Sociologist Teo You Yenn’s previous book was an academic publishing phenomenon; her latest appears to be following suit. CHERIAN GEORGE (Hong Kong Baptist University) explains the structural conditions that make her an exception in Singapore academia.
The unprecedented impact of Teo You Yenn’s books prompted a non-academic to ask me a few days ago: what makes You Yenn so special? This question could be read as an invitation to psychoanalyse the enigma that is Singapore’s best known sociologist in the hope of uncovering individual attributes responsible for her unique appeal. But the questioner was really asking: if there is such demand for such scholarship, why aren’t there more like her?
To answer this, we have to go beyond micro-level analyses of the author’s biography (as interesting as such an exercise may be). We need to dissect the structural conditions in which Singapore academia operates. This is a matter of legitimate public interest. Singapore taxpayers have poured immense resources into the higher education sector. They are entitled to demand maximum bang for the buck.
By many measures, they are already getting it. Singapore universities offer high-quality credentials craved by not only Singaporeans but also other countries’ young people. Our universities are integral parts of Singapore’s knowledge-based economy, contributing to high employment and the productivity of major industrial sectors.
Teo’s work exemplifies a different kind of return on investment in universities. Her 2018 book, This Is What Inequality Looks Like, helped Singaporeans understand that they should not think of the country’s poor as belonging in a separate box called poverty, but as the flip side of systems and structures designed for the comfort of the middle class and the wealthy. It thereby challenged official narratives about inequality. A recent commentary by Ng Wai Mun in Lianhe Zaobao says of the book that it “to some extent, shifted public narratives from ‘individual responsibility’ to ‘structural inequality’, having a lasting impact on both policy and society”.
The fact that her latest book, Unease: Life in Singapore Families, shot to the top of the nonfiction bestseller list even before its official launch shows that there is considerable public appetite for this kind of scholarly work. Singaporeans don’t only want universities to discover new species and drugs, create new inventions to patent, or generate data to help government and business work more efficiently. They also value new ways of thinking about old issues, prompting not just new answers but also new ways to frame questions.
The government has not given any indication that it welcomes Teo’s interventions, and has indeed tried to use its power to limit her influence in the national debate on inequality. But this seems to have only enhanced her popular appeal. Clearly, a significant segment of the Singapore public believes in partaking of perspectives that differ from the official line. This does not mean that they all agree with her 100 percent; but it suggests they have the maturity to demand diverse viewpoints to sharpen their own thinking.
Teo You Yenn’s two books on inequality and family life are both on the non-fiction bestseller list.
Universities are uniquely placed to cultivate alternative perspectives and challenge conventional wisdom. The notion that this is a legitimate role for universities is nothing new. The principle of academic freedom can be traced back to the 12th century CE, when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I realised that his realm would grow stronger if professions and scholars at what became the University of Bologna had the freedom to produce knowledge guided by their own norms.
Today, this is hardly a revolutionary idea. In a 1997 declaration, member states of the United Nations affirmed universities as “communities of scholars… pursuing new knowledge without constriction by prescribed doctrines”. More than a thousand universities (including some in the People’s Republic of China such as Peking University, but none in Singapore) have signed a collective mission statement, the Magna Charta Universitatum, that embraces the principle that “research and teaching must be intellectually and morally independent of all political influence and economic interests”. It adds, “Intellectual and moral autonomy is the hallmark of any university and a precondition for the fulfilment of its responsibilities to society. … As they create and disseminate knowledge, universities question dogmas and established doctrines and encourage critical thinking in all students and scholars.”
Singaporeans implicitly endorse this mission when they hoist Teo’s books into the bestseller list and cram themselves into standing-room-only venues to hear her speak.
I should stress that I’m not recommending that all academics devote themselves to critical and conceptual research like Teo. Singapore also needs social scientists to answer more fine-grained and instrumental questions. Like: Is health education more persuasively communicated by experts or celebrities, through information-rich or affective cues? Or: How would autonomous vehicles affect gig economy workers? And countless others.
