor do we disparage Yale-NUS students or faculty. We’re worried mainly about the “corporatization” of universities and civil societies in both countries, but especially at Yale in New Haven, prompting crises in American education and politics that may pose worrisome challenges for both countries and for liberal education itself.
If anything, I’ve long believed, American society and jurisprudence are too “free,” but mainly in that they’ve unleashed a free-for-all of commercially driven “speech” that’s degenerating into a free-for-none whose shouting benefits only those who invest in it. That’s not good for public order, or a democracy that depends on the constructive dialogue that a liberal education tries to encourage — dialogue that is not just for an elite but for a whole civil society.
The sheer scale of American crisis is an obvious reason for Singaporeans to accuse Yale of cultural imperialism: both Yale and the United States are huge, expansive, and sometimes recklessly presumptuous. Singapore is tiny, and in my view governed too tightly and defensively for its good, although Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong likens his city-state, rightly enough, to a small boat breasting powerful cross-currents. Among those currents, China looms much larger in East Asia than the U.S. does. As China rises, Singapore’s decision to collaborate with Yale and the United States could begin to feel like a dependency, so whenever Americans assert liberal values, however justifiably, they may prompt prickly, defensive fears of unwarranted influence and even of the ghosts of colonialism.
A second reason for charging Yale with cultural imperialism is that Yale itself has in fact has been culturally and economically imperialist or missionary for hundreds of years, nowhere more so than in Asia. Henry Luce, Yale Class of 1920, founder of Time magazine and of a 20th century publishing empire including Fortune magazine, was born in China to Yale Christian missionaries who were among thousands of others eager to “evangelize the world in a generation,” as their slogan put it. So was John Hersey, Yale Class of 1936, author of the book Hiroshima. Some Yale missionaries even went to Singapore.
Yale College itself was founded as a missionary venture in 1701 by Puritans eager to purify their Christianity against mercenary temptations. But they had to seek the college’s material support – and therefore to take its name – from Elihu Yale, a British governor in India for one of the world’s first multi-national corporations, the British East India Company. As if that weren’t ironic enough, the East India Company acquired the island of “Singapura” for the British Crown in 1812. I don’t mean to suggest that Yale colonized Singapore, but within thirty years its Christian missionaries had arrived there, along with Anglo-American capitalism.
Now, though, two hundred years later, Singapore may have acquired Yale, not the other way ‘round. Ironically, that may be the third reason for some Singaporeans’ to charge that Yale practices cultural imperialism: Why? Because the very names and imprimaturs of Yale, Harvard, and other elite Anglo American universities hold obsessive fascination for many in Asia’s burgeoning middle classes, many of whose members grasp at the iconic American trappings. But that’s quite rightly an affront to some Asians’ pride if it suggests to them that the old Anglo-American colonialism still sets standards for newly vigorous Asian societies.
Yale and Singapore: When A Convergence is Too Smooth
Singapore’s leaders have wanted Yale’s name and imprimatur partly to forestall a brain-drain. They also want to make Singapore a center for what its former ambassador to the U.S. called “the higher education industry,” whose graduates will become the worldly investors and corporate managers who can entertain business clients at New York’s elegant Yale Club when they visit the U.S.
If that proves to be the overriding accomplishment of this joint venture, it may prove costly in terms that economists and markets don’t measure. The more that liberal education is conscripted to accelerate riptides of casino-like financing, predatory lending, and degrading consumer marketing, the more empty and destructive civil society and politics become, and the more that Singapore’s and other governments may try to control the social decay with increasingly authoritarian measures that hobble culture and politics.
Liberal education is itself a small boat navigating the powerful tides I’ve mentioned on a big but risky mission — to introduce young adults to what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “The Great Conversation” across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit.
The Yale-NUS Common Curriculum does that by using varied cultures’ great writings. But a true liberal education should also equip participants in its Great Conversation to interrogate the powers of their time – not to be interrogated by them or to serve them. If Singapore keeps liberal education “in a bubble,” it will shrink liberal education’s mission: Johns Hopkins University, Australia’s University of New South Wales, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have pulled their programs out of Singapore. Faculty at California’s distinguished Claremont Colleges rebuffed Singapore’s overtures to establish an undergraduate liberal arts college there. Britain’s prestigious Warwick University cancelled its own plans for such a college there after its faculty studied its prospects.
Yale-NUS claims to guarantee “the free expression of ideas in all forms — a central tenet of liberal arts education. There are no questions that cannot be asked, no answers that cannot be discussed and debated…. This statement is not limited to the classroom. It extends to the dining hall and student suites and the common rooms. It also extends to many forms of expression, including debate, speech, dance, and theatre.”
