Advice for the new chairman (2022)
An active and engaged board (2022)
Asking why (2022)
Attracting faculty
Bargaining for a city campus (2022)
Challenges and significance of SMU
Challenges to "The SMU Culture" (2022)
Choice of President (2022)
Desired qualities of an SMU Chairman
Differentiating and defining SMU
Diversity of the students (2022)
Flexibility to choose an area of study (2022)
Forming SMU's Board of Trustees
Holistic approach to admissions (2022)
Inaugural Convocation
LSE of the east or a third comprehensive university (2022)
Measure our success through impact (2022)
Meeting with alumni
Motivation for Oral History project
Personal impact
Plans after stepping down as chairman (2022)
SMU presidents (2022)
SMU's entrepreneurism culture (2022)
Starting College of Graduate Research Studies (2022)
Starting the College of Integrative Studies (2022)
Strategic directions for SMU (2022)
The first involvement
The goal for College of Integrative Studies (2022)
Vision of a needs-blind university (2022)
Words of wisdom
Words of wisdom post-pandemic (2022)
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Advice for the new chairman (2022)
-
An active and engaged board (2022)
-
Asking why (2022)
-
Attracting faculty
-
Bargaining for a city campus (2022)
-
Challenges and significance of SMU
-
Challenges to "The SMU Culture" (2022)
-
Choice of President (2022)
-
Desired qualities of an SMU Chairman
-
Differentiating and defining SMU
-
Diversity of the students (2022)
-
Flexibility to choose an area of study (2022)
-
Forming SMU's Board of Trustees
-
Holistic approach to admissions (2022)
-
Inaugural Convocation
-
LSE of the east or a third comprehensive university (2022)
-
Measure our success through impact (2022)
-
Meeting with alumni
-
Motivation for Oral History project
-
Personal impact
-
Plans after stepping down as chairman (2022)
-
SMU presidents (2022)
-
SMU's entrepreneurism culture (2022)
-
Starting College of Graduate Research Studies (2022)
-
Starting the College of Integrative Studies (2022)
-
Strategic directions for SMU (2022)
-
The first involvement
-
The goal for College of Integrative Studies (2022)
-
Vision of a needs-blind university (2022)
-
Words of wisdom
-
Words of wisdom post-pandemic (2022)
I gave him a word of advice, publicly at last board meeting. I said, he will be at best a horse whisperer or cat whisperer. Not even a horse whisperer because academics are even less disciplined than horses, they are like a bunch of cats who think for themselves. Cats are very smart, smarter than dogs. But you cannot train a cat to do anything, right? They just walk this way and do whatever they want to do. If it wants to be nice to you, it's nice to you. Dogs come wanting to be patted and wanting to be loved. Cats are very independent.
I basically said… to Piyush, to all other members of the board that a university is legally a corporation, but it is not in actual fact a company or a corporation. It is a community of most unimaginable porosity. It is a community where the academics, the faculty, the students, the graduates, the alumni, all gather around that institution. And the role of the chairman is to inspire, to advise, to guide, but not to think that a university should be run like a company. SMU would be a disaster if it is run like DBS or Singapore Airlines or Banyan Tree. It is a very precious thing to have a community. So, the board of trustees and the chairman are like tribal elders who can impart wisdom and give advice. But they cannot just give orders because the community thinks for itself. I think that's the strength of the university, that everybody in the university thinks for itself. And so, we had to cajole people to come together and do what they want to do. But that becomes incredibly powerful if everybody is aligned. Then the power of the university is huge. And we are aligned today. I think that's why SMU is, that the SMU community is a very strong community because everyone is aligned and they're not ordered to do so. It is because they all share a common vision.
Well, I think an active and engaged board means they really had to feel that they, they have an ownership over the whole process. Ownership of the University and an ownership at the end of the day, if you think of what it means, doesn't mean you physically own it and it's just like my associates at Banyan Tree, I want them to be engaged. I want them to feel a sense of ownership, but they don't necessarily own the shares or anything. I think if you distilled it down to what ownership means in its essence, it means that what you do makes a difference. You're not just an employee saying, doing things that people tell you to do. You can actually initiate change and you actually are empowered to make change. When you're empowered, you feel a sense of ownership. So we all joke about it now because everybody knows, knows who, anybody who's joined the board of SMU, knows that you're only spending part of your time on the board the majority of the time you're spending in the committees. So we always, I've always tried to create committees in which the committees do not have me in it. And they have their own chairs and they actively engaged with management. And they make strong decisions, of course, which usually has to be approved by the board. So we have a number of different committees. I think if you ask any of our trustees, they feel empowered. They feel very engaged because they actually are not just sitting rubber stamping a board meeting which is chaired by a chairman. They dive deep into a lot of things and they invested of a lot of time. But the more time they spend, more time they feel that they have an ownership that what they, what they want to do, they actually empowered to do it. They're not just advisory person on a board. And then of course there are lots of little things. I mean, I always use humour, which is actually quite fun. I mean, quite a binding thing. They all know by now that at every board dinner and I tried to have a lot of board dinners, there are always a bet. When you have a bet, it's a way of getting people to talk and laugh, winners of bets and losers of bets. It’s trying to create a sense of comradery, sense of kinship, a sense that this is a group of friends who are engaged in a common mission for a larger cause, which is the University. But they're having a good time doing it. And we don't take ourselves too seriously. We take the issues very seriously. We don't take ourselves too seriously. So we have fun, we do all these. The board is very engaged and it's not an easy thing to do. But I’ve been on too many boards where I've been bored out of my mind and just waiting for the board meeting to end. And I'm always resolved that when I chair a board, I want the board of trustees or a director, to really enjoy the time that they're there. And to see at the end of the day, this was fun. This institution was fun, enjoyable and I contributed. So I put quite a bit of time in trying to create that board culture. So, it's not so much the topics themselves. It's not - a board is a board like everywhere else - it is creating a culture within the board. And people, I think insufficiently realized that there is something like a board culture.
