Lily KONG

A relatively young university

As a woman in senior management

Blue Ribbon Commission for Undergraduate Education

Capacity building

Career in Singapore prior to joining SMU

Dare to dream

Garden metaphor

Getting a different perspective

Healthy competition, cooperation and collaboration

Internal and external role

Know yourself and find a good fit

Leadership styles, group dynamics

Learning & delegating

Making a difference in higher education

Postgraduate professional programs

Prinsep Street Residences

SMU Academy

SMU-X courses

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Yes. If I might just add to that—a relatively small university; it is not small but it is not fifty thousand, forty thousand students, and there is great advantage in that. Youth and size, I think, can be a double-edged sword, and we have to be clever about dulling the side of the sword that is not so good for us. So, on the plus side, relative youth, the fact that when we started we were agile, we were innovative, we were entrepreneurial. All of those things are characteristics of the university that I hope will stay with us for a very, very long time. I have said to my colleagues that it does not matter if we are 20 years old, 50 years old, that pioneering spirit will hopefully continue to stay with us. That sense of youthfulness if it stays with us means that we are constantly looking at the next frontier, thinking of how we can do things differently, pushing the boundaries, pushing the envelope. At this point in time, I think we have still got elements of that. We must not lose it. If anything, we should try and grow that still further. It is an opportunity—with new leadership, with new ideas brought in from elsewhere mixing with the experience of those who’ve been here.

Relative youth means that we’re not so set in our ways. You know, 100-year old institutions have layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy and so forth. We could become like that if we don’t watch it. And every now and again we do need to prune. The relative size of this university— we have 10,000 students, it’s not small but it’s smaller than many institutions with 30, 40 thousand maybe even a 100 thousand in some universities—and that size is also a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it means that we are actually a more close-knit place than many other places. We actually know faculty across the schools better. We actually know our students much better. We have that close contact with students that we’re actually not just that distant figure in a lecture theatre but in many ways a role model for the students as well. And that’s great.

But the flipside of it is that our relative size means that we have limited faculty numbers. It means that if we are trying to develop, say, a critical mass in particular areas of research while delivering the spectrum of courses, it can be a challenge. We can’t have a group of 50 working on a particular area. You need to spread it out, expertise across different areas so that they can teach different areas. So we need to be smart about how we do it. The way that we are coming at it is precisely through the societal challenges—that if we identify a particular societal challenge, such as aging, that we are drawing different disciplinary perspectives to bear on that particular societal challenge. You bring in the psychologists, you bring in the information systems colleagues who are working on technology to enable the homes of elderly people, you are working with economists. So, we really do need to be strategic. We don’t want to try and say we have the best marketing group per se. We want to say that we have particular strengths in an area that cuts across the schools. I have spoken previously about aging as an example drawing from economics, from psychology, from marketing, from information systems to bring to bear perspectives on a particular societal challenge.

Whether we like it or not, the rankings appear to be here to stay. When school rankings were done in the context of Singapore, and met with so much unhappiness, the Ministry of Education that had done the rankings had the ability to do away with the rankings and to turn that into banding. But in the case of rankings for universities, they are done by external bodies, and we don’t have the same ability to just kind of say we are going to abolish that.

Neither is it necessary to completely throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some things about rankings that can be helpful. For example, they focus our minds on certain areas, certain criteria, that the ranking agencies use. They focus our minds on how well are we doing in those areas. If we don’t think that a particular criteria is really that important, then we don’t pay as much attention to it. But there are other criteria that actually are quite helpful as a mirror to ourselves, and the fact that we are in these rankings, therefore then put the spotlight on some of those areas that we want to improve on. I think the critical thing is that we don’t become too obsessed with the rankings, but neither do we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The truth of the matter is that these rankings are a useful way for young people looking to go to universities, if only because of the fact that it is a simple metric. But I always tell young people: read it with caution, read the ranking results with caution, read it with a critical mind and don’t take it as gospel truth. Look at the criteria. What are the criteria that are important to you? If the criteria don’t matter one jot to you in your decision to choose a university, then don’t look at those rankings. The thing to do is not just to look at the rankings and say oh these rankings, say this university is top 10, that university is top 500, therefore choose top 10. But if the criteria for top 10 don’t demonstrate that they make any impact on your education, why should you worry about that ranking?

