Introduction
On 28 October 1959, following the triumphant election of Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) and the British colony’s achievement of full self-government, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew visited Nanyang University to address the university community. Describing the tensions between the ‘tremendous emotional commitment’ of Singapore’s Chinese-speaking people to this Chinese-language university in the British (post-)colony, as well as its subversive uses as a ‘possible breeding ground’ for the Malayan Communist Party, Lee recalled in his memoirs that dealing with the problems of Nanyang University (Nantah) was his first lesson in the ‘difference between formal constitutional power and the political strength needed to exercise it’.Footnote 1 His public address struck a conciliatory note. He urged the 471 graduates of its inaugural class to prove their commitments to Malaya and Southeast Asia, rather than China, so as to contribute to the cause of ‘inter-racial harmony and peace in the region’. To that end, Lee assured, the government of Singapore would absorb 70 graduates into the civil service and make arrangements for scholarships for postgraduates studying in universities abroad, particularly in the subjects of science and engineering.Footnote 2
Lee’s remarks reflected multiple themes which would re-emerge in his shifting attitudes towards Nantah and the extant writings about the university within Singapore’s trajectory of decolonization and nation-building. The central tension that Lee identified in 1959—between the anti-colonial energies of the Chinese-educated youth and merchant elites sponsoring them, and the threat of possible communist subversion which would undermine his government’s envisioned future for a post-colonial Singapore—would continue to animate higher educational debates in Singapore and Malaya for the next two decades, until Nantah’s state-enforced merger into the National University of Singapore in 1980.Footnote 3 However, Lee’s statements on the government’s plans for encouraging scholarships for Nantah graduates to study overseas has been overlooked. A few months prior, following Singapore’s changed constitutional status and the transfer of power under full self-government, the Singapore government had announced the termination of the highly prestigious Queen’s Scholarships and Queen’s Research Fellowships to the United Kingdom, replacing them instead with Singapore State Fellowships that only permitted a minority of University of Malaya graduates to pursue education overseas.Footnote 4 What, then, did Lee have in mind for Nantah?
Unknown to most in the audience, about a month prior to Lee’s October address at Nantah, he had discreetly corresponded with John Tallman, the representative of the American nonprofit The Asia Foundation (TAF) in Singapore, requesting support for a programme of graduate fellowships in science at American universities for 50 Nantah graduates each year, for at least the next two years.Footnote 5 Envisioning for his American interlocutors an ambitious programme that would send nearly 33 per cent of all Nantah graduates in the College of Sciences to American graduate schools, Lee asserted that such a graduate scholarship would do ‘a great deal to allay anti-American bitterness among the Chinese’. He even went on to make clear his feeling that ‘such a program would have a more immediate and greater benefit than almost anything [the Foundation] might undertake’.Footnote 6 Lee’s request caught The Asia Foundation by surprise. A San Francisco-based ‘private’ foundation, which would later be revealed as a covert CIA front organization, The Asia Foundation had operated through an office in Singapore since 1952 as the Committee for Free Asia (CFA), and had seriously contemplated closing its office in Singapore upon the PAP’s assumption of power in 1959, anticipating anti-American agendas from ‘left wing forces within the Party’.Footnote 7 Now, Lee’s overtures signalled a welcome shift. In fact, The Asia Foundation’s cooperation in the PAP’s proposed scholarship for Nantah was so essential that Lee’s secretary reminded TAF representative John Tallman again a week prior to his Nantah address to confirm its support; the day after the prime minister’s address on 28 October, Minister of Education Yong Nyuk Lin duly called on Tallman, to coordinate what would be the hitherto largest American scholarship programme to Singapore, while gaining his assurance that the programme would be a covert one. As a TAF report surmised, it was ‘of great significance that a leftist-oriented government has given the United States preference in the training of its future engineers and scientists’. This signalled the promise of American universities in shaping the future of Singapore.Footnote 8
Standing at the intersection of American Cold War agendas to contain the spread of communism among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Singapore state’s efforts to leverage American expertise and resources, and students’ aspirations for further education overseas, the Nanyang Graduate Scholarship (NGS) is a little known footnote in the histories of education in post-colonial Southeast Asia and Singapore. Originating in American agendas to de-link overseas Chinese students and youth in Southeast Asia from returning to communist China for education, the NGS—later renamed the Singapore Graduate Scholarship (SGS)—was one of multiple American-led efforts aimed at facilitating educational exchange as an arm of cultural diplomacy in Cold War Asia.Footnote 9 Unlike historic American uses of ‘schooling’ as a biopolitical technology to buttress and consolidate American imperialism in its occupied territories, however, programmes like the SGS were covert operations aimed at helping Asian elites work for the future of a Free Asia; according to TAF’s stated aims, the ‘attainment of peace, personal liberty and social progress’.Footnote 10 Indeed, while the goals of the SGS may have been broadly similar to the pedagogical project of projecting American power overseas—as in the historic precedents of colonial Philippines and occupied Japan—the context of TAF operations in Cold War Singapore was markedly different; they were initiated by an ostensibly ‘private’ American foundation, but administered locally under self-governing Singapore’s Public Services Commission (PSC), thus serving as an exemplary case of successful covert operations where American foreign policy objectives could be achieved through local actors with little attribution. Far from simply being a case of American-led subversion in Asia, however, it was also a case of Asian elites in a small post-colonial state successfully co-opting superpower agendas for their own interests, thus providing a useful lens into the unexpected afterlives of early American efforts to challenge communist China for the ‘hearts and minds’ of Southeast Asia’s Chinese youth.
This article provides a historical examination of American efforts to reshape higher education in Cold War Southeast Asia, and the efforts of local elites in Singapore to strategically bait and then redirect these resources for their own agendas. While diplomatic histories of Southeast Asian-American relations have recently drawn attention to the geostrategic and military dimensions of ascendant American power in the late-colonial British territories in the region, this article showcases specifically how the presence of the Chinese-medium Nanyang University in the British colony of Singapore captured the attention of American state actors and its proxies, not merely as a possible site of communist subversion—for which it is better known—but also as one node within a networked infrastructure of ‘Free Chinese’ education outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).Footnote 11 While these fantasies unsurprisingly did not unravel as planned, their impacts were multiple. One immediate consequence of the SGS was in providing pathways for Nanyang University graduates to study for advanced degrees at American universities. But its larger significance lay in opening new educational mobilities for Singapore’s elites to America’s leading universities. By time the SGS was terminated in 1965—coinciding with Singapore’s declaration of independence as a sovereign nation-state and the fifth graduating cohort of Nantah—its early associations with the university had long been overshadowed by the diktats of the Singapore government, demonstrating the importance of education to the United States-Singapore bilateral relationship. Perhaps its most consequential legacy was in paving the way for the Singapore government’s 1967 recognition of American degrees for scholarships and employment in the civil service, laying the foundations for a decades-long pattern of Singapore elites’ schooling at leading American universities which endures to the present day.