I did an alumni session just yesterday and talked to them about what I would like to see them do in their own lives as leaders. I pointed them to a title of my book where I said, "Asking why" is the most important two words that you could ever ask anyone, to always ask why. And I think in the future of Singapore, the role that SMU can play is not only provide leadership in many ways, but to provide leadership by asking why. By questioning social norms, by questioning any accepted ways of doing things.
I always emphasize that asking why does not mean you are a rebel, it doesn’t mean you are against something. But it does mean you think through every issue. The greatest thought leaders in the world, whether they are scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Einstein or whether they are social leaders like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, they asked why. Lee Kuan Yew asked why in his younger days, why Singapore was a colony of the British and he was caught up in that whole anticolonial movement being asked why. He asked why more than anybody, any other leader I know.
The danger of Singapore is that everybody continues to play by the same playbook that was set by the predecessor without asking why. So I think SMU has to ask why of itself and cannot simply say, "Oh, this was set by the leadership 25 years ago." Singapore has to ask why we are doing things this way, why we are not changing to circumstances, etc., and challenging itself. And I hope that SMU can play a catalytic role in that process of thought leadership.
Perhaps even more important than that was the fact that Singapore was seen as an academic backwater. I think we have changed that to a certain degree in very concrete ways. The other two universities before they became autonomous were not really free to set their own salary levels. We said we have, being a business school, we have to have international salaries. Business schools have the highest-paid faculty in the world. Finance, the highest. Well, they’re like almost like investment bankers because they criss-cross. So we had to bite the bullet and with MOE’s indulgence we offered salaries that were really competitive with US institutions. That’s a problem that, for example, Cambridge isn’t able to do as a state university. So that’s why it’s a big bane, a brain drain now from Cambridge, and Oxford to the best US universities. Research we were willing to pay for. So the whole climate in Singapore has changed. National Research Foundation is giving incredible grants to top scientists to come here. People go to a university largely because of a) they have decent salary for themselves, and b) they offer decent grants, and c) the soft part, you have a community of like-minded people. So that’s all happening, but the time when we started it wasn’t really happening yet. So we had to tailor our strategies accordingly.
Well, we have been offered locations that we didn’t want at all. I think, in Tampines, and a few other places. We were offered locations that were out of the way. They would have been able to Land Authority or whoever would have been able to give us sufficient land also to build a residential campus. But we had said that that would have been just totally identical to NUS and NTU. And not unnecessarily better location would have been a small specialized university with a residential campus, but just like the others. And you know, all my life with this being Banyan Tree or whatever, I've always said. If you are a latecomer into something you never can try to play catch up and be a number two or number three. You always have to be trying to be number one in whatever you tried to do, even when you are a latecomer. So that's why we turned down with great sadness, of course, because we would have liked to have a residential campus where students could stay because we know in Singapore most students stay at home. And the reason why many students like to go overseas is to have a stay out-of-home experience. We couldn't do that at SMU now with just a very small extent. But we were willing to give that up because we felt that if we could have a city campus, that would be absolutely unique, like London School of Economics is so very different from Cambridge or Oxford. So we decided we wanted to have an urban campus. We've had our eyes set on here, on Bras Basah. But you never, you know what you deal with government. What you asked for you never get - so ask for something else, and then you get what you really get (want) and pretend that you're not very happy when you get it. So that was when we asked him in default, Marina Bay Sands. We were laughed out of the room. Then they said, okay, here you can get Bras Basah. So we left the meeting pretending to be very sad but we were jubilant because we got what we wanted.
I think from my particular perspective, because it would be many, many different levels of challenges from faculty recruitment to student recruitment to the campus, I think from my perspective overseeing it all, the biggest challenge was one of credibility. Credibility to students, to parents, to the broader community, to MOE [Ministry of Education]. So, we had many people who were looking at this university as a rather strange little experiment, and we could have flopped. I think that was always topmost in my mind. A flopping would be one measured by simply the fact that we could be seen as a mediocre new university, one that had no impact at all, no big deal. I guess it wouldn’t have made much difference to life in Singapore, but it would have made a huge difference to all of us, because we had these great dreams about what we wanted to do. So to me that was the biggest challenge. Like launching SMU, to us was like launching a new product. I likened it to iPad, because there’s a certain similarity. Steve Jobs can do all the market surveys he wants to do, but the iPad wasn’t built on the basis of—or even iPod—on the basis of market surveys. It’s based on what he thought the public would want, but it could have flopped. You really would not have known beforehand whether it would flop or not.
So we had great dreams about what we wanted to do, and we had hoped it would resonate with people, but you never know, it could’ve flopped. So when you look back, that fear of flopping, in my view was the biggest challenge. It’s not fear of not having money, because the money was going to be there, Government was supporting us, but it was the fact that we could have flopped. A lot of things had to come together for it to have succeeded, and thankfully, it all came together—the faculty, the students, the administration, the choice of campus, the pedagogical system, everything came together and maybe because it was the first of its kind.
There were debates within MOE [Ministry of Education], we would hear about the idea that we should just be then the sole provider of business education. We didn’t want that, because it’s against my personal values and the whole values that SMU was set up on. I wouldn’t call it competition as such, I would say diversity is always good. That’s a fundamental value even within the ethos of SMU itself. We don’t want all top academic performers. We don’t want all Singaporeans. Diversity has an inherent value, in and of itself. And diversity in the choice you give to Singaporeans—first of all it does lead to competition, which is very healthy.
Having NUS and NTU business schools that are doing very well can only be good for us because a) it makes Singapore a destination for high-quality business education—that will rub off on SMU. It means competition so that we bring better professors overall. Competition overall—if you are a business person, competition is always good. More importantly, as a Singaporean, I think it provides diversity. NUS is going to have a slightly differently calibrated business curriculum, so will NTU, and so will we. And that’s good for everybody, to the extent that these things were ever discussed, a monopoly on business education or a large university. If they had gone ahead, against our recommendations, it would have been, in my view, quite negative. But thankfully, they were more distractions than anything else. The real significance of SMU at the broader level is that we were actually the, the change catalyst for completely changing the university situation everywhere else in Singapore.