I have just said this to a group of 800 teenagers over the weekend. My alma mater, my secondary school and my primary school had organized its 165th anniversary events, and there are now eleven schools in that system, and there were 800 students coming together, and they asked me a similar sort of question. It was wonderful to hear it from a ten-year-old primary four student.

For me, some of the challenges have related to age and gender, at different points in time. I was a very young dean, and I might have said this in my previous interview, please stop me if I have, but when I was appointed dean of a faculty with about 400 faculty members at that point in time and about 7,000 students, a senior colleague said to me, I am used to working with people with 35 years of experience, not 35 years of age. And that was a wake-up call for me, because I had never thought about age as a factor, and I realized at that point in time that it did matter to some people, and that I had to demonstrate a certain depth and gravitas, in order to win their respect.

At other points in time, it has really been about how, as a woman, you have care responsibilities. I said this to the 10-year-old student over the weekend, that childbirth is the sole responsibility, in a sense, of women because the man cannot take that responsibility. Childcare need not be the sole responsibility, but often it is the primary responsibility of women. And eldercare need not be, but it is also often primarily the responsibility of women. So, everything that people say about juggling the responsibilities at home and in the workplace are completely true.
How do we deal with that? Supportive colleagues are a big part of that. That at times when there is a dire situation at home, that your colleagues are willing to step in, and more than pull their weight. At other times when things are good on the home front, you must be willing to step in for other people, and that has to be manifested on a daily basis for the group dynamic to work.

It is true that with heavy responsibilities, whether as a provost or president, there are sceptics. There are sceptics who will say—you can’t do this, how can you do this? —not because you don’t have the ability, but because you have other responsibilities. It was a question that I deliberated very carefully. If I didn’t think that I had a chance of making this work well, then I shouldn’t take the responsibility. But the moment I take the responsibility, I have to then learn to manage the time, to give and take, to know when to rely and when to support.

There were various factors that led me to establish that commission. One was that in terms of the undergraduate curriculum, the University had been pioneering at the time of its establishment in 2000, it had introduced a broad-based educational system not unlike the US, in contrast to the British-based deep major that was delivered in the other two major universities at that point in time. Although changes had been made along the way, the basic structure and the basic philosophy had remained, and I thought, as we approach our third decade, it is very timely for us to take a really hard look, especially at this time when the world is undergoing such change. That is not to say change hasn’t happened in the past, but the pace of change, the nature and direction of change may be somewhat different at this point in time, and so that was one.

Secondly, I was very conscious that SMU had a lot to offer in the core curricular space that was as much part of the education of our students as the disciplinary curriculum, but we had not fully realized the potential of that, I thought. And I wanted to do something about that. I also wanted us to think very hard about what we are trying to achieve—what are the outcomes, the learning outcomes for our graduates—and be driven with the end in sight, so to speak. So, whether it is the curriculum, the pedagogy, the co-curriculum, the core curriculum, I wanted all of it to speak to the graduate learning outcomes. And I did not start with a preconception that we were not doing it and therefore needed a commission to look into how to do it. I started with the premise that there were probably some things we were doing that were speaking to certain outcomes, there were probably some things that we were not doing that could speak to the learning outcomes, and there were probably some things that we were doing just because we had been doing them for years and had not really thought about what the desired outcomes were.

I got together a group of people from across the six schools, and I am so delighted with the choice of colleagues that came on board because they were all wonderful contributors. More than the immediate group of about 20, there were work groups, that whole Commission was divided up into five or six work groups, and they co-opted both faculty and staff into each of the work groups. So all in, the engagement involved about 50 to 60 people in the thinking and discussion and so forth. Of course, subsequently, we engaged a whole lot more stakeholders, but this was roughly the group that I think has contributed significantly to the outcomes of the Blue Ribbon Commission. We started by asking ourselves what the graduate learning outcomes were, and we did not just pull them out of the air. What we did was to look at a lot of what is going on out there. The McKinseys of the world that have studied the skill sets that are needed for the 21st century, the discussions at Davos and World Economic Forum, the research that academics do into these sorts of things. We engaged our stakeholder communities from alumni to employers and faculty and we put all of that together and devised a set of graduate learning outcomes, five areas. As you might imagine in an academic institution, all you need is 20 people in the room and you will have 50 different views, and each individual disagrees with himself or herself at different points in the discussion, but that was the richness of the discussion.