But will those guarantees include protecting an essay in The Octant, whose online version can be read off-campus? They will have done so if you’re reading this now online as I wrote it. But in 2012, when I wrote a column about Singapore’s long military and strategic intimacy with Israel, an army of Singaporean trolls unleashed thousands of nasty comments (since removed) and ravaged my Wikipedia page.
Where can we assume that that “army” came from? At that time, Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore an abysmal 135 out of 179 countries in freedom of the press in 2011. By 2013, Singapore’s rank had dropped to 149;; in 2015 to 151, in 2016, to 154. From 2011 to 2013, as I was writing columns such as this criticizing Singapore’s meticulously “legal” maneuvers to cripple dissent, some of the columns were re-posted on Singapore websites and blogs — until the government proved my point by requiring that websites post expensive bonds that can be demanded by authorities if what’s published violates their standards.
What standards? Even university faculty who speak out have been convicted by Singapore’s judiciary, bankrupted when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines, and, in some cases, effectively exiled. Jothie Rajah’s book Authoritarian Rule of Law, mentioned and linked here, describes such methods. Human Rights Watch calls Singapore “a textbook example of a repressive state.” The Economist magazine — which is anything but an anti-capitalist or human-rights organization — publishes a rigorous Democracy Index that ranks that Singapore down with Liberia, Palestine, and Haiti on its measures of political freedom.
As if that weren’t enough, we now have the official grilling of historian PJ Thum and civil society activists, preparatory to passing a law against “fake news.” The American Association of University Professors warned Singaporeans about what happens to liberal education under such circumstances when it issued a public letter to the Yale community and to 500,000 American professors in 2012, expressing “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.”
The worst consequence of widely reported instances of government censorship is widespread self-censorship by scholars, journalists, and ordinary citizens. “Fear leaves no fingerprints,” writes William Dobson in The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which shows that surveillance and seduction are as effective as truncheons and prison cells at silencing countless citizens who never experience them directly.
A true liberal education equips you to be strong and effective in resisting such subtle constraints. Maybe it equipped Subhas Nair, recent Yale-NUS graduate from the Class of 2017, to produce a rap album with the cleverly subversive title, “This Is Not a Public Assembly.” We’ll see how far it gets.
America, by contrast, could use more self-restraint, not less, in the kinds of speech and other forms of expression that true freedom requires. No wonder that some American visitors almost welcome Singapore’s fearsome fingerprints as they’re welcomed into the protected bubble of a carefully manicured campus. If some of us do notice and criticize, that’s not “cultural imperialism.” It’s our warning about Singapore’s side of the two-sided threat to the Great Conversation, which requires self-restraint but not authoritarian coercion and fear.
Professor Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University. He teaches a course there called “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy”. The views expressed here are the author’s own. The Octant welcomes all voices in the community. Email submissions to: yncoctant@gmail.com
Long before the trustees of the New Haven, CT-based Yale, one of America’s elite universities, ever thought of co-founding a liberal arts college with the National University of Singapore, some of trustees had been coming to Singapore for years as investors, not educators.
As a world-capitalist entrepot that is a tightly-run and relatively safe port in the storms of global capitalist exploit, Singapore welcomed the Yale investors as advisors and officers of its sovereign wealth funds — the Government Investment Corporation, chaired by the prime minister, and Temasek Holdings, which at one point even designated a Yale trustee, Charles Goodyear IV, as its CEO in 2009.
It was natural for such leaders to consider Yale-NUS College an outgrowth of their collaboration in market and political terms. Of course, they also knew that a liberal arts college is more than a career training and networking center or a cultural finishing school for future global investors and managers. Its deeper purpose, they said, is to strengthen young citizens’ freedoms of inquiry and expression by equipping them to question and sometimes challenge their own societies’ arrangements and premises. Arguably, that strengthens societies and humanity’s prospects in the long run.
Deeper commitment?
But how strongly committed to that deeper purpose were Singapore’s political leaders and Yale’s investors? When some of us on Yale’s faculty doubted that commitment, some Singaporeans accused us of practicing what Daryl Yang (2018) and Paul Jerusalem (2019), Yale-NUS undergraduates who wrote in the student newspaper The Octant last October, called “moral neoliberal imperialism” and trying to impose Yale’s and America’s values on Singapore.
Similar charges of cultural imperialism and elitism have been lodged against other Anglo-American universities that have entered into (and, quite often, withdrawn from) joint ventures with institutional counterparts in Singapore and other host countries.