Social science findings illuminating such technical issues, generated through experiments and sophisticated modelling, may not excite journalists and influencers let alone book publishers, but they would be extremely valuable to various decision makers. They could, quite directly, protect lives and livelihoods.
Indeed, it should neither be surprising nor worrying that most academics devote themselves to instrumental, incremental, and unglamorous contributions to knowledge. This is the norm everywhere. But this need not be an either-or choice. Singapore has thousands of researchers in the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools such as law and education. Even if most of them maintain a lower profile, we should expect a significant minority opting for public-facing scholarship. There isn’t. So what requires explanation is why encountering research like Teo You Yenn’s is as rare as sighting a wild Malayan tapir.
Book talk at Wardah Books on 7 May 2026.
Academic freedom?
The most obvious explanation is Singapore’s constraints on academic freedom. These have been documented in some detail, especially by AcademiaSG, the collective that Teo co-founded in 2019 with economist Linda Lim, political scientist Chong Ja Ian, and me. The government has blithely sidestepped our questions about its practice of political vetting of all university hires. Some young Singaporeans on the brink of joining universities have been blocked by the government, seemingly for nothing more than past links to progressive branches of civil society.
The professional mission statements I referred to earlier explicitly endorse academia’s engagement with civil society: academics need to provide expertise to non-profit sectors and “engage fully with and assume leading roles in local communities and ecosystems”. In Singapore, however, faculty members’ dealings with civil society are closely watched and regulated.
This has a direct bearing on the replicability of Teo’s approach. Teo attributes her own development as a scholar not only to her training at left-leaning UC Berkeley, but also to her involvement with the feminist group Aware. Working alongside activists endowed her with benchmarks quite different from her employer’s criteria. “I got to be around women who worked tirelessly outside the boundaries of what counted in evaluation schemas,” she has said. The rules of the Singapore mainstream — “[h]ierarchy, not speaking out of turn, avoiding disagreement” — did not apply in her civil society milieu.
Her status as an academic helped Aware’s public advocacy; at the same time, civil society allowed her to develop a side of her that academia could not. “In Aware, I found a place for my needs and aspirations to breathe,” she said. This experience prompted Teo to spearhead AcademiaSG’s Knowledge PRAXIS conference in 2024, where artists, journalists, and activists discussed their work alongside academics. It challenged the occupational silos that the state prefers as a way to divide and rule, and reminded us of the value of building, in Teo’s words, “an ecosystem in which different people bring different strengths to the endeavour of engagement”.
The lesson for fans of her work is this: to get the next Teo You Yenn, consumer support is not enough. Promising to buy copies for yourself and all your friends, thus turning a book into a multi-year bestseller, will still not generate enough royalties to sustain years of scholarly research like hers. In a few fields — like economics, business, and law — lucrative private-sector consultancies could pay the bills. But for most researchers in the social sciences and humanities, it’s the security of a salaried academic position that underwrites the work, and that security is not assured in a political system that is suspicious of critical, public-facing scholarship.
The metrics trap
Political restrictions are the most obvious barrier to such work. But they are not the only one, and perhaps not even the most important. Much less understood are the global higher education industry’s self-imposed systems for evaluating research quality. The modern neoliberal university’s increasing demand for high productivity has led to a dilemma of how to assess staff’s annual outputs (of, say, two or three densely written journal articles each). Since reading these publications is time-consuming and qualitative judgments can be contentious, many universities rely on proxy measures. One measure is how many times the publication has been cited. But articles need time to build up their citation counts, so the proxy measure of choice for annual appraisals is the ranking of the journal or publisher in which the work appeared.
Does publication in a top-ranked journal mean the article is excellent? Is the article worth less if published in a lower-ranked venue? Many universities’ evaluation methods make these assumptions.