In attempting to retrace an international history of Singapore-American relations through the lens of ‘Chinese’ higher education in Cold War Southeast Asia, one goal of this article is to foreground how American responses to the sizeable ethnic Chinese communities in the region—initially entangled with its own policy of containment of communist China—gave rise to new educational infrastructures in the region that connected post-colonial Asian elites to American universities. Recent scholarship has noted how American-led efforts to contain communism and shore up a Free Asia gave rise to myriad impacts—not only the violence and trauma inflicted on casualties of the various ‘hot wars’ in Asia, but also collaborative initiatives with ‘Free Asian elites’ which do not fit neatly within a binary of violence and resistance.Footnote 12 Indeed, centring the complex role of American power in shaping decolonization in Malaysia and Singapore, historian Wen-Qing Ngoei has argued for greater focus on the ‘Free Asian’ elites and American allies that mediated American power in Southeast Asia, ushering in pax Americana to supplant European empires in decline.Footnote 13 A separate monograph on Singapore-American relations by historian S. R. Joey Long focused specifically on how American Cold War agendas during the Eisenhower administration sought to make the colony ‘safe for decolonization’, aligned with its economic and military interests in Southeast Asia. While Long’s work is one of few that has elucidated the role of psychological operations and information warfare as core to the repertoire of American efforts to influence hearts and minds in the lead-up to Singapore’s formal decolonization in 1959, none of the extant works of Singapore-American relations have explicitly considered the role of education, nor American-led information campaigns specifically targeted at Chinese youth in the colony, who were regarded as the most susceptible to influence from communist China.Footnote 14
This is a notable omission, given how recent scholarship on the cultural Cold War in Asia has instead attempted to centre Singapore outside a teleology of nation-building, within a broader transregional network across Chinese-language publics across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. In particular, a recent volume by Jeremy Taylor and Lanjun Xu has demonstrated how Chinese-language reading publics, publishers, and schools scattered across Southeast Asia were not only proto-national institutions in the region’s new nation-states, but equally important nodes in what Shuang Shen has described as a networked ‘Empire of Information’, stretching across Sinophone communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.Footnote 15 This network, crucially enabled by a web of American funding and influence, was characterized by the flows of periodicals, print cultures, media, student exchanges, and mobilities, all aimed at cultivating Free Chinese and Free Asian subjectivities among the region’s youth and elites.Footnote 16 Following Wen-Qing Ngoei’s point that American Cold War approaches to Southeast Asia’s ‘Chinese problem’ transcended the conventional axes of bilateral politics but in fact represented a transnational American-Southeast Asian history, this article outlines—through the case of shifting American positions towards Singapore’s Chinese-medium Nanyang University—how this transnational project was later co-opted into the context of inter-state diplomacy between a self-governing Singapore and the United States.Footnote 17
If one of the aims of this article is to renarrate the contours of Singapore-American relations in the early Cold War by focusing on higher education, I also hope to invite historians of education in Asia to consider—through this specific institutional history of Nanyang University—an alternative genealogy of Singapore’s educational globalization, as it encountered American educational and diplomacy as an arm of foreign policy.Footnote 18 Best known in local folklore as Southeast Asia’s only Chinese-medium university, historical writing about Nanyang University has been hitherto dominated by the state’s allegations of real and imagined instances of communist subversion, Chinese communal politics, and the university’s negotiations with state power through various stages of decolonization.Footnote 19 In many ways, this historiography has mirrored the broader story of higher education in post-colonial Southeast Asia, characterized by a focus on decolonization, academic freedom, aspirations for institutional autonomy, and the politics of control under authoritarian states.Footnote 20 In Singapore, extant writings on higher education have unsurprisingly focused on the paramount role of the PAP government, its control over its universities, and, as Philip Holden has beautifully elucidated, the possibilities of the autonomous university in between submission to state and capital.Footnote 21 However, historians of education in Singapore have not always accounted for what Kah Seng Loh has described as the ‘transnational origins of national policies’, and the role of international actors in shaping policies later attributed to the visionary foresight—or heavy-handedness—of Singapore’s leaders.Footnote 22 What S. Gopinathan has described as Singapore’s ‘borrowings’ of ‘educational ideas and practices from other countries’, such borrowings—as with the uneven impacts of capitalist globalization—were very much shaped by Cold War geopolitics and their proximity to the United States as a global superpower.Footnote 23 Thus, by drawing on a hitherto overlooked American archive which reveals efforts to locate Nantah within an American-allied ‘Free Chinese’ educational orbit in Free Asia, this article outlines how local educational aspirations and American Cold War agendas were interlinked.
Indeed, in light of how Nanyang University’s graduates have constantly cited the large numbers of graduates who ‘qualified’ for Western graduate schools as a validation of their academic prowess, such claims should be moderated by acknowledging the intermediaries engaged in reorienting Nantah towards American universities and facilitating these educational pathways.Footnote 24 Considering Singapore’s later successes in educational internationalization and the great emphasis the government placed on study abroad for its national leaders, this article seeks to de-naturalize these patterns of educational mobilities, where American universities—as with various other exports that mediated American cultural hegemony in Asia—became an increasingly familiar and ‘normal’ part of the region’s elite professional class.Footnote 25 At least at the outset, these global educational pathways were not given, but made.
‘Chinese’ higher education, Cold War politics, and the former colonial British empire in Southeast Asia
The significance of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s solicitation of American aid for Nantah graduates to study in the United States in late 1959 must be understood in at least three contexts and overlapping frames of analysis: Chinese educational politics and community activism in British Malaya and Singapore, the role of educational exchange and cultural diplomacy in the American Cold War repertoire, and Anglo-American educational rivalries in Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies.