Let me explain why some of these charges are understandable, but why others underestimate the degree of support and protection that a liberal education needs but isn’t getting in either Singapore or in the United States, for different reasons in each country.
Regarding Cultural Imperialism
First, let me emphasize that most of us who’ve criticized Yale’s joint venture with Singapore are not preoccupied with condemning the country, although we do have serious criticisms that I’ll get to in a minute. Nor do we disparage Yale-NUS students or faculty. We’re worried mainly about the “corporatization” of universities and civil societies in both countries, but especially at Yale in New Haven, prompting crises in American education and politics that may pose worrisome challenges for both countries and for liberal education itself.
If anything, I’ve long believed, American society and jurisprudence are too “free,” but mainly in that they’ve unleashed a free-for-all of commercially driven “speech” that’s degenerating into a free-for-none whose shouting benefits only those who invest in it. That’s not good for public order, or a democracy that depends on the constructive dialogue that a liberal education tries to encourage — dialogue that is not just for an elite but for a whole civil society.
The sheer scale of American crisis is an obvious reason for Singaporeans to accuse Yale of cultural imperialism: both Yale and the United States are huge, expansive, and sometimes recklessly presumptuous. Singapore is tiny, and in my view governed too tightly and defensively for its good, although Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong likens his city-state, rightly enough, to a small boat breasting powerful cross-currents.
Fears of ghosts of colonialism
Among those currents, China looms much larger in East Asia than the US does. As China rises, Singapore’s decision to collaborate with Yale and the United States could begin to feel like a dependency, so whenever Americans assert liberal values, however justifiably, they may prompt prickly, defensive fears of unwarranted influence and even of the ghosts of colonialism.
A second reason for charging Yale with cultural imperialism is that Yale itself has in fact has been culturally and economically imperialist or missionary for hundreds of years, nowhere more so than in Asia. Henry Luce, Yale Class of 1920, founder of Time magazine and of a 20th Century publishing empire including Fortune magazine, was born in China to Yale Christian missionaries who were among thousands of others eager to “evangelize the world in a generation,” as their slogan put it. So was John Hersey, Yale Class of 1936, author of the book Hiroshima. Some Yale missionaries even went to Singapore.
Yale College itself was founded as a missionary venture in 1701 by Puritans eager to purify their Christianity against mercenary temptations. But they had to seek the college’s material support – and therefore to take its name – from Elihu Yale, a British governor in India for one of the world’s first multi-national corporations, the British East India Company.
As if that weren’t ironic enough, the East India Company acquired the island of “Singapura” for the British Crown in 1812. I don’t mean to suggest that Yale colonized Singapore, but within 30 years its Christian missionaries had arrived there, along with Anglo-American capitalism.
Now, though, 200 years later, Singapore may have acquired Yale, not the other way ‘round. Ironically, that may be the third reason for some Singaporeans’ to charge that Yale practices cultural imperialism: Why? Because the very names and imprimaturs of Yale, Harvard, and other elite Anglo-American universities hold obsessive fascination for many in Asia’s burgeoning middle classes, many of whose members grasp at the iconic American trappings. But that’s quite rightly an affront to some Asians’ pride if it suggests to them that the old Anglo-American colonialism still sets standards for newly vigorous Asian societies.
When Convergence is Too Smooth
Singapore’s leaders have wanted Yale’s name and imprimatur partly to forestall a brain-drain. They also want to make Singapore a center for what its former ambassador to the US called “the higher-education industry,” whose graduates will become the worldly investors and corporate managers who can entertain business clients at New York’s elegant Yale Club when they visit the US.
If that proves to be the overriding accomplishment of this joint venture, it may prove costly in terms that economists and markets don’t measure. The more that liberal education is conscripted to accelerate riptides of casino-like financing, predatory lending and degrading consumer marketing, the more empty and destructive civil society and politics become, and the more that Singapore’s and other governments may try to control the social decay with increasingly authoritarian measures that hobble culture and politics.
Liberal education is itself a small boat navigating the powerful tides I’ve mentioned on a big but risky mission — to introduce young adults to what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “The Great Conversation” across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit.
The Yale-NUS common curriculum does that by using varied cultures’ great writings. But a true liberal education should also equip participants in its Great Conversation to interrogate the powers of their time – not to be interrogated by them or to serve them. If Singapore keeps liberal education “in a bubble,” it will shrink liberal education’s mission.
