Who is NUS trying to protect? Political leaders need to answer


Academic Views, Editorials / Sunday, January 26th, 2025

ACADEMIASG EDITORIAL

In our editorial marking the swearing in of the Lawrence Wong Government last May, we urged the new Prime Minister and his team to leave behind the legacy of punitive and paternalistic responses to dissenting views, including in academia. But, entering 2025, it is clear that old habits die hard. Legal threats have been issued against a Singaporean academic; a foreign university’s website has just been blocked

It’s not merely more of the same. The National University of Singapore has taken its institutionalisation of self-censorship to an unprecedented level. Academics in NUS’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences wishing to invite outside speakers must now complete a form declaring whether the event is likely to be  “controversial” or “sensitive”, in which case higher approval would be required.

Several talks are known to have been blocked by university leaders in recent years. In our 2021 survey of academics working in local universities, around four in ten academics said that they did not feel free to invite guest speakers as they wished. More than half said they had received explicit signals from their supervisors that certain topics would not be politically welcome. 

NUS’s new system routinises and bureaucratises values and principles that were previously applied in a somewhat ad-hoc and shadowy manner. But doing the wrong thing more efficiently is still doing the wrong thing.

We have said before that academic freedom is not an absolute or unlimited right. Beyond needing to follow the laws of the land, academics “voluntarily subject themselves to rules designed to protect the rigour of their research, the ethics of their methods, and the integrity of their findings”. But such standards should not be a way for rule-setters to impose conformity of thought or protect the powerful. 

Rules are unobjectionable when they address clearly defined social harms, without obstructing legitimate academic work. For example, ethics reviews would expect researchers to specify all possible risks to human subjects and design protocols to eliminate the possibility of serious harm. Researchers should, and most do, support such oversight because its purpose is clearly to protect the vulnerable.

We fail to see what academic or ethical purpose NUS’s new protocol serves or why its faculty should support it. We can surmise its intentions from its track record. Senior management and heads of academic units have blocked book talks about books that are freely available in local bookstores, and seminars based on academic publications readily accessible through the NUS Library. In one highly publicised case last year, the rationale offered to the speaker when organisers were told to drop her was whom she was married to. We know of other interventions at NUS, Nanyang Technological University, and other institutions where the affected parties have chosen not to go public. These cancelled engagements, on subjects and by speakers already circulating in the public sphere, could not credibly be considered a risk to students or the wider public.

NUS’s new system is far from normal, which is why it has made world news. Of course, universities around the world are sometimes put on the spot when faculty organise controversial talks. They may be criticised for providing a platform to speakers with viewpoints, connections, or biographies that some consider intolerable. In exceptional cases where a planned event could create law-and-order problems too large to manage, university authorities and even the police may need to intervene. But the usual response of the best universities is to defend their academics’ and students’ right to go ahead with a controversial event. They do not create a mechanism that silences voices that some lobby groups or individual members of the public obect to. 

The only plausible reason for NUS’s rejection of global best practice is that it believes “controversial” and “sensitive” events will trigger people in power. While ethics reviews protect human subjects being researched, political vetting seems designed to protect the vetters themselves. A year ago, responding to a controversy over a cancelled speaker, education minister Chan Chun Sing told Parliament that public universities manage their own events — but his ministry would “advise” universities “when necessary” to “respect Singapore’s wider social norms and act in line with national interests”. In other words, the government would intervene if university leaders are not screening activities to its satisfaction. It would not be surprising if NUS administrators concluded that they could lose brownie points if campus activities organised under their watch raise their political masters’ eyebrows. 

The Wong administration cannot remain silent behind its customary claim that universities are autonomous. (In our survey, less than one-quarter of academics said they believe they are.) Only ministers can answer whether NUS is right or wrong to believe that there will be a political price to pay if university administrators do not properly screen “controversial” or “sensitive” events. Since these are relative terms, the discussion should address the many concrete cases — some public, others less so — of university administrators blocking faculty’s plans. If NUS is overreacting to political signals, the education minister should advise it to abort this overreach by administrators. If university leaders’ fears of retribution are justified, the Wong administration should explain how this squares with its claims of respecting academic freedom.

– Cherian George, Linda Lim, and Teo You Yenn