Since the turn of the twentieth century there emerged a significant presence of modern schools among sojourning communities across the South Seas, including within Britain’s colonies in Southeast Asia. Given a British policy of relative indifference to native education in its colonies, a range of actors, including Christian missionaries, local Chinese community leaders, and then the late Qing and Republican Chinese state, sponsored a growing network of independent Chinese schools that received only limited oversight from colonial authorities.Footnote 26 British bureaucrat and scholar Victor Purcell described this phenomenon as creating an ‘imperium in imperio’, as these ‘Chinese’ schools produced Chinese in Malaya who were Chinese nationals rather than British subjects or Malayans.Footnote 27 By the 1920s, a now venerable tradition of educational philanthropy from successful South China merchants like Tan Kah Kee had created an entire network of schools—from kindergarten to high school—culminating with universities in China like Xiamen University that students returned from the diaspora to attend.Footnote 28 These patterns of educational circulations were interrupted with the Pacific war in 1942, and abruptly cut off in the wake of the 1948 Malayan Emergency and 1949 Chinese communist revolution of 1949, where restrictions on immigration were local inflections of a global Cold War which reshaped the transnational educational landscape for Chinese families in the diaspora.Footnote 29 British efforts to establish a University of Malaya in Singapore were heralded by some as the crucible for the new Malayan nation, but it remained inaccessible for all but a minority of Anglophone elites.Footnote 30 Thus, when Singapore-based rubber merchant Tan Lark Sye announced the establishment of a private Chinese university in Singapore—a Nanyang University that would cater for the 13 million ethnic Chinese of the South Seas—it gained widespread support from a cross-class coalition of ethnic Chinese across Singapore and Malaya. Funded by massive donation drives from the public, Nantah opened its doors in 1956 to great local fanfare and enthusiasm.Footnote 31
Despite the rhetorical flourish in Tan Lark Sye’s claims to preserve and promote Chinese culture at Singapore’s Nantah, it is worth noting that it was neither Beijing nor Taipei, but New York City where the Singapore Chinese merchants on the university’s preparatory committee recruited their initial cohort of faculty leaders.Footnote 32 Thus, American interests, especially among a sizeable body of missionaries, educational philanthropists, and political observers all witnessing the shifting situation in Asia, were quickly piqued.Footnote 33 In fact, a number of American missionaries and educational philanthropic organizations based there had already been invested in promoting alternative sources of Chinese higher education outside the PRC—across Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Japan—to stem the flow of returning overseas Chinese students to China.Footnote 34 For instance, in September 1950, the British embassy in Washington delivered letters to various American missionary organizations exiled from China, such as the Yale-in-China Association, the Trustees of Lingnan University, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, introducing the challenges of ‘Chinese’ education in Malaya and making an unlimited offer to American missionaries with China expertise to contribute to the educational needs of Malaya.Footnote 35 Prominent independent Chinese schools in Singapore and Malaya even made efforts to recruit teachers and principals from among Chinese scholars in the United States, leading to a widespread trope among Chinese school students in Singapore about the presence of teachers with PhDs from American universities.Footnote 36 Charles Baldwin, a London-based American diplomat who weighed in on these debates, even made the impertinent suggestion that Chinese in America might be recruited for educational work in Malaya, a suggestion that was immediately rebuffed by his British interlocutors for fear of exporting ‘KMT protagonists’ and undue American influence into the colonies.Footnote 37
With the establishment of Nanyang University, influential and wealthy Chinese merchants in Singapore now also independently started reaching out to American state and private agencies for various forms of assistance.Footnote 38 Indeed, a day after the public announcement of the new university, Baldwin, the American diplomat who was now serving as American consul-general in Singapore, was presented with a prospectus from the Nantah preparatory committee and had to deny allegations of American involvement in the founding of the new university. The Committee for Free Asia (CFA)’s Singapore representative, too, was positive on hearing about this new university, describing ‘the proposed Nan Yang University [as] directly relevant to our plans for the overseas Chinese in general’, given their shared goals of discouraging Chinese youth from Southeast Asia from travelling to communist China for their schooling.Footnote 39 A few months later, upon learning about Nantah’s decision to recruit Chinese scholars based in the USA to staff its faculty, American consul Baldwin was upbeat, describing their faculty leadership as ‘Chinese Americans’ for whom the American consul in Singapore intended to provide counsel and assistance from the beginning.Footnote 40 Unlike the British, which saw Nanyang University as a communal initiative destabilizing their vision of a multiracial Malaya, the Americans hoped to encourage Nanyang as a source of Chinese higher learning outside of the PRC, capable of instilling democratic principles among the overseas Chinese, and as an effective tool to ‘weaken the powerful attraction of Chinese Communist universities’ on the mainland.Footnote 41
Recently declassified British archives reflect the tensions and contradictions inherent in the British and American positions towards Nanyang University, where the Americans were much more interested in reshaping the university for anti-communism, while leaving security problems to the British. Acknowledging the rapid developments at Nanyang University, acting American consul Hawkins wrote in June 1954 that, considering the composition of its faculty, and the possibility of its sponsors seeking American assistance, the ‘United States will find it impossible to have no relations at all with Nanyang University’, but rather ‘considers that it would be wise to provide friendly counsel and assistance from the beginning.Footnote 42 Responding to fears that it would be subverted by communist penetration, they simply noted that ‘local authorities, in consultation with the CO (Colonial Office), can be relied upon to keep a watchful eye’.Footnote 43
Despite reluctantly agreeing to let the construction and planning of Nanyang University proceed—albeit registered as a Limited Corporation under the Companies Act without degree-granting powers—the British were threatened by this Chinese university’s potential to upset their vision for a Malayan nation.Footnote 44 The governor of Singapore John Nicoll noted that it was impossible to imagine Nanyang as anti-communist since the Malayan communists had already expressed interest in it.Footnote 45 Amid these conversations with the American consul, the thorny question of American aid stimulated heated internal debates among colonial officials; given that Nanyang was a fait accompli, would it be justified to solicit unpublicized American aid that could be leveraged to gain ‘as much advantage as possible’ from an otherwise undesirable development? The tenor of A. M. Macintosh’s memo in June 1954 reveals this frustration, as he advised the Foreign Office not to continue any dialogue with the Americans, for ‘the mere discussion of the possibility might encourage the Americans to go on considering covert assistance at a time when in our view any assistance can on balance only do harm’.Footnote 46 Such words of caution, however, did not suffice to deter the CFA, which promised to ‘do all it can to rally American educational institutions to make Nanyang University, and particularly [Chancellor] Lin Yutang’s role, a success’.Footnote 47
Neither communist nor nationalist: American encounters with Singapore’s ‘Chinese university’