Other boffins run for cover
Johns Hopkins University, Australia’s University of New South Wales, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have pulled their programs out of Singapore. Faculty at California’s distinguished Claremont Colleges rebuffed Singapore’s overtures to establish an undergraduate liberal arts college there. Britain’s prestigious Warwick University cancelled its own plans for such a college there after its faculty studied its prospects.
Yale-NUS claims to guarantee “the free expression of ideas in all forms — a central tenet of liberal arts education. There are no questions that cannot be asked, no answers that cannot be discussed and debated…. This statement is not limited to the classroom. It extends to the dining hall and student suites and the common rooms. It also extends to many forms of expression, including debate, speech, dance, and theater.”
But will those guarantees include protecting an essay in The Octant, whose online version can be read off-campus? They will have done so if you’re reading this now online as I wrote it. But in 2012, when I wrote a column about Singapore’s long military and strategic intimacy with Israel, an army of Singaporean trolls unleashed thousands of nasty comments (since removed) and ravaged my Wikipedia page.
Where can we assume that that “army” came from? At that time, Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore an abysmal 135th of 179 countries in freedom of the press in 2011. By 2013, Singapore’s rank had dropped to 149th; in 2015 to 151st, in 2016, to 154ths. From 2011 to 2013, as I was writing columns such as this criticizing Singapore’s meticulously “legal” maneuvers to cripple dissent, some of the columns were re-posted on Singapore websites and blogs — until the government proved my point by requiring that websites post expensive bonds that can be demanded by authorities if the published material violates their standards.
What standards? Even university faculty who speak out have been convicted by Singapore’s judiciary, bankrupted when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines, and, in some cases, effectively exiled. Jothie Rajah’s book Authoritarian Rule of Law, mentioned and linked here, describes such methods. Human Rights Watch calls Singapore “a textbook example of a repressive state.” The Economist magazine — which is anything but an anti-capitalist or human-rights organization — publishes a rigorous Democracy Index that ranks that Singapore down with Liberia, Palestine, and Haiti on its measures of political freedom.
The “fake news” specter
As if that weren’t enough, we now have the official grilling of historian PJ Thum and civil society activists, preparatory to passing a law against “fake news.” The American Association of University Professors warned Singaporeans about what happens to liberal education under such circumstances when it issued a public letter to the Yale community and to 500,000 American professors in 2012, expressing “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.”
The worst consequence of widely reported instances of government censorship is widespread self-censorship by scholars, journalists, and ordinary citizens. “Fear leaves no fingerprints,” writes William Dobson in The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which shows that surveillance and seduction are as effective as truncheons and prison cells at silencing countless citizens who never experience them directly.
A true liberal education equips you to be strong and effective in resisting such subtle constraints. Maybe it equipped Subhas Nair, Yale-NUS graduate from the Class of 2017, to produce a rap album with the cleverly subversive title, “This Is Not a Public Assembly.” We’ll see how far it gets.
America, by contrast, could use more self-restraint, not less, in the kinds of speech and other forms of expression that true freedom requires. No wonder that some American visitors almost welcome Singapore’s fearsome fingerprints as they’re welcomed into the protected bubble of a carefully manicured campus. If some of us do notice and criticize, that’s not “cultural imperialism.” It’s our warning about Singapore’s side of the two-sided threat to the Great Conversation, which requires self-restraint but not authoritarian coercion and fear.
Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University, where teaches a course called “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.” Reprinted with permission of The Octant, a student-run newspaper/publication at Yale-NUS College. The views expressed are the author’s.
Singapore President Tony Tan Keng Yam (R) with Professor Pericles Lewis (C), president of Yale-NUS college at its inauguration August 27, 2013. (ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Americans were ousted from two parts of Asia in August, 2021. The expulsion of Yale by Singapore illuminates the horrific expulsion from Afghanistan. In both cases, Americans undertook missions to societies we didn’t understand. I’m not defending Singapore’s state capitalism or Afghanistan’s Islamicism and tribalism. I’m challenging what’s corrupt in our own evangelical presumptions and economic-military incursions. Please read the piece’s links online.
By: Jim Sleeper
Yale College’s much-celebrated venture into the wealthy island city-state of Singapore seemed a harmonious convergence, the host country paying all the bills of the Yale-National University of Singapore College, and Yale’s visibility and allure ascending among Southeast Asia’s burgeoning middle-class families.
A visit to the USS Stennis: From Yale-National University of Singapore College Facebook page.
Willful innocence of other countries and cultures has driven many American military and pedagogical misadventures abroad, and it has generated bitter ironies that might be instructive if they weren’t so often forgotten. For one, Yale is named for Elihu Yale, a governor of the East India Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations, which acquired the island of “Singapura” for the British Crown in 1812.
