Defense Against the Dark Arts
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...