I think inevitably. There will be. One of the biggest challenges for any institution, as it gets bigger and older, is that it becomes, the tendencies that it begins to ossify a bit more, is the bureaucracy gets bigger. It's inevitable. Bureaucracy gets bigger. Sense of empowerment is less. The sense of being a pioneer is less. There is a good management book called it the founder’s mentality. And it basically addresses this issue. What is the founder’s mentality? And how do you keep that founder’s mentality in an institution that might be 100 years old and is no longer, founders are no longer there. And it's no longer owned by an entrepreneur. How do you keep that spirit alive? It is a challenge. One of the ways to combat that challenge is to just continually emphasize, especially to a successful young institution, not a start up like us, but a young institution, is to continually admonish everyone in that institution to beware of hubris and to beware of complacency. I've constantly said that because SMU has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. And anytime people told me about how great we are, the first thing I say is, be careful, we're practicing hubris. I say that to SMU graduates. Do not think you are better than everybody else. I say that to all the faculty, and my last words to the board today was, do not fall into complacency or hubris. So, if that message can always remain alive and if that becomes part of the corporate culture of the institution, beware of hubris and complacency. And if you build that into the culture when you're always edgy. As the founder of Intel said, Andy Grove said, “Only the paranoid survive”. I think that has actually been part of the ethos of the Singapore government from LKY onwards. To create the sense of urgency, to create this sense of fragility, in order… and we’re very secure, I know that, but you have to build this continuing sense of fragility, so that younger Singaporeans, as we get more and more wealthy and so on, do not lapse into the idea that the future of Singapore is a given. By the same token, we cannot lapse into the complacency of thinking that the future of SMU is given, over the next 20 years, we could easily become a mediocre institution.
And that tied in probably with a choice of president. The first three president we had, were from an American educational background. The fourth one, I clearly even pushed against the tide of the board and said I really didn't want another really excellent American University, undergraduate, university professor. We had three very good points. I already wanted someone who would take us into graduate studies and into research. And by the way, that also tied in with another phase. I mean, when you talk about the next phase, part of that was engrain research into graduate studies. But also very importantly, no longer identifying herself as being an American style university. But an SMU style university, which meant getting away from purely saying we have American style pedagogy. So, I wanted to have a non-American, someone who was also came from the graduate school side. And that was Arnoud De Meyer. So that was one decision that I think I did play a role in because the rest of the board at that time were saying, let's continue with the same thing, and I said no I wanted Arnoud. Arnoud of course then helped in that whole transformation. So that was one, second phase of the university and it's continuing all the time since then.
I think you’ve got to have somebody who’s enough of a non-crusty, old, traditional person to understand that a university also has a key task of being an exciting place for young people. Thankfully, although my ‘years’ may be advanced, I think perhaps more ‘young’ in meaningful ways, I don’t know how to do Facebook and all that, but in more critical ways I might be more young thinking. Critical in which I challenge—young people challenge things, they challenge norms—generally I challenge norms, more than most people of my generation and my level of establishment. If I were looking for a replacement to myself, I would look for somebody whose outlook on education, outlook on young people, outlook on life, and outlook on what he wants to create within the corporate culture here is novel, who is excited by and passionate about creating that kind of environment. I think that individual attribute is more important than the technical attributes of whether that person has ever run a university before, et cetera.
A lot of work. It has meant for me, personally, an avenue for me to have channelled many of my more activist inclinations of my past, which used to be channelled towards somewhat more destructive stuff like throwing stones at police and writing about articles that get me into jail. I have always been wanting to make...I’ve always had views right or wrong, about a lot of things, besides my work. I’ve always, as a young person, been very unhappy about a lot of the things that were around me in my environment, unable to make changes in any constructive manner. I have to admit that most of the things I did in my late teens to twenties that got me into trouble were relatively destructive and didn’t change the world.
Now at my age, dealing with young people, I have the opportunity to try to perhaps give them an environment that can challenge them, can inspire them to be what they want to be, and I think it’s deeply satisfying. These are the things I would have wanted to have grown up with in Singapore. If I can challenge our young people to, within the environment of SMU, become a future leader in whatever they choose to be, then that’s really deeply satisfying. So, I hope that will continue.
But if we can, if some of them can be leaders, and I don’t necessarily mean political leaders, but leaders meaning you think for yourself, and you do something new, and other people are tempted to follow you because what you’re doing inspires them to want to do the same thing. To me, that’s already a leader. If SMU can provide that kind of thought leadership, I would have been deeply satisfied.
It is smaller. By virtue of smallest of size, there will always be, there will always be this distinguishing feature. With smaller size, smaller classroom size, smaller everything, there’ll be a greater sense of intimacy. So that will continue. But in terms of the actual programmes we’d offer, and I’m talking about many years down the road, I think it’s always going to be simply a matter of finding niches for yourself. Now, SMU has found certain niches already. Clear niches, the fact that we’ve always said the exciting areas of education are really at the intersection of traditional disciplines. Bearing in mind that traditional disciplines were set up in the 19th century—biology, physics, chemistry—those are all 19th century constructs. Today, the most exciting areas would be between art and computer science, its animation. Between physics and biology, biophysics and so on. Now we’re not involved in all those areas, but to the extent that we are going to be offering joint degrees in law and in business, in business and accountancy, in economics and law for example, we will be of interest to other students, and we’ll distinguish ourselves that way. Now, when NUS goes that direction, we’ll be less so.