For another, Yale missionaries in Singapore and China a century later pursued “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” a goal of the American Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, whose archives rest, fittingly, in the Yale Divinity School. Yale’s would-be evangelists in China parented future Yale missionaries of a different kind: Both Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time magazine, herald of the American Century in the 1940s, and John Hersey — whose novel The Call depicts Christian missionaries’ blindness to host cultures’ alien cultural depths — were born in China to missionary parents near the turn of the century.
Another century later, in 2003, Yale “missionaries” figured significantly in the design and prosecution of the Iraq War: President George W. Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney (a Yale drop-out, but still,…), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, (who, as a Yale professor, had taught a student named I. Scooter Libby, a future top Cheney aide); “axis of evil” White House speechwriter David Frum; and the neoconservative polemicist Robert Kagan (shown here preening about American power and being flattened by French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin).
In 2011, other Yale professors and their National University of Singapore counterparts sat in a mansion on a hill atop New Haven, designing a curriculum for Yale-NUS College, a “new community of learning.” That community’s first president, Yale comparative literature professor Pericles Lewis, declared that he was witnessing “the liberal arts experience made manifest” and prophesied “a place of revelatory stimulation” in the campus that Singapore was building on the other side of the world.
Skeptical of such prophesies and resentful at not having been consulted or even informed about Yale-NUS before its contractual commitment was a fait accompli, Yale faculty in New Haven passed a resolution warning that liberal education would be hobbled by Singapore’s “lack of respect for civil and political rights.” The American Association of University Professors sent a public letter to the Yale community and to 500,000 American professors expressing “concern about the 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… will suffer.”
Yet Yale’s trustees and administrators and some faculty marched jauntily into the clutches of Singapore’s structures and strictures. Some trustees held material interests in Singapore, as I reported at the time. As a tightly-run, relatively safe port in the storms of global capitalist exploits, Singapore welcomed the Yale investors as advisers and officers of its sovereign wealth fund, the Government Investment Corporation, chaired by the prime minister, and Temasek Holdings, which designated Yale trustee Charles Goodyear IV as its CEO in 2009. Another trustee, Fareed Zakaria, sketched the ideological interests in The Future of Freedom, praising Singapore’s model of state capitalism and Lee Kuan Yew, its authoritarian, racist ruler.
Yale President Richard Levin, an economist and apostle of a neoliberal, “World is Flat” vision, believed that the new college would enhance and enrich Singapore as a global capitalist hub with a humanist global management and investment ethos that deflects nationalist, authoritarian undercurrents.
But those swift, dark undercurrents have resurfaced with a vengeance against neoliberal gambits and dreams. Authoritarian state-capitalism is rising, not only in East Asia. Even Britain may become China’s virtual island colony off the coast of Europe, somewhat as Hong Kong and Singapore became Britain’s island colonies off the coast of Asia.
In 2013, a year after the Yale faculty resolution opposed collaboration with Singapore, former Harvard President Derek Bok told me that a “run-in” with Lee Kuan Yew years earlier had convinced him not to trust authoritarian rulers who ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing, using state coercion to enforce the cohesion that their societies once drew from Confucian, Islamic, or even Western colonial traditions but that they’re losing to global capitalist inequities, escapism, and consequent social crises.
Rulers in Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi and other countries have also tried to harness liberal education to finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of “go-go” economic development, seeking American colleges’ imprimaturs and instruction in the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education can impart to their investors, managers, and spokesmen. Recalling how Lee Kuan Yew invoked “Asian values” to justify imprisoning an officer of the Harvard Club there, Bok told me that “Nothing in that experience would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore.”
Reinforcing such skepticism in 2015, John Berthelsen, editor of the independent website Asia Sentinel, reported that Lee Kuan Yew’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, speaking at a ceremony with Yale President Levin and Yale-NUS president Pericles Lewis inaugurating the new college, warned that education there “cannot be a carbon copy of Yale in the United States if it is to succeed. Instead, it has to experiment and adapt the Yale model to Asia.”
An irony in Lee’s warning hasn’t escaped Kenneth Jeyaretnam, former secretary general of Singapore’s opposition reform party, who tells me that “The Singapore Gov thought that it could have the trappings of a world-class liberal arts college without the freedom that goes with it, and that it could be tightly managed and spun to show the superiority of Asian values. It didn’t work out that way.”
