A collaboration that began with unanswered questions about human rights and academic freedom ends in questions about whether Yale-NUS College was ever an academic project to begin with
The more I know about how institutions plan and think within their leadership suite, the more sharply and brightly I can see the walls around "the room where it happens"--the deliberations and conversations that take place that no one but the people involved can see, about which there remains some mystery. Is the outward hubris--or seeming naivety--of those decisions a mirror of the discussions involved that lead to them? Are the people in those conversation just the people who appear on the organizational chart--the president, the senior leadership, the trustees, the university counsel--or are there prominent alumni or just backers of the plan who worm their way into the discussion via a phone conversation or a private meeting? Are their quids we can't guess at for the quo of the plan? (And what kind of quids does Yale or Harvard or NYU actually need, considering how pretty it is that they're sitting?) Is it just that the presidents and trustees of those institutions live within worlds where you have to matter to the elites of Singapore, Doha, and Shanghai or you're just a bumpkin sitting on a pile of moldering antiquity?
The logic of prestige is perverse enough to explain any number of follies, but I still find myself wondering so often: is that it? Is that all it takes to drive a university leadership to do something that costs them a lot of political capital within the institution when they start and likely costs them a lot of real money before it grinds to the end that everyone with any foresight and expert knowledge predicted in the first place? No matter what those prior conversations sounded like, they're not likely to be the credit of the leaders who had them, but I suppose I want to know whether they're simply stupid or whether there some kind of cunning venality involved.
The more I know about how institutions plan and think within their leadership suite, the more sharply and brightly I can see the walls around "the room where it happens"--the deliberations and conversations that take place that no one but the people involved can see, about which there remains some mystery. Is the outward hubris--or seeming naivety--of those decisions a mirror of the discussions involved that lead to them? Are the people in those conversation just the people who appear on the organizational chart--the president, the senior leadership, the trustees, the university counsel--or are there prominent alumni or just backers of the plan who worm their way into the discussion via a phone conversation or a private meeting? Are their quids we can't guess at for the quo of the plan? (And what kind of quids does Yale or Harvard or NYU actually need, considering how pretty it is that they're sitting?) Is it just that the presidents and trustees of those institutions live within worlds where you have to matter to the elites of Singapore, Doha, and Shanghai or you're just a bumpkin sitting on a pile of moldering antiquity?
The logic of prestige is perverse enough to explain any number of follies, but I still find myself wondering so often: is that it? Is that all it takes to drive a university leadership to do something that costs them a lot of political capital within the institution when they start and likely costs them a lot of real money before it grinds to the end that everyone with any foresight and expert knowledge predicted in the first place? No matter what those prior conversations sounded like, they're not likely to be the credit of the leaders who had them, but I suppose I want to know whether they're simply stupid or whether there some kind of cunning venality involved.