We have said that if we had to ever use a simple way for stating, in twenty-five words or less, what our ambition is—and you always have to use other examples, other names of institutions to give people an impression—what we’ve said in our strategy sessions in the past is that, we want to be an LSE [London School of Economics] but with a Princeton type of setup. Princeton type of setup because it’s US-style education, liberal arts sort of thing. So, the style will be like Princeton, style and size, but the offerings will not be like Princeton. LSE, because a social science university. And of course management. So we don’t see ourselves as being management only. I think that’s quite limiting. Law is already, we’re moving beyond that, but we would probably want to offer a wider range of the social sciences. So it’s basically a marriage, imagine LSE and Princeton marrying, and that should be your SMU.
Diversity means many different things. I actually do not know whether they're sufficiently diverse. I haven't seen the metrics. I mean, in terms of gender diversity is quite straightforward. In terms of ethnic diversity. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I hope we are more diverse. Ethnically Singaporean, ethnic, ethnically, in terms of foreigners there is a sort of informal quota. So we can't do much about that. In terms of diversity of students, socioeconomic background, I don't know. It's a good question. Because one of the biggest problems, as you know, over Singapore generally, is that more and more you're getting what I would call entrenched meritocracy, which I've spoken about, I've written about that you're no longer getting dynamic meritocracy. Singapore still very meritocratic. Meaning you cannot buy your way into anything. You can't buy your way into university. But are we more and more entrenched? Are we more of a stratified, meritorious. To the extent that studies have shown that compared to before, more and more children who go to university of parents who have gone to university. Now, no doubt that's a function that more and more Singaporeans are graduates also. So, you would get more and more who are coming from university. But more and more are also coming. I just don't know the answer to that. And I think it's actually worth a study to see if you look at different indices of diversity beyond the simple ones of race and gender, were we more diverse before, and are we diverse enough now, what other kinds of diversity do you want to get? I think it's a good question.
That’s the other thing that we mentioned that we are not allowing right now, not so easily. Transfers, right? I mean, we have the most ridiculous situation because if you go to other universities, other countries, you'll find that nobody applies both for School of Law and School of Medicine at the same time. They're totally different. But in Singapore, foreigners coming here, and actually this is what happens because essentially at the age of 17 or 18, if you're really a good student, your parents also pushing you. Just apply for law, apply for medicine because they're the hardest to get in, the most prestigious. And has nothing to do with whether the students at the age of 18 really want to practice law or medicine. And yet they're being forced to choose. So that's just the two extremes, but why is it that so long as you accumulate sufficient credits, foundational credits to graduate? And that's the beauty of the criticism, that you can spend a year in economics but decided that an adjacent school - normally you won't go from economics to go to medicine or anything - but you could have gone to economics and felt that I really like sociology instead. You can graduate in sociology or something else. The ability to (have) more mobility once you are within the university is something I would fully encourage.
I wanted a mixed board. But I just wanted to emphasise how that is also in a way very novel, because this was a board that would be selected by me, and from here on it’s self-selecting—meaning, it’s not me anymore, it’s the whole board deciding. That’s a critical aspect of autonomy. If the board cannot be self-selecting, then you don’t have autonomy. So I want to emphasise how when you talk about autonomy, the board is important. The first board was put together by me trying to put together a number of people with diverse backgrounds, including overseas trustees too. We wanted trustees like Narayana Murthy, for example. He was important because he’s known for his CSR [corporate social responsibility] and yet he’s widely respected in India, and we also wanted Indian students. So when we chose trustees, it’s a mix of things we put in. Let’s say there are twenty trustees, I needed to have enough trustees I could fill up the committees, who would have to be resident here, so that’s one. I wanted foreign trustees to represent countries whose inputs are important to us, and who are individuals also that we wanted, we think are important. So now we’ve got Jaime Ayala [Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala], who is not only a prominent businessman but also has an interest in education. What I wanted to do linking all the trustees is I wanted people who have—well, they all serve pro bono, that’s one important point. All the other boards that one sits on, even Temasek Boards, you’re paid. For university you’re not paid. So you’ve got to have people who have a certain passion for what they’re doing and have to believe, at the same time, that they themselves are making a big contribution. So we’ve had board members come and go, but my philosophy of it has been a) diversity is important, and b) empowerment.
We also have established clearly that we have to have governance systems that are very robust. So the board always has an executive session, where all management leaves, including the president and everybody else, and there are very rigorous discussions about, about everything. Including management, including the president, assessment of the president. Because we have, we’re aware of one responsibility we have, not just to SMU but to, hopefully, a kind of system we want to set up in Singapore.
I was very involved in creating the whole process where we tried to, you know, before this and now all that years have changed but the previously it was like cut off points, right on your A levels. Well as your cut-off point, you get 253, you go to a university you get 254 you didn’t go to university. It's the most stupid thing in the world. It is completely non holistic. It measures, only, doesn't even measure academic ability. It measures academic performance on the day of the exam. And that's all. I've had enough cases where I had a bad time on the day of my exam, I didn't do well and I didn't score well. So it's not even a measure of academic abilities, it’s a measure of performance on that day. So it's a very poor indicator for admissions to anything. So and yet you can’t throw it out the window. And how many A's you get and this and that you can't throw it out the window. So, we tried to basically bring in an interview process. In the beginning, the interviews were one-on-one. And we tried to ask lots of interesting off-the-wall issues and questions. I remember one question very well, that you would have a student there, with a bunch of professors there. And the student would be thinking to be asked questions about maths and science and so on. And somebody would say, why is the sky blue? It's not a, it's a bit of a trick question just to see how you respond. Not whether you know, geophysics, whatever it is. It's to ascertain the personality of the individual. And then of course, we will look at other things like ECA or how well you do in sports. I have long believed that sports is an important indicator, not because of their ability, but because not whether you scored high in sports, but they do participate in team sports or not. Would indicate whether you are a person who is sociable, who enjoys working with people and so on. So, we tried to develop different metrics for assessing an individual, and it's never perfect, and it doesn't mean it's at the sacrifice or it is sacrificing academic quality, because I think that the statistics show that every year our intake in terms of pure measurement of academic ability is still very high. But we also get people who are more than just high achievers academically, they have other interests in life, and that was very important because you talk about the output of SMU, which were the students which became well-known and even now well-known for being more articulate, more problem-solving, more questioning of things. It's partly because of the pedagogy we have, but it's also because the input of students were already slightly different from the rest. So, it is self-selecting the students who want to be more articulate, to want to be more sociable, more want to take more initiative. They are the students that we managed to get from the interview process.