Lee’s and his father’s invocations of “Asian values” veiled their narrowly instrumentalist, meticulously repressive policies: In 2013 a five-part Wall Street Journalseries documented Singapore’s abuses of migrant Chinese bus drivers, a paradigm of how it treats rights-less migrants who are one-third of its population. The country’s 2014 Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is 0.478, one of the widest in the world. The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-capitalist or human-rights organization, publishes a rigorous Democracy Index that ranks Singapore down with Liberia, Palestine, and Haiti on its measures of political freedom.
Reporters Without Borders’ index of press freedom in 180 countries currently ranks Singapore near the bottom – 160th, below Belarus and Sudan, its lowest ranking in the ten years I’ve watched it drop down the list. The organization’s Index classifies Singapore as “very bad,” noting that “Despite the ‘Switzerland of the East’ label often used in government propaganda, the city-state does not fall far short of China when it comes to suppressing media freedom. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s government is always quick to sue critical journalists, apply pressure to make them unemployable, or even force them to leave the country.”(Afghanistan’s press-freedom rank was 122, not yet updated since the U.S. departed, but it was well above “sophisticated” Singapore’s 160.)
The prime minister and ruling People’s Action Party have a long record of using fine-spun, Kafkaesque legalism to block freedoms of expression. Jothie Rajah’s invaluable Authoritarian Rule of Law describes their methods. Even university faculty and opposition-party leaders who speak out have been convicted by Singapore’s judiciary, bankrupted when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines, and, in some cases, effectively exiled.
Small wonder that Yale-NUS has been kept ever-more tightly in its paymaster Singapore’s pocket. The “Yale” in its name designates merely a hired consultant. As of 2025, even that name will be gone. The many students and professors who feel betrayed by having been admitted this year under false pretenses to a college that will cease to exist after their graduation in 2025 are protesting vigorously, but to no avail.
A comprehensive, Sept. 7 Yale Daily News story reports Singapore’s claim, seconded by former Yale President Richard Levin, that the closure reflects only financial, not political problems. Levin believes that the financial problems were surmountable. But some Singaporeans consider Yale-NUS an objectionably elitist enclave, with too many international students (approximately 40 percent of the student body). On the other hand, opposition-party leader Jeyaretnam tells me that “elitism doesn’t seem to have been an issue, since 14,000 students signed the petition opposing Yale-NUS’ closing.”
Part of Singapore’s reason for dismissing American pedagogy is “navigational” in a geopolitical sense: Lee Hsien Loong likens his country to a small but doughty craft breasting global economic and political riptides. As Beijing and Washington vie for influence in East Asia, Foreign Policy magazine reports that “China… is working hard to influence Singaporeans to take a more accommodating position toward Beijing.” Most Singaporeans and rulers are ethnically Chinese and regard China more favorably than do people in Malaysia, Indonesia, or Australia. Singapore’s removal of Yale may be what it considers a modest concession to China and a way to control the college ever more tightly amid the sea change.
But a deeper reason for Singapore’s expulsion of Yale is the same one that’s been given to justify America’s expulsion from Afghanistan: For all its glitter and wealth-generating capacity, American liberal capitalism has been undermining itself with manic speed, along with the civic-republican institutions, beliefs, and liberal education that have given the system its legitimacy. Today’s ubiquitous, intrusive casino-like financing and algorithmically driven consumer marketing are groping, goosing, intimidating, surveilling, addicting, stupefying, and indebting so many millions of Americans that the United States has less and less of value to export to Afghanistan or Singapore.
As I reported in Dissent magazine in 2018, the private-equity baron Stephen A. Schwarzman has donated US$150 million to Yale, his alma mater, to transform its historic Commons into a hive of junior-business start-up platforms, performance spaces, and lounge areas, all of it renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center. You don’t have to believe that Afghanistan will be better off for spurning such glitter, or that Singapore will be better off for repressing criticisms of its lockstep discipline, to acknowledge that Santayana’s vision of the American as “an idealist working on matter” and a bearer of the requisite civic virtues has been hollowed out by Americans’ own obsessions with buying and consuming “matter.”
Yale excelled at these pursuits at times in 19th and early 20th century America, but it has lost its way. We’ll need to renew our own civil society’s institutions, including its colleges, as “places of revelatory stimulation,” where the experience of liberal education is “made manifest” more vividly than it has been in most of our lifetimes.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz lamented our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing post-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read it, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism. All of these are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including by greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and that seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled Americans to combine faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is said to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I myself doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous or cankered enough to elect him. Now, they’ve done it twice, even though he has gotten worse.
