Faculty Gives Yale a Dose of Dissent Over Singapore

NEW HAVEN — Yale announced a year ago that it was creating the “first new college to bear the Yale name in 300 years” at the National University of Singapore, and last week, after reviewing 2,500 applications, it sent out the first handful of faculty job offers for Yale-N.U.S. College.

So it is distinctly awkward timing that members of the Yale College faculty, which never voted on the plan, are now raising concerns about joining their storied institution with an autocratic city-state where drug offenses can bring the death penalty, homosexual relations are illegal and criminal defamation charges are aggressively pursued.

On campus, there is a whiff of a Yale Spring, a slow awakening — at a university with no faculty senate — to faculty discontent. Many Yale professors are unhappy about the absence of a vote on the Singapore project, while some go further and attack it as a dangerous collaboration with a government that does not support the broad freedoms they believe are central to liberal arts education.

“The faculty is feeling disempowered, that it has no voice in what is going on,” said Seyla Benhabib, a political science professor.

Richard C. Levin, the university’s president, said the faculty had no vote on the project because it would not affect the college. It was approved by the Yale Corporation, the governing board. Yale officials take pains to explain that Yale-N.U.S., which will be paid for entirely by Singapore, will not be Yale but a distinct institution with its own president and its own diploma.

Of course, some faculty support the project, and some are deeply involved in it: Charles Bailyn, an astronomy professor, will be the dean of Yale-N.U.S. when the first 150 students arrive next year, and other professors helped develop the plan and are working on hiring.

At last month’s faculty meeting, about 150 professors, an unusually high turnout, debated Professor Benhabib’s resolution calling for a formal commitment to broad freedoms. A vote was postponed until the next meeting, this Thursday evening, when an even larger turnout is expected, along with an attempt to amend the resolution to include a statement of support for the project.

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