Few could have anticipated the dramatic turn of events in Nanyang University’s early years, which confounded American observers who struggled to make sense of the situation. Chancellor Lin Yutang, the extremely well-known York-based Chinese author and inventor who had made his name through his series of books explaining China to the West, had initially waxed lyrical to the international media about the prospects of Nanyang as a ‘Free Asian’ university, a bastion of free thought within the free world, and a community of learning that would rival world leaders like ‘Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge’.Footnote 48 However, Lin’s comments soon antagonized his local sponsors and community leaders who resented his ‘politicization’ of the university. Coupled with a famous clash of personalities between Chancellor Lin and his local merchant sponsor Tan Lark Sye, mounting disagreements over the university’s budget ultimately resulted in Lin’s premature departure after only a brief tenure of six months. Local pundits speculated endlessly about his possible identity as an American agent, though there is no conclusive evidence for this. On the contrary, one of Lin’s final official correspondences as chancellor was a request for TAF fellowships for Nanyang University, thus corroborating student Teh Hoon Heng’s speculation that Lin’s rhetorical anti-communism might have been geared towards soliciting American funds for his faculty and students, a gesture misunderstood by the local media as politicizing the university.Footnote 49 In any case, Lin’s departure and his damning allegations of a university controlled by Beijing and dominated by leftist students left a permanent mark in founding accounts of the university.Footnote 50 Describing the failures of Nanyang University to support American efforts in challenging student migrations to the PRC, a report by the Planning Coordination Group in Washington DC, noted the practical ‘difficulties in establishing a university for Chinese students in the Far East’ to counter Beijing’s educational offerings, while emphasizing in particular that the ‘social and intellectual climate of Singapore is far from being favourable to [an] intellectually oriented anti-communist activity’.Footnote 51
And yet, while one 1955 report to the OCB speculated that Nanyang University would inevitably come under the influence of Beijing, other American government reports begged to differ. As students began to matriculate in 1956, and new faculty members were now recruited at short notice from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the American consul in Singapore and the United States Information Service (USIS) retained an active interest in the university, given their broader policy of discouraging overseas Chinese students from travelling to the PRC for education. For instance, the joint group on overseas Chinese education based in Taipei continued to press on whether Nanyang University could support this larger effort to support Taipei’s efforts to provide a ‘non-communist college education’ for Chinese students in Southeast Asia.Footnote 52 In fact, in a 1957 survey of ‘non-communist’ Chinese college education in Asia, Nanyang University was singled out by the American embassy in Taipei as one crucial node within its broader project to ‘compete with Red China for youth among the overseas Chinese, and cultivate anti-communist, pro-Free World leaders’. Despite various incidents during local Chinese middle school anti-government and anti-colonial unrest, a series of 1957 correspondences from American diplomats in Singapore to Taipei affirmed that there was no proof that the university was either communist or anti-communist. For good measure, the American consul in Singapore noted that while many assumed it could swing either way, it was unlikely ‘apt to swing full pendulum to communism’ at that time.Footnote 53 The bigger problem, the American consul noted, was the problems of administration and operations—that of under-remunerated staff who were academically weak, the university’s limited budgets, and the sponsors’ unwillingness or inability to accept government assistance. Problems would continue to exist until these administrative problems were rectified.Footnote 54 Insofar as there was a ‘communist’ threat, he noted, ‘the university should be considered as an institution to which a number of the local overseas Chinese communists go for higher education, as an increasing number are expected to go in the future’. However, insufficient spaces to meet rising demand meant there had to be supplementary support for ‘Chinese’ educational facilities in Taiwan. They were all part of the same project.Footnote 55
The American consul’s concerns over Nantah’s administrative and operational weaknesses were noted particularly from the perspective of the university’s teaching staff and faculty, who, following Chancellor Lin’s departure, had been placed on one-year contracts renewable annually and under the control of a Management Committee that controlled the budget and recruiting process, which was led by businessman-founder Tan Lark Sye. Indeed, many of the Nantah faculty retained close correspondence with the American consul and USIS, apprising them of their predicaments, sometimes soliciting advice and aid, and even seeking opportunities to continue their scholarship in the United States.Footnote 56 Notwithstanding Lin’s controversial departure, USIS Singapore, which closely monitored the Chinese scholars entering the colony, observed that among the 70 members of the Nantah teaching staff, ‘a very large proportion of the staff has been trained at some time in American universities’, with at least a dozen American colleges represented on the faculty.Footnote 57 USIS Director Lawrence, whose personal adviser Chang Chin-Teh—himself a graduate of Yenching University with a PhD from the University of Washington and numerous friends on the Nantah faculty—met regularly with Nantah’s faculty leaders, often alongside representatives from The Asia Foundation. They would, on occasion, together host Chinese scholars or American professors with experience in China who were passing through Singapore.Footnote 58 Summarizing a conversation with Dean of Arts Chang Tien-Tse and Dean of Sciences Chen Chung-Nan, USIS reported favourably that these American-educated Chinese deans were ‘very definite’ in their opposition to the British ‘colonial type of education’ prevalent in Singapore, but ‘stated emphatically that Nanyang follows the American educational pattern and that it is by far the best’.Footnote 59 Even British Director of Education McLellan, a strong advocate for Commonwealth educational standards, was sanguine about his relationships with Chinese academics such as the ‘academically extremely well-qualified’ Dean of Arts Chang Tien-Tse. He noted a crucial distinction between the local merchants who funded and controlled Nantah, as opposed to the faculty members, where the latter group was more ‘anti-communist than at all strongly left wing’.Footnote 60 As the government’s Secretariat for Chinese Affairs would surmise, this was simply attributable to the fact that the United States was the leading destination for higher education among Republican China’s leading intellectuals. This also explained Nantah’s adoption of the four-year credit system—as in the ‘Sino-American’ pattern of Republican China—rather than the three-year honours prevalent in the British Commonwealth.
Assistance, not critique: Revisiting the 1959 Nanyang University Review Commission
In the lead-up to 1959, as the first cohort of 471 students from Nanyang University were preparing to graduate, the university was filled a sense of unease and anticipation. There was still uncertainty about its ability to grant degrees, the prospects of employment, and the extent to which its graduates would be recognized publicly.Footnote 61 British observers were largely sceptical about the graduates of Nanyang University Private Limited, an institution rooted in the ambitions of local businessmen, with no external criteria for examinations and parity of standards across the Commonwealth, where universities were sponsored by London and governed by uniformity of standards.Footnote 62 However, the American position was one of nagging anxiety that Nanyang University would yet remain the locus of a communist threat, especially in light of Singapore’s June 1959 elections and an ascendant leftist political force in the socialist People’s Action Party. Thus, when granted the opportunity to staff a committee of ‘noted international scholars’ to evaluate the university’s academic standards and advise the government on the possible recognition of Nanyang degrees, Singapore’s American consul immediately took the opportunity with great enthusiasm.
Historians of Singapore-American relations have hitherto focused on the prelude to Singapore’s June 1959 elections, which vaulted the PAP to power, as one early instance of alleged American meddling in local politics, chiefly through the case of covert payments to incumbent Minister of Education Chew Swee Kee.Footnote 63 As S. R. Joey Long has written, the public scandal over the ultimately false allegations that the CIA had financially supported the Lim Yew Hock government gave rise to Minister Chew’s resignation and arguably even paved the way for PAP’s victory in the general elections.Footnote 64 However, while the attention of American Consul General Avery Peterson was no doubt dominated by the fallout from this scandal and attempts to troubleshoot, he was at least partially also focused on the contemporaneous Nanyang University Review Commission that took place in early 1959, and American involvement in this effort to evaluate the quality of Nanyang University degrees and potentially reshape the institution’s future prospects.