In sociology, for example, the Annual Review of Sociology and the American Sociological Review are widely considered to be among the world’s top journals. A university that employs metrics-based evaluation of outputs would give maximum points to a faculty member’s article published in ARS or ASR, without having to go through the bother of reading it. Similarly, administrators would give high marks to a monograph published by Cambridge University Press. No need even to pretend to have read its 200 pages. University administrators wedded to such systems tell themselves that this is a scientific and objective method of evaluation. But since it basically involves judging a book by its cover, it can alternatively be regarded as the very definition of anti-intellectualism.
What’s beyond doubt is that the reliance on such bibliometrics involves an outsourcing of evaluations, away from the academics’ own institutions to the editors of top-tier journals and book publishers. Many academics welcome this. They may distrust their own supervisors’ expertise or sense of fairness. If a dean does not support a faculty member’s interest in studying racial discrimination, for example, getting published in the highly regarded Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies provides external validation that is hard to argue with.
But there is a catch. Top-tier journals and book publishers are overwhelmingly American and European. Singapore universities’ metrics-driven appraisal systems thus amount to a massive distortion of incentives. In theory, a critical mass of academics should be orienting their work toward Singapore’s needs. In practice, their career progression is strongly influenced by their success in writing for Western peers.
Some areas of research are less affected than others. A Singapore researcher working at the psychological level of analysis — conducting rigorous experiments on how different social media interfaces influence college students’ sharing of misinformation, for example — may produce findings that journals accept as globally relevant, because reviewers feel that the findings are not greatly dependent on national context.
However, the more context-rich the research, the less likely Singapore-focused research would appeal to Western editors. A deep dive into Singapore’s unique political system, for example, is not going to get into the top-ranked Journal of Politics or American Political Science Review.
Professors trying to defend the metrics-driven hankering for Western approval say junior scholars should try produce work on Singapore that connects with Western research agendas. This is certainly possible. In an exceptional case, an academic might produce the academic equivalent of Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye — unapologetically Singaporean and receiving global critical acclaim. But there is usually a trade-off: either dilute the Singapore content at the expense of relevance to Singapore, or settle for a lower-ranked regional journal. In Teo You Yenn’s highly exceptional case, she opted for an independent local publisher over an international academic press, so as not to still her manuscripts’ beating Singaporean heart.
Furthermore, while a Charlie Chan is hypothetically possible, academia has become an unforgiving game of probabilities. Fine margins separate the junior scholar who scrapes past the promotion-and-tenure hurdle and the peer who is shown the door. Quite understandably, since academics like everyone else need to earn a living, many do the math and conclude that they cannot afford to spend the bulk of their working hours on research that has a lower chance of acceptance by the publishing venues most prized by their employers. The game has only become more competitive over the past two decades, so it is getting increasingly unlikely that junior scholars will follow in Teo You Yenn’s footsteps.
If Singaporeans think there is something wrong with this system — and they would be right — they should demand change. University administrators and policymakers intent on preserving the status quo will no doubt caution against lowering academic standards. They will present a false binary of world-class quality versus local relevance. We should not be duped by this. What needs to change is not the application of high standards but the outsourcing of judgments to editors and reviewers who have no interest in Singapore. The government is fond of saying that Singapore’s affairs are for Singaporeans to decide. Yet, it supports a system where Western editors and reviewers have more say than the Singapore public over the research priorities and the career choices of Singaporean scholars.
It is not just the Global South that is rebelling against the industry’s pernicious reliance on bibliometrics. Leading American and other Global North universities and academic associations have signed onto the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, pledging to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in appointment and promotion decisions and instead to assess research on its own merits. Singapore’s universities need to move with the times. And since change is unlikely to come from the top, members of the public who want to see more socially-relevant scholarship need to make themselves heard.
The distorting impact of rankings and metrics was discussed at AcademiaSG’s 2024 Knowledge PRAXIS conference, in presentations by Cornell University PhD student Jacqueline Ho (now at Singapore Management University) and Cherian George.