Convocation is like nothing people have seen, and it’s all done by the students. That’s part of our ethos also. Every convocation is organised by the students themselves. Besides the normal kind of stuff they have events, student performances that they put together, it’s quite incredible. Everybody is impressed by it. They even do a few, in my view, rather kitsch stuff themselves. It’s all done by them! Many of them were probably guys who came from national service, so the trooping of the colours, the taking of the student pledge which is a take-off from the national pledge. But these were all done by students, never done by management. If you talk to dean of students, this is where it’s also totally new for us compared to the other universities. It ties in with the whole issue of the sense of ownership. Now we can’t get students designing their own courses, but the point is, where you can give people a sense of ownership, empowerment, give it to them. A convocation exercise need not be decided by management. Lord, leave it to the students! So it’s left to them, they started all these traditions.
Well, LSE of the East obviously is not to really emulate them in every way or to copy them. The only point was that at that time and even up to now, we're supposed to be only a management university. So, we had said we might want to then be a Social Sciences university. Like LSE is a full-scale university, although it is called a school…with very deep and very strong in many areas of the social sciences. And that was at the time when we were thinking that we didn't want to be known as just the business school, even in the very beginning of the name, we didn't want to have the word business in it. But at that time, government was not that happy about us going into social sciences. But now they've even created a Singapore University of Social Sciences. So now, in a way, our aspiration is not so much to be an LSE. One of the debates we're having now, of course, all this will be subject to MOE approval, and it's not going to be within the next few years. In terms of the longer vision, my own sense, is I've switched from thinking that we should be an LSE of the East to being the third comprehensive university in Singapore… But that's also because university landscape has changed. We used to be very happy to be a specialized management university. Now there are all these other specialized universities as SUTD, SUSS, so on and there was Yale-NUS. But there are only two comprehensive universities. I think the room is there for us to be a comprehensive university, but with a different pedagogy. So that's something that's not on the cards right now, but it's something that I think we can continue to aspire for. It will happen one day. Now there are actually more specialized universities than there are comprehensive, because you have SUSS, SIT, SUTD, and you have University of the Arts coming. So it would be about five or six specialized universities and two comprehensive universities. So why not have a third comprehensive university? But at the same time, even within ourselves being comprehensive, we would find areas of excellence. We already have social sciences. One time, the decision from MOE was, don't have social sciences because the other universities are having it already. I think there's room for another comprehensive university.
Interesting. I would probably say through impact. The easiest thing is to measure through rankings, right? That's one important measure. I don't want to diminish the role of rankings because it affects students and affects many things. Rankings are important, but if we were just fixated on rankings alone, we would start doing certain things in a particular way. It ties in with my overarching philosophy, which is not an academic philosophy, because I'm not an academic. Most academics would measure SMU in a more narrowly academic set of parameters.
I’ve always seen a university as an agent of social change. Which it is inevitably… so therefore if you are an agent of social change, you should measure yourself through impact. What impact our students are making as they move out in life. Not to be the richest people or the most powerful people, but are they having any impact on society? Their views, their thinking. Are we getting leaders? Our leaders going out not just to be the banking CEOs or prime ministers, but are they affecting the community as a whole? What's the impact of our research? So I would say impact is the thing I would want to have most. But of course, that leads to another whole new area that I don't want to get into, which is, how do you measure impact? But I would measure it through our impact. And then of course, the next step is you have to then start to define what impact means at every level.
The idea of a student gift, that people collect money and give to the university, that’s all started [by the students]. I’m saying this to you because I think there’s a philosophy behind it. My meeting with student alumni and asking the student alumni to start new things, because eventually there will be a big alumni club and you must start it. All along the way we’re having students starting new traditions, keenly aware of them because they will take root. And it’s good because even after only ten years now I meet new students today, and they’ll say, “Oh, those oldies, they did it that way so we’re...” You know, there’s already a sense, ten years is a long span for a young person. So that’s as far as students are concerned.
I keep in touch with alumni, because I think they are—in fact about six or seven of the old alumni see me every year. They get me to give my views about their careers. I’m kind of like an uncle. “Is it good for you to change this job? Is it not good for you to change this job?” Young people need guidance, so I keep up with them. I listen to pitches by SMU students who want to start a new business. So it’s my way of, for me, it’s useful. For them I guess it’s useful that they have mentors around. For me it’s useful because it’s one of the ways I try to keep tabs of how young people are thinking, how SMU students are thinking. Of course I always ask them about complaints and this and that and so on.
I suppose it’s driven by two different things. One is, I’ve come to realise that, especially when I see that SMU has become what it has become—and in the beginning it was nothing more than a piece of paper, a simple concept—it’s one of the few projects I’ve been involved in that has come such a long way from zero, and it’s finally dawned on me as it would probably to many of our early pioneers that the actual history of the beginning of SMU could be of interest to people way, way down the road. An institution like a university—unlike a company or even a government department—is a living community with changing constituencies all the time. As we find with other universities, people are very interested in the beginnings of the university one hundred, two hundred years afterwards, and inshallah, Singapore and SMU will be around two hundred years from now. So that’s on one side. I think it’s important for pioneers not to see themselves as important, but to see that the events they were involved in will be of interest and significance to others, and it behoves us, as part of the responsibility that we had to even start the institution, to ensure that this history remains.