From the outset, the American position towards Nantah had been a delicate one, especially when faced with British antipathy towards communal Chinese higher education at Nanyang. As historian Anthony Stockwell has argued, while the British did not outright oppose the creation of Nantah, they regretted it, not least because its presence undermined their vision of higher education at the Anglophone University of Malaya, which exemplified their commitment to compatible educational standards across the British Commonwealth and efforts aimed at achieving a ‘non-communal’ Malayan nation.Footnote 65 Initially, Morey J. Wantman, a visiting American professor of education from the University of Rochester who was then living in Singapore, had been invited to serve on the external commission to represent American educational perspectives. However, following preliminary conversations revealing that the Commission’s report would be negative, he was ordered by American Consul Avery Peterson to decline to be involved.Footnote 66 Reporting to London on a private conversation with Wantman about the American consul’s position, Australian academic Stanley Prescott, who was appointed to lead the Commission on behalf of the British Inter-University Council for Higher Education on the Colonies (IUC), noted his duty as a British subject loyal to the Commonwealth to highlight this divergence in Anglo-American agendas:
I gather that American policy in Singapore, as far as the Consul is concerned, is that America should support Nanyang in competition with the University of Malaya, and I understand that through the various foundations some support will probably be given to Nanyang from American sources. I believe the reason that they are supporting Nanyang University, and their anxiety to see Nanyang recognized as a University comparable with the University of Malaya irrespective of its standards, is that they are fearful that Chinese students, in Nanyang may be the leading edge of Communism in Singapore, and you know, this bogey determines so much of their policies in the Far East. If Wantman as an American had been a signatory in a report condemning Nanyang it would have been very embarrassing to the American Foreign Policy.Footnote 67
Local murmurings in Singapore of a possibly unfavourable report ‘condemning Nanyang’ may not have been communicated to Washington, however, as the State Department’s International Educational Exchange Services (IEES), which continued the task of identifying an American representative for the Commission, retained its upbeat tenor over the prospects of advancing American interests among the overseas Chinese through Nantah. In a letter to Harvard President Nathan Pusey inviting support from Harvard University, state department officials in Washington continued to express hopes that this Commission could support the recognition of Nanyang degrees, and advance the ‘eventual acceptance of US academic degrees in Singapore’, thereby facilitating future students coming to the United States for graduate or undergraduate study.Footnote 68 Harvard President Pusey, who would later foster a lifelong connection to Nantah through his son’s subsequent marriage to Nantah Professor Wang Teh-Chao’s daughter, in turn, recommended the Harvard-Yenching Institute’s Willim Hung (Hong Ye) as their representative. In fact, the American government noted a ‘source of great satisfaction’ regarding the appointment of a Harvard representative for the Commission, and that given the ‘political and psychological importance of Nanyang University as a symbol of Chinese culture in Singapore … it is hoped that American participation in the work of the academic commission will contribute to effective results in the form of official recognition of the University’s academic standards and of its degrees’.Footnote 69 Washington would in turn write back to their consul in Singapore, outlining their twofold aspirations for both supporting Nanyang and advancing recognition of American degrees, that:
If the official status of Nanyang and its degrees is thereby enhanced and regularized (as a result of the Prescott Commission), the emotional fixation of the Singapore Chinese on the University as a symbol of Chinese culture and as the apex of their educational system would find a measure of gratification, which is unquestionably desirable from a political point of view. If Hung can assist … in obtaining general recognition of American degrees, another of our objectives would have been well-served by his presence in Singapore.Footnote 70
Misunderstandings were rife on multiple levels. Indeed, on the eve of his departure from the United States to Singapore, Hung even believed that he would be exploring possibilities of an affiliated relationship between Nantah and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, as he revealed to his daughter Gertrude who assisted with his visa application.Footnote 71 Arriving in Singapore, Hung’s presumption of his obligation to support—rather than critique—Nantah produced a memorable clash of personalities and conflict with the IUC’s Stanley Prescott, who deplored Hung’s ‘intense anti-British anticolonial prejudices’ and his ‘extremely pro-American ideas on organization and administration of universities’.Footnote 72 In fact, many of the Nantah faculty too assumed that the Commission was meant to support it: to make recommendations on the purchase of books and modification of curricula in order to bring the degrees up to standard within a year.Footnote 73 Thus, it came as a rude shock when the Commission’s report recommended nonrecognition of degrees, deferring the decision to the newly elected PAP government, and openly critiqued Nantah’s lacklustre administration. As Prescott cautioned in correspondence to London, despite the unanimous conclusions of the Commission, American policy towards Nantah was actively detrimental to residual British influence and their efforts to reshape higher education in line with a self-governing, multiracial, and multilingual Malaya. Critiquing the ongoing American efforts to support Chinese education in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to counteract Beijing’s influence, Prescott noted, ‘on the face of it a great Chinese university serving the whole of South East Asia sounds quite nice’, but given the new Singapore government’s aspirations towards merging with the Malaysian Federation, such a Chinese university ‘placed in Singapore it will be a cultural threat to the ‘Malayanization’ of the Chinese in the Federation’.Footnote 74
Tails wagging dogs: The Asia Foundation and the Nanyang-Singapore graduate fellowship (1960–1966)
Into this uncertain terrain stepped the newly elected socialist PAP government, which had come to power as a non-communist, socialist party in the June 1959 elections, taking over the full organs of government for the first time. As Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew recalled in his memoirs, while the ‘dangers of communist penetration of government and administration’ remained ever present, his government’s initial concern was those who could not join it—the Chinese-educated of Nanyang University, whom he feared would be captured by the communists.Footnote 75 Indeed, the PAP government had immediately identified the ongoing crises of recognition at Nantah and the future prospects of its graduates as in need of attention. For instance, it took the unusual step of printing and distributing 10,000 copies of the 1959 Commission’s Report in English and Chinese, an act widely perceived as a gesture to discredit Nantah sponsor Tan Lark Sye.Footnote 76 Among the Nanyang university leaders, however, some were optimistic that there would be greater government support; Dean of Arts Chang Tien-Tse, who had previously petitioned the United States for assistance, was now also looking hopefully towards the newly elected government for support. In private correspondence with Minister of Education Yong Nyuk Lin on the eve of his departure from Nantah, Chang expressed his unhappiness with the influence of merchant founder Tan Lark Sye and urged the government to expedite its efforts to take over administrative control of the university.Footnote 77
The Singapore government’s efforts to shore up control over Nanyang University are a well-known episode in Singapore’s educational history—perhaps best remembered for the violent crackdown on dissident student activists in 1964, and the Federation government’s published White Paper Communism in the Nanyang University which alleged communist infiltration of the Student Union.Footnote 78 However, as historian Zhou Zhaocheng’s work on the Singapore government’s shifting positions towards Nantah has revealed, the period between 1959–1963, when the Singapore government was still navigating internal party-opposition, was notable for experimental efforts to win support, which were not only heavy-handed but also involved cajoling, including rhetorical gestures towards the shared nation-project.Footnote 79 Overlooked within this repertoire, there were opportunities for Nantah graduates to study abroad, which Prime Minister Lee regarded as interim measures to ‘mollify the brighter ones and test their real worth’.Footnote 80 However, the fact that the socialist PAP government, whose main electoral opponent was discredited due to allegations of covert American funding in 1959, would now immediately turn to an ostensibly private American foundation—rather than other Commonwealth institutions—as the source of this assistance, suggests that it was keenly aware of American interest in Nantah as a possible lever to exploit. In this instance, their main benefactor was the San Francsico-based Asia Foundation.
