Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . 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 seni...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In a previous column in this newsletter, I asked readers to write to the President of Yale University to support a fact-finding mission regarding the cancellation of a learning module titled "Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore" at Yale-NUS College. The Yale report, published on September 29, finds that "the decision to cancel the module was made internally and without government interference in the academic independence of the College.... [And] the evidence does not suggest any violations of academic freedom or open inquiry." However, the instructor of the module, playwright Alfian Sa'at, in a Facebook note published yesterday, charged that some members of Yale-NUS College "have been lying." He has "detailed emails and Whatsapp messages that will definitively prove that the allegations [of defiance, recklessness, and incompetence against him] are false and defamatory." He...