Thursday, November 11, 2010

Conviction of Alan Shadrake casts doubt on Yale NUS tie-up: rightly so

Quoting from University World News: Conviction of Alan Shadrake casts doubt on Yale NUS tie-up

Yale needed to consider "the possible risk to students in Singapore who take the idea of free expression seriously and are emboldened by it, and if the oligarchy there is embarrassed and afraid it will spill over to the general public, things could get extremely ugly. At the very least, Yale's name should not be on the institution," Yale classics professor Victor Bers said.
If Singapore is to cultivate a genuinely liberal intellectual climate, and stop being a society dominated by docile and narrow-focused technocrats and managers, then Alan Shadrake's book should give rise to open debates, and not court proceedings against its author that inspire fear among Singaporeans of crossing invisible government lines.

ps. Essay in the New Republic.

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