The Asia Foundation’s work in Singapore first began in 1952 as the Committee for Free Asia (CFA), a CIA programme code-named DTPILLAR which sought to ‘promote, aid, and assist the cause of individual and national freedom in Asia, as opposed to Communist and other totalitarian doctrines’. A September 1954 restructuring renamed it The Asia Foundation (TAF), de-emphasizing its anti-communist, ideological aspects in favour of ‘supporting non-communist Asians in ways which support the attainment of US policy objectives’.Footnote 81 Through a local office and representative in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur it had been actively monitoring developments at Nantah, producing copious intelligence reports about goings-on within the university. While TAF programmes were not exclusively concerned with Chinese affairs, its broader concern with ‘overseas Chinese’ youth and students had led to the development of a programme dominated by a focus on Chinese educational and cultural affairs. This included the covert sponsorship of non-communist Chinese youth organizations like the Union Press, the I-Lien Dramatic Troupe, and even scholarships for Chinese school students disbursed through the Malayan Public Libraries Association (MPLA). It also had fostered relationships with Nantah students and faculty through small grants and fellowships, most recently through the sponsorship of historian Hsu Yun Tsiao and 34 students from the Department of History and Geography on a 1958 study tour of India.Footnote 82
Until the first correspondence between Lee Kuan Yew and TAF’s John Tallman in late 1959, however, the PAP had been relatively unapprised of the Foundation’s work in Singapore; to the extent that it had acknowledged TAF’s involvement, it had been negative. One of the PAP’s first initiatives was the dismissal of TAF-sponsored recreational adviser Sterling Winans, who had remarkably entered the ranks of Singapore’s civil service under the Lim Yew Hock government. This gesture led to fears that the Foundation’s office in Singapore would be shuttered by the new socialist government, as was the case in the nonaligned states of Indonesia and India.Footnote 83 However, their initial correspondence in September 1959 signalled a much more cooperative future relationship. One day after Lee’s Nantah address on 28 October, Minister of Education Yong Nyuk Lin called on The Asia Foundation, welcoming its advice on how to proceed with their collaborative programme to assist Nantah graduates in the United States. Yong, who was ‘greatly surprised’ upon learning of the extent of TAF’s ongoing projects at Nantah, nevertheless welcomed its suggestions as he had ‘no fixed ideas on how the program should be handled’. His initial request for funds sufficient to cover 100 graduate scholarships for Nantah (sponsoring 50 graduates per year for two years) was welcomed as an unambiguous recognition of the value of American degrees. However, given the insufficiency of funds to meet this unexpected and ambitious request, Tallman eventually negotiated to provide 20 graduate scholarships to science graduates from the graduating class of Nantah for the next three to five years, ameliorating any difficulties that Nantah graduates might have in seeking employment or study abroad opportunities. As Minister Yong noted, these scholarships would only be for students resident in Singapore, to the exclusion of Federation students. It would be a crucial step in facilitating Singapore’s scientific development, while supporting students who intended to return to teach at Nanyang, thus meeting the Foundation’s ‘objectives of strengthening the Nanyang faculty’.Footnote 84
Upon learning of this news, the Foundation’s Home Office in San Francisco was enthusiastic, even offering its President’s Reserve Funds to top up this important initiative, which was deemed to be a project of considerable urgency.Footnote 85 Advice from their American-based interlocutors too, were positive. M. H. Trytten, director of the Office of Scientific Personnel at the US National Academy of Sciences, had previously visited Nantah in 1958, reporting that this invitation for scholarships was a ‘highly desirable program’. Observing American efforts to compete for talent with the Soviet Union, and a wave of recent returns by prominent Chinese scientists from the United States to China, Trytten noted that ‘such a program at Nanyang might well be the weight that tips the scales’ in view of the precarious balance between the influence of the West and the East, by reorienting future Nanyang faculty towards American universities.Footnote 86
However, tensions soon emerged even within the Foundation’s ranks over the prospect of one of its largest grants going to the Chinese-dominant Nanyang University, which was subject to growing criticism locally for possible communist subversion, Chinese communalism, and inferior academic standing. Pointing towards these multiple tensions, Kuala Lumpur-based representative William T. Fleming cautioned that ‘possibly the best but certainly the most dangerous project on which we are embarking is the Nanyang scholarship program’. Given local criticisms about the academic standards of Nantah graduates, would they fail to gain admission to American universities, or prematurely drop out of graduate programmes? He added that the only authority in Singapore to vouch for the quality of Nantah graduates capable of undertaking postgraduate work in an American university was Minister of Education Yong Nyuk Lin. Faculty at the University of Malaya, echoing the unfavourable external reviews, disavowed Nantah’s academic standards.Footnote 87 Furthermore, within a broader context of the Foundation’s policy to encourage ethnic Chinese assimilation into non-communist nation-states in Southeast Asia, would The Asia Foundation now be culpable in encouraging Chinese communal interests, at a moment when ‘both governments [of] Singapore and Malaya are talking integration and The Asia Foundation gives a grant entirely to Chinese?’.Footnote 88
Indeed, Fleming’s concerns about TAF aid to Nantah brought to the surface an unresolved paradox that had been internally debated a few years prior in the context of the Foundation’s assistance to overseas Chinese students travelling to Taiwan, which it had been supporting since 1954. The calculations and reasoning no doubt differed according to where their representatives were located, and their assumptions about the role of the ‘overseas Chinese’ in relation to the broader priorities of TAF. If it did not act, it would encourage student migrations to the PRC and the indirect spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia; however, if it did support institutions like Nantah, then the Foundation would be charged with abetting communal politics and undermining ‘overseas Chinese’ integration against the local government’s wishes.Footnote 89 These concerns were left unresolved, given the Singapore government’s sense of urgency to wrap up these negotiations in the period leading up to Nanyang University’s inaugural commencement of April 1960. Behind-the-scenes negotiations between The Asia Foundation, the Educational Testing Services (ETS), and the US State Department’s Institute for International Education (IIE) worked laboriously to create a special agreement whereby Nanyang graduates would be admitted to American universities with no standardized testing, language exams, or individual applications, but based on evaluations from a locally appointed selection committee. If Nantah graduates were to be encouraged to study in the United States to advance shared Singaporean and American interests, conditions had to be created to ensure their success.