I’m hoping that what we do now, when many of the people who were involved are getting older, we should lay the same groundwork, so that people in the future can make use of our memories and continue keeping alive the origin and tradition of SMU.
I would have to say of all the other things, of everything I’ve been associated with other than my own company, SMU’s probably been the most deeply satisfying because of two things. One is the nature of the work is a nonprofit, so therefore it’s hugely satisfying. Even if you give me a chance to start a new company, it’s not that much fun. I have to run my own company every day; I’ve to work on profits and loss. Here you really feel—and I know all my other trustees feel the same thing—that you are helping to change something in Singapore. Especially if it’s young people, it’s all the more gratifying. Having a chance to do something where you’re doing it from scratch, really is, well, pretty scary. When you’re younger, you don’t, when you’re so small—I guess if you were to tell me today that this is SMU, this is what you’re going to eventually have, now you’re starting ten years ago, can you be sure you can get there? I think the task would seem so daunting and the responsibilities are so huge, that I might not want to accept it, especially since its all free time and everything else. The beauty of it is when you start with something small, you have no idea what it’s going to be, and the beauty of it is you dare to take more risks. The beauty of it was we were never told by Tony Tan or by anybody else, “This is the blueprint and this is what you’re going to become.” As we grew, we evolved and the sense of ownership was huge. So to me, yes, it’s been deeply satisfying.
My own company has gone through a terrible period of COVID, with the hospitality industry been hurt more than anything else. We need to rebuild. We have come out of it very strong. So, I want to spend whatever remaining, I mean it is true that seventies are the new sixties because I don't feel seventy. I feel like I've got many good years ahead. I've got a new, I used to be chairman and CEO, now we have a CEO and Chairman. But I've got certain areas that are still directly under me. There are so many things I want to do. I don't feel at all near retirement. There are projects I want to do, there are things I want to do. I mean, I think living a life of purpose is still very much what I want to do. There are new purposes to find. It's not retiring to just play with (my grandchildren), I mean I love my grandchildren, but I wouldn't be happy just being playing with grandchildren every day. There are lots of things I want to do in life, to have an impact and to leave a legacy. And it’s going to be mostly with Banyan Tree now.
I think we were very lucky. I think we had great presidents each time. I'm very happy for that because if you look at the other universities, while, if you go back, way way back. University presidents were there for life … and they became bureaucrats. Not a good scene. They became not just bureaucrats who became autocrats. They kind of ran their own little place very tightly. I think we broke with that tradition with having the first woman. Janice Bellace, the first woman, non-Singaporean, to be a president. Although for a very short period of time. And then we continue to have foreigners. But people thought that, oh, we'll always want to have foreigners, which was not at all the case. But the minute we could get … and through Lily, we have 3 firsts. First internal promotion because she joined us as a provost, the first Singaporean and the first woman. And Lily knows this, and we said to her 100 times that nobody gave her an easy time on the selection committee, which I chaired because she fulfils each of these. This was a very happy confluence of events. It was a very rigorous board where we looked at all the other candidates. And we began to get tougher and tougher, tougher meaning high-quality candidates from outside because we became more and more established. And Arnoud helped put us on the map. So I'm very happy that we've done this. But it does not mean that in the future may not be a non-Singaporean or something else. I think we've broken the mould also for university leadership, which is something that I think we're proud of.
I think that entrepreneurism is very much within the culture of an institution. I see that problem within my own company. That Banyan Tree and SMU have the same lifespan, Banyan Tree a little bit older. We started in 1994. SMU started in 1997, so to speak, right. So we're a bit older, but it's about the same generational transition that I have to see. I think, to me, culture is very important. I think the culture of SMU, which anybody who comes to us and you as a student, as administrator of faculty, knows that it is a different culture than NUS or NTU. You can’t put your fingers so easily because on the surface, everything they do and everything we do is the same. But the culture is different. A culture is something that you feel and it's hard to describe, but you feel the difference between the culture at one institution or another. And a culture is a living thing all the time. So, I just hope that the culture will remain in 25 years. I've helped to create a culture, where people remember it and will continue with it.
Empowerment is another area that's very important, as I mentioned to you, the entrepreneurial spirit is tied very much to the sense of ownership. Sense of ownership is tied very much to empowerment. Do I matter? Pride is very important. You have to be very proud of your university. And a cultural willingness to try new things all the time that might not always work. That's another attribute of entrepreneurship. The willingness to try and not always succeed, not fail, but not always succeed. And that's embedded within, within culture, I think legends, narratives and things like oral history. These stories that go on right after a while. People talk about why it is important for me to talk about the origins of SMU because many years from now, 10, 20, 30 years from now, people may talk about how SMU was started, and we thought we were going to fail, and we didn't fail and so on. Every generation needs to recapture the narrative of the past, to see how that old narrative can inspire them today, and by enshrining our past as a university that dared to try things and was innovative and sort. One hopes that that spirit remains embedded in the culture through these narratives. And that's the whole point of these oral history series. That's the whole point of Howard Thomas writing his books. It all builds up slowly over time.
The other big transformation was within research itself. All really strong research universities have gotten an entity whereby the each, each school is deep and strong in its own research field and its own postgraduate studies field. But there is a whole college, also a School of Graduate Studies which ties everything together and becomes both a clearinghouse and a coordinator of all these programs. So these two are the most recent creations that I think that I hope will go on. Howard Thomas also, probably when he wrote the book. The interviews I had with before we created our SMU-X, which is as you know it SMU-X with collaboration with industry and with people who are students getting together at a fixed time and having very intensive periods where they work together with industry. I guess what I've tried to do all along is with every new president coming in. I tried to have a dialogue with them and say, imagine today is the last day you’re with university. Your ten years already finished five years, eight years, ten years have already past. What would you want to be remembered for? So that really clarifies a mind. You go in with the beginning and the end as a beginning. I don't have the luxury of time of being here forever. What do I want to leave as my legacy? Think of one or two big projects. So for Arnoud, it was SMU-X and the graduate school. For Lily, she's just barely started, and there’s really been in the School of Integrative Studies and research and a few more big things she wants to do. So with every president there has been an opportunity for me to collaboratively discuss where do we want to go with the university. And that's how it's been. So these are the new things that have happened since the first interviews I did, which was I think largely only dealing with our success as an undergraduate university.