But maybe the rest of us have gotten worse, too. “Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
My father, who served in Europe in World War II in the 277th Battalion Army Combat Engineers, told me that it’s those who haven’t proven themselves who keep on touting militarism. “The biggest blowhards at the American Legion are the ones who spent as much of the war as they could at the PX,” he said.
There was so much of this in the Republican Party last night that, at one point in his speech, John McCain looked annoyed. He knows the difference between flaunting heroism as some legionnaires do and making a political decision to showcase it. He and the Republicans overplayed the hero card because they have so little else to run on.
Several times during his acceptance speech, the party’s militaristic id – or is it a guilty conscience? — threatened to erupt. Whenever McCain touched even lightly on a military or patriotic theme, we heard from a somewhat unnervingly large contingent of young men whose repertoire of political expression consisted solely of shouting “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
They tried to dominate the rest of the crowd’s reactions even when McCain was sounding poignant or somber, not pugnacious. No matter how subtle, subdued or highly dignified his appeals to patriotism, the rising and sometimes overwhelming response was “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
In a voiceover, Fred Thompson said, “When you’ve lived in a box, your life is about keeping others from having to live in that box.”
“Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
Someone mentioned how, a year ago, McCain’s campaign was so strapped he’d had to let go of most of his staff, but that he’d come back in New Hampshire thanks to his grit and conviction that he would rather lose an election than see his country lose a war.
“Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
Sentimentally but not very convincingly, McCain named three different, hard-pressed American families whose problems he’d taken to heart, without making make clear what policies he’d support to help them. He did vow, to a family whose son had fallen in battle and whose bracelet McCain now wears, that he would “make sure their country remains safe.” As the parents grew moist, the crowd cried, “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
To introduce his theme of energy independence, McCain said, “We’re gonna stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much.”
“Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
McCain said that he respects and admires Senator Obama and affirmed, “Despite our differences, we are all Americans. That’s an association that means more to me than any other.”
“Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
I think I recognize some of the guys I saw doing this. Their buffoonish, boorish chanting is only one side of them, not necessarily the dominant one. They haven’t all curdled into fascists, as some liberals might believe. There’s a decency and clueless love in them that’s trying to find a political home, and there’s yearning for something that’s slipping away.
The problem, of course, is that the Republican Party, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are ratcheting up these hurts and pointing them toward war and nasty hatreds of dubious domestic villains. Yes, this is dangerous, and McCain isn’t on top of it.
A couple of times during his speech, lone demonstrators who’d sneaked into the audience rose, shouted out, waved some signs, and were hustled to the exits.
In that vast hall, with the media focusing on the podium, the disruptions were easily minimized – until the guys decided to counter them by chanting, “Yoo Es Ay! You Es Ay! You Es Ay!” They did disrupt McCain’s speech, far more than the demonstrators had. It was then that he looked annoyed, and rightly so.
He deflected the second uproar deftly enough, with a couple of words I haven’t had time to check. But was there any good leadership on the floor? That brings us back to the Republicans’ problem.
Compare McCain, who refused early release from captivity in Vietnam, to George W. Bush, who dodged the same war by getting into the National Guard on a phone call from his Dad and sneaked out of the Guard early. (Perhaps my father’s wisdom about blowhards who never served casts some light on Bush’s swaggering, “Mission Accomplished” flight-deck landing some 35 years after he’d left the Guard.)
It’s almost as loathsome as the Swift-Boating of John Kerry, and it highlights the larger problem: Proportionately, the Republican Party has the most members of Congress and other high officeholders who’ve never served in the military. And its loudest war-mongers, like Rudy Giuliani and, now, Joe Lieberman, haven’t served, either, although both were of draft age during Vietnam War. Neo-con war-hawks, who have battened onto McCain’s campaign, have never served, unless you count their militaristic strategizing and strutting.
Ronald Reagan never served, beyond making war movies Stateside. (George H.W. Bush did serve heroically in combat, which may have something to do with his youngest son’s desperate posturing.)
But the Republicans’ “Yoo Es Ay!” problem is about more than young men’s hormones and older men’s uneasy consciences. It’s even about more than just men, now that Cindy McCain has touted Sarah Palin at the convention as “a pistol-packing hockey mom.” (The Republican Party, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, and the National Rifle Association have all encouraged women to pack heat.)
The Republicans’ real problem is that they have too few other ideas that most Americans still believe in or even want to hear. Desperate for heroes, they don’t even acknowledge that John McCain’s war killed 58,000 Americans and countless others, in vain: After Vietnam defeated us, it entered the neoliberal global capitalist orbit, anyway, as it would have done had we never fired a shot. There’s a war memorial in Washington, but my memorial is a T-shirt on my back whose label says, “Made in Vietnam.”