Ironically, as American operatives between Singapore and San Francisco worked to ameliorate scepticism over the academic competence of Nanyang’s graduates, the Singapore government subtly shifted the emphasis of its initial proposal to strengthen the Nanyang faculty, emphasizing the practical uses of American training in the ‘scientific, technological, architectural, engineering fields’ to support Singapore’s economic development. By March 1960, TAF representative William T. Fleming wondered aloud if the Singapore government had baited and then misled the Foundation, as now ‘the basic objective of this project is to create a source of technical and professional skill to assist the government of Singapore in the development of the State … strengthening the Nanyang faculty is a collateral objective’.Footnote 90 Indeed, the intention of the Ministry of Education was revealed when it requested an expansion of the scholarships to include Singapore University and Polytechnic graduates, renaming the Nanyang Fellowship a Singapore Graduate Scholarship (SGS) and placing it under the administration of a Technical Assistance Scholarship Board (TASB) under the Public Service Commission’s Chairman Phay Seng Whatt, who convened its first meeting and confirmed its terms of agreement with The Asia Foundation in October 1960.Footnote 91 The previously ambitious targets of sending 100 Nantah graduates to the United States were now reduced to 50 Singaporeans from Nantah, the University of Malaya, and the Singapore Polytechnic.Footnote 92 In a classic case of what historians of the Cold War have described as the phenomenon of ‘tails wagging dogs’—where local elites leveraged superpower agendas for their own interests or forced superpower responses—Fleming now concluded that the government’s ultimate agenda may have been to leverage interest from Nantah in the existing TAF programme, while safeguarding a large number of scholarships and American funds exclusively for Singapore at the expense of Federation students.Footnote 93 Lamenting these changes by the Singapore government and its increasingly assertive control over the terms of the scholarship, Fleming noted that ‘the Singapore Graduate Scholarship project has since its inception been associated with Nanyang University in our discussion with the Ministry of Education (MOE) and in our own thinking … unfortunately … there has been less and less reference to Nanyang as a source of candidates’.Footnote 94 To make matters worse, the sole Nantah faculty representative on the Singapore-based Board of Admissions, Pan Pu, resigned in 1962 and left Singapore permanently, thus reducing the Nanyang University connection even further.
The scholarship programme nevertheless ran its course from 1961–1965, educating over 60 graduate students from Singapore in the United States at a cost of $470,000 to The Asia Foundation, and producing many American-educated civil servants for a post-independence Singapore. But by now, there was no longer any reference to Nanyang graduates as ‘overseas Chinese’ within this bilateral American-Singapore programme. On the contrary, the Foundation took great pains to ensure that the Singapore grantees, especially those of Chinese ethnicity, were placed in ‘universities with student bodies containing as few as possible overseas Chinese’, to guard against possible ‘overseas Chinese political pressure’ from both communist or nationalist sources among the international student body at American universities.Footnote 95 All recipients were Singapore citizens, and were willing to serve the Singapore government for five years on completion of their course.Footnote 96 While this was no longer a solely Nantah project, 29 of the 60 grantees were Nantah graduates. To a large extent, it was TAF’s close working relationship with the Institute for International Education (IIE) that allowed many Nantah graduates to enter American universities without regard for the negative external evaluations of their degrees, thus paving the way for future enrolments and opportunities for studying overseas.
Wang Kang-Ding, one of the distinguished graduates of Nantah’s first graduating cohort who later also took an Asia Foundation scholarship for a graduate journalism degree in the United States, has a decades-long project to document the career and professional achievements of all the Nantah graduates who went on to advanced studies. In his tabulation of statistics from the first to fifth batches of graduates, he found that a remarkable 11.58 per cent of 2,003 graduates went on to graduate studies; among College of Science graduates, it was 22.7 per cent.Footnote 97 Among all the external organizations funding these scholarships for Nantah graduates, The Asia Foundation’s Singapore Graduate Scholarship was by far the largest external sponsor, funding 30 out of the 81 graduates who went to the United States. Of the 30 graduates who took up an Asia Foundation scholarship to pursue graduate degrees in the United States, 14 had returned to Nanyang as lecturers by 1965; others returned as civil servants or to teach in the Chinese secondary schools.Footnote 98 While these graduates did get a boost in admissions and the administrative processes, the academic achievements of Nantah students speak for themselves. As one academic adviser from the University of Minnesota enthusiastically reported, Nantah students measured up to high standards in the Master’s programme in chemistry, and experienced few problems in adjusting. On the basis of the records of earlier Nanyang graduates in their department, he noted, ‘they [were] happy to receive them, and have been awarding their own assistantships to Nanyang graduates in recent years’, thus producing a cascade effect of receiving more and more Nanyang graduates’ applications.Footnote 99 And it was not only the United States, but also educational pathways to Europe and beyond. The German consul general in Singapore, initially echoing a broader ambivalence about underqualified Nantah graduates’ ability to succeed in overseas graduate studies, was heartened by feedback by The Asia Foundation’s representative that Nantah graduates had ‘compiled an excellent scholastic record in the U.S. … even superior to that of students from the University of Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic’. The Asia Foundation’s Lin Sloan strongly encouraged the German consul general to provide more opportunities for Nanyang students to take graduate work overseas, since opportunities for them were lacking in Singapore.Footnote 100
While Nanyang graduates did go on to illustrious academic careers overseas, recipients of the Singapore Graduate Scholarship who had to return to Singapore after two years to fulfil a five-year bond with the civil service were not always satisfied with their job placements. By then, the Singapore government’s agendas were less and less concerned with staffing the Nanyang (or even Singapore University) faculty. Instead, these returning graduates from the United States were placed in a range of jobs, from middle school teachers to civil servants in economic development or the public utilities board—with mixed reactions. A survey of the first three returning students in 1963 evidenced an overall positivity; they took positions as secondary school science teachers, thus meeting The Asia Foundation programme’s objective of ‘contributing to the development of highly trained manpower to meet Singapore’s educational and technological needs in connections with its industrialization plans’, while making indirect progress towards the ancillary objective of government recognition of American degrees.Footnote 101 Popular recognition of American degrees, however, took time. One grantee, Lam Peck Heng, who went on to a distinguished career teaching at the Raffles Institution and the civil service, returned ‘distraught that no one in Singapore had ever heard of a University of Kansas’.Footnote 102 Perhaps the most disgruntled returnees were the many aspiring professors, now disappointed at not being able to continue doctoral studies and unhappy with their job placements upon their return.Footnote 103 For instance, Lai Wah Wen was bitterly disappointed at being assigned to a secondary school and denied a teaching position in physics at Nanyang; others like Wong Toon Quee were assigned as lecturers at Nantah but were disgruntled at the low salaries, the inability to complete a PhD, the heavy teaching load, while feeling insufficiently prepared to ever become an established scholar in his field of mathematics.