We can start with the College of Integrative Studies. I've often believed that the advantage, the British educational system and the American educational system both have their own respective advantages. The British system is quite narrow and very deep. The American one is very broad-based but relatively shallow. Now how can we marry that so have a unique educational system in Singapore that would have the best of both worlds? We, in the past still stuck to the British model and just tried to make it broader so that within your chosen discipline, it's a bit broader. And you could also have double degrees, double majors, and so on. But it's still very much a British system, meaning at the age of 18 or the age of 20, 21, depending on boy or girl. At a very early age, when you enter university and you apply, you have to apply for a particular school - now, that's the British system. The American system, as you know, you don't apply to a particular school, you apply to the university. And then once you're accepted into university, you then choose your discipline. And very often you create your discipline through credits - a credit system. I think that has a lot of strength for those who are not quite sure what they want to do at a relatively young age. Whereas the British system is excellent for those really knew what they wanted to and when to go, just go deep, dive deep.
How can we have both? And I wanted all along to start a system whereby we accept you into the university, and you then can take time to decide in your first year, maybe even go into the second year, what school you wanted to go to. We managed to do this, within the idea of a College of Integrative Studies. But that's how the College of Integrative Studies started. So that it is partly residential to give them a sense of community, but they're basically students who go for the first year, then you decide what to do. That is part of a process which I think I hope will continue after I retired. And I'd love to see a system one day where we can be fully open. You can come in, into your interview, university so long as we accept you. You can either have chosen a discipline beforehand. Or you come in, maybe even after the first year or so, you decide which major you want to do, like in an American university. And you build, you even create within your school, your actual area of strength, like in an American university, you can graduate with economics, but because I want to choose credits from particular courses, actually create my own, my own degree, even within the field of economics or the school of social sciences or the school of management or whatever. And we're moving there. So that's part of a big transformation.
I think if you were to look at what I sort of conceptualized as the general phases of SMU. I think the very clearly, the first phase was to establish SMU as a credible undergraduate University with a new curriculum structure and new pedagogy and to establish our credibility. Because when we first started, we had zero credibility and I remember parents would actually try to convince their children not to attend SMU. So that was quite a difficult thing to do to establish credibility. We had different strategies to do that, which actually I think may have covered already, but it has been interesting to even management studies because for example, the board decided to in fact, a challenge the issue of credibility by charging up even higher tuition fee to establish that we are premium product and so on. So there were a number of things we did. I would say it's probably the first challenge for the university in the first phase. That would probably tie in with the moving to a new campus - this campus because that really established prior to that we were just staying at Evans Road, miserable temporary quarters and then at Bukit Timah campus. The credibility isn't really there, but coming here, established that credibility.
I guess the next big phase, which would probably not have been covered, was to really establish ourselves as a graduate university, as a research university. As Janice Bellace used to tell me, Janice Bellace was our first president and she used to say, I always remember it because it's so, so simple. Because people often ask, what is the role of a university? And she said it in two sentences - that one role of the university is to transmit knowledge. The other role of a university is to create knowledge. So the transmission of knowledge is through undergraduate studies and of course, postgraduate studies too. But that is a transmission of knowledge. And we, I think we did that quite well. The second part was to actually create knowledge, which means research. To really be a credible university, I think you need to be more than just a teaching university. You also have to be known for research. Now, of course, you cannot do very good research programs unless you have a postgraduate college. Because then the people wanted to do purposes. We want to do research or use PhD students as research assistants. And so I think that was the next big challenge, the next big phase.
The first time I ever knew anything about this was at lunch with Cham Tao Soon. He’ll probably have different recollections of the lunch, if he recollects it at all. I was certainly intrigued by the idea. As you’ll know later on, when we talk about the events, the Government didn’t even really have an idea as to what kind of university they wanted. We went through so many permutations—from a comprehensive university with twenty-five thousand people, to a business school and a business school alone which would be the monopoly business school for all of Singapore and all the other universities will shut down their business schools. We’ve gone through many, many permutations so it’s clear that they had not a clear idea what they wanted at all. It was Tony Tan, who was then deputy prime minister, who I think has got really radical views about education and to me, is really the person who’s shaken up the entire tertiary landscape in Singapore. And to whom Singapore really owes its greatest debt regarding what our educational system overall has become at the tertiary level.
It was the most illogical choice. Okay because, I barely managed to get a bachelor’s degree, and I’ve gone to three universities and I end up with only a bachelor’s. You would normally assume you’d get somebody who’s a little bit more acquainted with university education, but I do think probably the reason that they asked me, the big bet from Tony Tan’s perspective, was because I had very clear and very strong views about university education, untainted by expertise. We all know that sometimes expertise gets in the way of trying to do something new. So I met Tony Tan, and I think there was general discussion about a third university. What I do remember well was that the very starting point was that this should be a private university, but he had really not much of an idea as to how to go about it. That I know, because after some degree of discussion, the device he wanted in order to start SMU—there was no name even of the university—was for me to go in and, take over SIM, Singapore Institute of Management. And then use SIM and make it into a third university.
Then for quite a while SIM was to be the vehicle for the third university. We recommended otherwise, government accepted, then we set up SMU, and then I became chairman of both. Then after a while, I decided that look, I’ll stick with SMU, and I gave up SIM.
This is going to be a small minority of people whose ambitions cannot be fulfilled within the normal structure. That's not my final goal. My final goal should be any student who enters SMU, then you should have the choice already having applied for the school. Or, everybody should have the choice of being in the College of Integrative Studies. It will take time to get there, but we're beginning, by MOE even accepting this, that it is good to have a small group of people to try out through CIS. Gradually the CIS may even transform itself to become a norm.
