Defense Against the Dark Arts

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The Yale Faculty Senate meets today to discuss, among other matters, the cancellation of the "dissent" learning module at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Big thanks to everyone who wrote to Yale. I hope the Senate discussion at today's meeting will not expend itself on general questions about academic freedom at Yale's satellite campus, as this Yale Daily News report did. Obviously there is academic freedom for most topics and most people at Yale-NUS. Singapore is not yet a Stalinist state. It is, however, an extremely sophisticated practitioner of the dark arts of (self-)censorship.

Instead, the Senate meeting could examine the analysis of Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal, which casts serious doubts on the Yale Report on the module cancellation. The Yale Report was written without taking into account the emails and text messages between Yale-NUS and the module instructor Alfian Sa'at. The senior counsel points out that the two accounts given by Yale-NUS and Alfian cannot both be right. There is a clear and urgent need to re-open the investigation under the charge of an unbiased Yale officer, and if the Yale Report is found to be wrong, a need to apologize and make amends to Alfian Sa'at, who has been vilified in Parliament and on social media.

Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal concludes soberly, "While one may legitimately debate the precise limits of academic freedom and open inquiry at our universities, a program of the type proposed by Alfian Sa’at ought to fall within the permissible boundaries: it neither advocated violence nor involved any breach of the law. Absent any breach of the law (actual or threatened) or clear harm to the public reasonably likely to be caused by a proposed academic or clinical program, one ought not to shut down a module simply because of disagreement with the worldviews, including contrarian political views, being advanced."

Singapore Unbound cannot agree with him more when he continues, "The spirit of open inquiry is essential to the broadest kind of human learning and the flourishing of the human spirit. We jettison this principle to our peril."

Jee Leong Koh
October 24, 2019

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