To his credit, McCain worked to normalize relations with Vietnam. But Republicans are so much in denial about the Vietnam war – and so eager to milk McCain’s sacrifice in it – that they don’t even mention that the war was conceived and conducted mainly by liberal Democrats..
McCain knows, of course, and he and John Kerry once bonded over it years ago in the Senate, despite their diametrically opposite conclusions about what the war had been for. At one point in his acceptance speech, McCain mentioned the vanity of young men like him who’d rushed into war to be “my own man,” and he recounted that his torturers had cured him of it: “They broke me,” he said quietly, to silence in the hall.
“I wasn’t my own man anymore,” he added. “I was my country’s man.” He claimed that his love of America had saved him, and that now “I will fight for her so long as I draw breath.”
It was a difficult, fraught confession, somewhat dissonant and troubling. McCain said not a word – as the young John Kerry had, years before — against the senators and presidents who’d sent them to kill and be killed in a misguided, fraudulent, massively destructive, and futile venture. Its hardest lesson is that the American blood it shed does not retroactively justify, much less sacralize, America’s betrayal by its leaders. One of them, Robert McNamara, understood this and, to his everlasting credit, confessed it.
McCain seems to have drawn a different lesson. “I hate war,” he claimed in his speech, insisting that good judgment and principles are as important as the will to fight. I can believe him and acknowledge that Iraq is not Vietnam. But the Republican convention was desperately, indiscriminately seeking political clarity in fogs of war and bellicosity in all directions, and McCain played to it.
He reaped what he sowed: His account of his brutal transformation in captivity from self-regarding flyboy to selfless patriot deserved strong, voiceless applause from a mature, deeply moved audience.
Instead it got, “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”
Bill Scher at LiberalOasis agrees: Gov. Sarah Palin can give a speech. She can deliver sarcastic one-liners. She can repeat long debunked misinformation about her opponents and misrepresent herself.
Closer to center (and, the Opinionator suspects, to use one of the left’s favorite terms, “reality”) is Michael Crowley at the Stump:
Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing–few if any would ever vote for McCain–but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked.
Along those lines, the most penetrating assessment comes from Jim Sleeper over at Talking Points Memo:
If you didn’t sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country’s deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don’t sense the trouble we Democrats are in.
Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and “American” — with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters.
The two currents she tapped — the ones that roared up from so deep in the crowd that you could feel them riding on love more than hate — weren’t the ones unleashed by her or Rudy Giuliani’s disparagements of Obama.
They were riptides of deeply wounded pride and groping loyalty, a yearning for vindication of something that is not to be disparaged at all.
The first such riptide was unleashed by Palin’s and Giuliani’s accounts of John McCain’s career-threatening commitment, a year ago, when his campaign was hopeless, to an American military victory in Iraq. Right or wrong — and I think it was wrong — it was a commitment grounded in an uncommon courage that will be dismissed as stupidity only by smart-asses who really want to lose this election.
The second current was tapped by Palin’s own grounded, calm confidence that “ordinary people’s” common sense – her kind, and a lot of other people’s – is what it takes to pull this country through its converging crises.
The question is where those currents will carry us; Sleeper’s answer is unsettling: “if McCain and Palin win, they will lose the America they mean to defend.”
(Among the 136 comments:)
September 4th, 2008 Correct, the most penetrating assessment comes from Jim Sleeper over at Talking Points Memo as quoted above.
The GOP candidates know the power of TV and radio to turn reality upside down. If the Dems can’t get smart about that this year, anything short of a demonstrably incipient Depression may not be enough to save them. — Posted by Rich Turyn
September 4th, 2008
Any moderate observer of the election can only skim over the reader comments posted on the NYT these days as they get increasingly nasty and personal (NYT are you really doing your job of screening out abusive comments?). It’s a telling sign, like a deer frightened by a car’s headlight, that they really don’t know what to make of the last week.
A brilliant excerpt of Jim Sleeper’s writing. The NYT should balance up their editorial board with the likes of such a writer.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz lamented our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing post-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read it, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism. All of these are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including by greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and that seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled Americans to combine faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is said to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I myself doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous or cankered enough to elect him. Now, they’ve done it twice, even though he has gotten worse.
But maybe the rest of us have gotten worse, too. “Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will (Wikimedia/AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
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Henry Kissinger, Charles Hill and George Shultz (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/U.S. Navy/Eric Dietrich)