One area that I'm proud of starting, but I think we haven't really achieved it fully yet. Lily is well aware of that when we started the Imagine Better Donation Campaign, the endowment campaign, it wasn't just to build up an endowment. It was to really imagine better. Part of the things I wanted to do is to actually create a completely needs-blind university system. The first in Singapore, where, as you know, needs-blindness, you are admitted to the university and you need not even worry at all about any financial assistance. Right now, before we had the president program, when you apply, when you go to the university, we admit you. But if you need financial assistance, you start to apply for financial assistance. It's not optimal and if you don't get it then maybe you won't come to university. And one will be surprised that even though we charge such low tuitions relative to private universities, there's still a group of Singaporeans whose households at an economic level where it is quite difficult for them, even to support the children through university. It's not that it is impossible, it is difficult. So we want it to be completely needs-blind. We set up a program for that. And I think we now are needs-blind up to certain level. But I would like to make that threshold even lower. Right now it's still relatively high threshold. Especially because as you know, the issue of financial assistance, is you have to define the criteria. So now we have achieved it in the sense that we are now needs-blind to certain category. But I would like to keep on pushing it lower and lower, so that you need to be less stringent on what that level is, in order for you to be eligible for the needs-blind program. I think that's an important social leveller. And I think that's also an important if nothing else, even if it becomes that only a minority of students who need this, I think it's an important signal to send that a university is not just a place to study, is not just a place of academic excellence, but a university is also a social change agent where we are a force within the community, what we do regarding social levelling, what we do about meritocracy and so on, sets an example for the rest of society. Because what we do in the university community actually establishes certain norms for the community itself and that grows beyond the community. It affects the rest of civil society, and it even affects government thinking. Not necessarily through direct lobbying, but through people, maybe some government leaders in the future and national leaders have gone through SMU or know about SMU, they imbibe our values. So, I think a university must be thought of not only as a repository of knowledge, as a transmitter of knowledge, it is also a very important source of thought leadership within the community.
If I can challenge our young people to, within the environment of SMU, become a future leader in whatever they choose to be, then that’s really deeply satisfying. So, I hope that will continue.
But if we can, if some of them can be leaders, and I don’t necessarily mean political leaders, but leaders meaning you think for yourself, and you do something new, and other people are tempted to follow you because what you’re doing inspires them to want to do the same thing. To me, that’s already a leader. If SMU can provide that kind of thought leadership, I would have been deeply satisfied.
When I meet with young people and they think that the world has ended because of the pandemic, and I don't mean that lightly, I really mean for many people the world ended and it was horrible. I guess my sort of saying to them is, you’re not new, you're not alone. And this is not to belittle them, is to say that you are sharing what you're going through now, your grandfather may have felt when he was leaving China and it was a hopeless miserable place and he was going to come to Singapore to work as a coolie, or your father or your mother.
I don't want to give false words of hope that everything is going to be great. I think it's just that if you realize that whatever you're going through has actually been experienced by others before you, you actually take a bit of solace in the idea that, life may be tough, there are challenges but I'm not alone in all these. Life is always tough, life is always with challenges. And that is not to belittle you. It’s actually to give you a sense of encouragement that, others have been where you are now and they have succeeded. You will succeed too. So clearly not to belittle, you know, some people say this from a belittling way, that I had a tougher time, you generation, life is easy for you. So what you did not get a job during COVID? When I was your age, blah blah… it's horrible. But that same thing can be turned around when I was your age, I also had a lot of issues. So I've been there where you are now and I know what it's like, and I know you will get out of it. I think there's a sense of support that, you know, you're not alone. I’ve just been there with you before. Life will always be like that. Life will always have difficulties and people will always surmount the difficulties and so will you. I don't know how to put that together … The worst thing when things are bad is that you think you're alone. When people are alone, people are down. And you give them false words of encouragement, it doesn't help. People don't believe it. Because life is bad, to basically say that pick up and move on and all that. It's not true, people can’t easily move on when life is not easy. The real honest thing to say to them is, it's not easy, it will change, you will get better, but while you are there, just realize that you are not alone. Having friends, having family, sharing your concerns, your worries with people. This really helps a lot.
One of Singapore’s most prominent businessmen, Mr Ho Kwon Ping, was tapped by Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan in 1997 to lead the effort to establish a new national university which would be autonomous and based on an American-style of education. An unconventional choice, Mr Ho worked with the start-up team headed by Professor Tan Teck Meng and an academic panel of advisors to develop the concept for the new institution. He became chairman of the governing council for the new university in 1997. In December 1998, he was named as chairman of the SMU executive committee and chairman of the campus development committee. Mr Ho served as the chairman of the board of trustees of Singapore Management University from its incorporation in 2000 until January 2023.
Mr Ho is executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, which owns companies engaged in the development, ownership and operation of hotels, resorts, spas, residential homes, and retail galleries. He is also chairman of MediaCorp Pte Ltd, the national television and radio company of Singapore. He is also actively involved in civil society, currently holding chairmanship, directorship positions and membership on the boards of various international and Singapore organisations. He has been a strong advocate of creativity, risk-taking, independent thinking, and corporate social responsibility. In education he has emphasised the process (rather than the product) of learning.
Mr Ho has been recognised by many organisations over the years. The Singapore Government awarded him the Meritorious Service Medal (2009) by for his significant contribution to the success of the SMU. He was a joint recipient of the Hospitality Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) at the China Hotel Investment Summit. In 2010, he received the American Creativity Association Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 he received the Conde Nast Traveller World Savers Award in the preservation category.
Mr Ho studied at Tunghai University in Taiwan and Stanford University in the United States. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics and history from the then University of Singapore and was awarded an honorary doctorate of business administration in hospitality management by Johnson & Wales University (USA).