Valuing impact beyond academia
Teo’s books are exceptional not only for their Singaporean focus but also for their impact beyond academia. This is another dimension of local academia that Singaporeans need to question. Are Singapore’s public-funded universities sufficiently incentivised to make an impact beyond the classroom and other scholarly spaces?
Lily Kong, president of the Singapore Management University, agrees there is a problem. In a 2024 lecture, she said, “Far too often, academics focus solely on communicating with their peers, particularly those in the Global North, through journals and conferences.”
She was in favour of valorising research that makes an impact beyond academia. She was quick to point out that measurement would be a challenge. True, but problematic measurement methods have not stopped universities from obsessively measuring conceptually flawed factors such as journal impact. Replacing these with rough measurement of things that are actually worth gauging, like societal impact, sounds like it would be an improvement.
Again, Singapore can refer to external developments for guidance. Hong Kong, where I work, is currently undertaking its massive university evaluation process. The six-yearly Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) measures the performance of every department in the territory’s eight public universities. A full 20% of the department’s final score is devoted to its research impact beyond academia. The RAE is modelled on Britain’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), under which even greater weight, 25%, is attached to impact.
In the REF and RAE, not every scholar needs to show strong impact, since it should be fine for many to focus on fundamental and theoretical research. Depending on its size, a department may need to submit just a couple of impact case studies to demonstrate that it has nurtured research that has made a difference to society. Wide reach (like a bestselling book or a YouTube video watched by thousands) is not enough. The submission must show evidence that the research has triggered change of some sort.
To be fair to diverse departments, the guidelines value different kinds of impact. When the UK’s REF was being imported by Hong Kong, academics pointed out that Hong Kong policymaking has fewer avenues for public consultation and participation than Britain’s liberal democracy. Therefore, if the RAE only recognised contributions to government policymaking, it would unfairly penalise departments doing more critical work. As a result, the Hong Kong RAE’s guidelines for the social sciences define impact more broadly, to include not just “policy decisions or changes to legislation [etc.]” but also stimulating “public debate”. Other examples specified in the guidelines include “adoption in public discourse by activists, artists, stakeholders and commentators of conceptual tools and empirical evidence” generated by the research; and “making knowledge about increasing inequalities and its causes part of the public debate”.
Read the above benchmarks closely and you will understand why I say that if Teo You Yenn were based in a sociology department in Hong Kong, her work on inequality would probably be seized upon by the department as an impact case study. I am also quite certain that the case would receive the maximum 4-star rating by RAE assessors, which would boost the department’s prospects for more funding. Other sociology departments would take note, and try to produce their own Teo You Yenns, which is precisely the effect that this competitive exercise is designed to achieve.
Admittedly, such a system would be difficult to transfer to Singapore. Its success depends on impact assessments that are independent of power. While Hong Kong’s academic freedom has declined significantly over the past five years, its University Grants Committee, which administers the RAE, remains professionally run. Assessors are chosen for their expertise, not their establishment links. Their evaluations are based on transparent academic criteria, with no second-guessing about what will or will not please the authorities.
Singapore has no equivalent institutional mechanism mediating between the government and universities. Therefore, trying to promote societal impact in a way that serves the public interest — and not just the interests of people in power — requires much deeper reforms in university governance.
Teo You Yenn’s work has tried to shift Singaporeans’ gaze from the problems experienced by individuals and families to the systems and structures that reproduce those problematic conditions. Figuring out why she is such a rarity requires a similar mental move. Her growing fan base rightly appreciates her personal traits: her intellect, social conscience, and moral courage. We shouldn’t stop there. We should also question the political system and institutional policies that raise the cost of such labour. Only if these are reformed can Singapore clear a path for more scholars to produce similarly impactful work.
– Cherian George, an editor of AcademiaSG, is a professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University and a member of the Social Sciences Panel of the Hong Kong University Grants Committee’s Research Assessment Exercise 2020 and 2026.