Of course, there were exceptions. For instance, one of the most prominent scholarship grantees from Singapore University was Tony Tan Keng Yam, who was identified by the selection committee as ‘the most brilliant Physics major to go through the Physics department in the last twenty years’. He was the only student whom the TASB insisted should attend MIT and the only student permitted to extend his studies for a PhD degree because of his undisputed genius in experimental nuclear physics.Footnote 104 But in a variation on the same theme of misaligned research agendas, upon returning to Singapore, he soon abruptly shifted his research trajectory—voluntarily or otherwise—from nuclear physics to traffic control operations.Footnote 105
The Singapore government, however, was so satisfied with the outcomes of these scholarships that the Public Service Commission even successfully pressured The Asia Foundation into a one-year extension of the scholarship programme, while requesting further increases in the number of Singaporean graduates sponsored to attend American universities. The Foundation’s Singapore office reluctantly acceded. Though now lamenting the disproportionately high expenditure on this programme, which was diverting funds from other projects in the region, representative Lin Sloan nevertheless acknowledged its ‘excellent working relationship with the PSC’, which served as a ‘principal connection with the upper echelons of the PAP government’. These were all valuable resources to be retained.Footnote 106
From The Asia Foundation, there were some misgivings and sense of relief when the programme was finally completed in 1965, but ultimately it too judged the overall project as a success given the ‘many excellent young people have received superior training which will directly or indirectly promote the economic and educational development of Singapore’, while at the same time cultivating an increased awareness and appreciation of American higher education.Footnote 107 Douglas Murray, a newly appointed young TAF representative who arrived in Singapore 1965 to administer the final years of the Singapore Graduate Scholarship, recalled a tumultuous time in late 1965 when Lee Kuan Yew—publicizing newly independent Singapore’s nonaligned foreign policy— led a negative press campaign against the United States.Footnote 108 And yet, notwithstanding Lee’s ‘nasty accusations about US espionage and CIA activities’, Murray recalled, the Singapore government remained a hugely efficient and effective partner in the scholarship programme, a conviction and trust he would take with him into his later career in educational philanthropy.Footnote 109 In his recollections, he noted how the SGS, which was the first systematic programme to send civil servants in the former British colony to American graduate schools, was a ‘highly successful collaboration because the Singapore Government managed it exceptionally well over many years. Typical!’. The Foundation’s Lindsey Sloan too, who served two stints as representative in Singapore between 1963–1965, and then 1967–1969, recalled his excellent working relationship with the Singapore government and the discipline of Singapore’s scholarship grantees, a perspective which was further enhanced after his subsequent posting to Afghanistan, where nepotism within selection committees and the phenomenon of grantees failing to fully honour their commitments was much more commonplace.Footnote 110
Perhaps the great validation came in 1967, when Minister Yong Nyuk Lin took the case of the specific example of the excellent achievements of the returned graduates from American universities now employed in government service as a direct reason for the Singapore government’s decision to recognize American medical degrees, and more broadly, American degrees for civil service scholarships and employment.Footnote 111 Citing this as the greatest evidence of a ‘major breakthrough in the Government’s public attitude toward American higher education’ and a substantial success for the SGS, Douglas Murray noted that this news should be a source of satisfaction to the Foundation.Footnote 112 Thus culminated a nearly two-decades-long protracted debate over the recognition of American degrees in Singapore, and comprised the roots of a new pattern of educational mobility, where an American graduate degree was now not a second-tier option, but a coveted symbol of prestige and cosmopolitanism for a new generation of Singaporean civil servants and Southeast Asian elites.
Epilogue: American higher education in post-colonial Singapore
In newly independent Singapore, although the myth of Nantah as a hotbed of leftist or communist students continued to be circulated, few with insider knowledge of the situation ventured to describe Nantah as a leftist or a Chinese university susceptible to communist subversion. Rather, uncensored comments coming from early supporters of Nantah bemoaned the growing influence of the Singapore government—and the state’s attempts to leverage American aid—at the university. Han Suyin, one of the few members of the teaching staff who was affiliated with Nantah for over a decade, commented privately to her friends that the changes to Nanyang University now symbolized post-independence Singapore’s ‘very pro-American’ orientation, whereby ‘Nanyang University is now entirely run by the Americans, [with] the Asia Foundation now in total charge of Nanyang University’.Footnote 113 It is uncertain what Han was referring to in this candid private letter. But one might venture a guess, given the growing numbers of their top graduates that headed to—or at least aspired to go to—American graduate schools, and the growing imprints of TAF funding on prominent Nantah institutions like its Language Center, its Southeast Asia Research Institute, and its faculty leadership, all of which were inviting greater resources from and ties with American universities.
Of course, with the termination of the SGS, Nanyang University no longer held a monopoly over Asia Foundation funds in Singapore, which were disbursed across a wide variety of fields, including Singapore University, and even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 114 Nor did the United States ever have a full monopoly over shaping Singapore’s educational futures, as the state’s international ‘borrowings’ were always varied. The overall dominance of Commonwealth institutions, especially universities in the United Kingdom, would only be supplanted by American universities in the 2000s.Footnote 115 Nevertheless, this story of the Cold War origins of American higher education in Singapore demonstrates how what later would be seen as a commonsense logic of human resource and national ‘talent’ development was in fact embedded within superpower contestations at an early stage of post-colonial Singapore’s development. Such a transnational lens into Singapore’s history and its encounters with American cultural and educational hegemony in Asia does not preclude the state’s role, but demonstrates how Asian elites’ interactions with American Cold War protagonists had important legacies.Footnote 116 Indeed, given how international educational advisers to Singapore have long been regarded as simply pro forma legitimators of the PAP government’s agendas—as in the 1980 merger of Nanyang University and Singapore University into the National University of Singapore— future scholarship might probe further the dialogical relationship between local and global, without reinforcing the primacy of the state.Footnote 117 And, given that the Cold War inadvertently shaped the global stage in which these circulations of knowledge were taking place, then more attention is equally merited to the multidimensional nature of pax-Americana in Singapore, and how the web of institutional and interpersonal networks it produced shaped the trajectories of higher education in Singapore.
Today, the memory of American interest in and aid to Nanyang University in the 1950s and 1960s, or the ways in which the Singapore government identified Nantah as a locus through which American support in higher education could be achieved, has largely been forgotten. Yet, what is striking now, when revisiting the archives of these Cold War-era collaborations, is how Asia’s leading universities remain contested battlegrounds of international politics, not only in attempting to deftly navigate Sino-American geopolitical rivalries, but more importantly, in a push towards educational ‘internationalization’ that is synonymous with neoliberal capitalism. The irony is that unlike the early Cold War attempts to co-opt American funds under ‘national’ government sponsorship and rhetorical commitments to nation-building, the post-Cold War quest to ‘globalize’ Asia’s leading universities have led national elites to purchase American university brands at great material cost—but ambiguous educational benefits—to their citizens.Footnote 118 In the present, where the fruits of Cold War-era American cultural and educational diplomacy in Asia seem on the verge of implosion under a second Trump Administration, is a fitting occasion to contemplate the local inflections of global politics, and how such ongoing negotiations may yet shape present and future of the United States and Asia’s ‘global universities’.Footnote 119
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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