And so we settled after quite a lot of discussion and debate on the five areas: disciplinary and multidisciplinary knowledge, intellectual and creative skills, interpersonal skills, global citizenship, and personal mastery. All of them are very important in my own conception. But the last is a special favourite of mine—personal mastery—because it is really about getting on top of who you are as a person, getting on top of how you make decisions, how you navigate choices, how you bounce back from adversity, the resilience that you might display. And I think that many universities tend to think of these things as personal qualities that the individual cultivates himself or herself in life, but I think the university has a role to play in all of that as well.

These five areas were further broken down into subcategories and so forth, and at different points in the Blue Ribbon Commission’s work, BRC for short—we kept coming back to, and we tweaked as we went along, as we thought about how we would deliver. But keeping honest, meant coming back to them and asking ourselves whether what we were proposing would contribute to these outcomes. From that, we thought about the curriculum as a whole, the academic curriculum. And basically, we had the core curriculum and the disciplinary curriculum. The disciplinary curriculum, I decided that I should respect the schools and their domain knowledge and have them take the lead in thinking about what they wanted to do there, with graduate learning outcomes in mind. But the core curriculum which cuts across the university, was where we spent significant effort thinking through what does it mean to be core, and there were many things that needed rethinking.

The university up till that point did have foundation courses, core courses, general education and just a couple of other baskets that students had to access, but it didn’t kind of hang together with a certain coherence and a certain narrative and philosophy—that’s what the group did. I think collectively we were quite proud of what we have devised in three pillars. The first being capabilities, the second communities and the third civilizations. And parenthetically, the alliteration speaks to us, as academics who like that sort of thing.

The capabilities pillar focuses very much on the individual capabilities, the sorts of numeracy skills, the writing skills, the managing skills, and, in a certain sense, that is what we have been doing quite well in at SMU already, and we didn’t want to lose that. But we also realized that for a graduate to be successful not just in his or her career but in life, it is not just individual capabilities that matter. It is how the individual is situated and learns to be situated within a larger community

And so we devised the communities basket with the following philosophy: that in the modern-day community, what an individual needs to navigate would be to understand the economics of it. Communities and societies are shaped and structured by how economics works, and so students need to understand economics and society, not just charts and graphs in microeconomics, but truly how economics impacts society and vice versa. So we wanted to devise a different kind of economics course in that basket within the pillar—the basket on “economies and society” within the pillar of “Communities”.

Then we thought, in this day and age, for someone to navigate their community and society, they cannot but encounter technologies. And so, we devised a basket on technology and society. It is not about coding, etc. That’s in computational thinking in the first capabilities basket. It is about technology and society—what does it mean for a human being to interface with technology? It is about AI and robotics—but what does this mean for my life, and how does it change the way human beings relate?

Technology and society is the second basket, and the third is on cultures. Very obviously, as we navigate communities, we need to navigate different cultures. And by cultures I don’t just mean ethnic cultures, although there is that. I don’t just mean national cultures, although there’s that. It is also about things like urban cultures. It is also things like family cultures in business history, for example. This is the basket that is humanities-oriented. It will have cultures in the sense of ethnic cultures and national cultures and histories, and it will also have the performing arts and literary arts and so forth, but also the urban cultures that we navigate as we live in cities and so forth. We have had really good feedback from students—even though we haven’t rolled out the full core curriculum, we were piloting some courses including one on urban cultures—and the feedback has been tremendous.

So that is the second pillar of communities and so moving outwards from the individual to the communities, we then moved to the larger civilizations pillar. The civilizational questions that are in a certain sense, timeless and placeless. They are things that will confront all humanity, one of which is ethical questions. And so, since day one, we have had a course on ethics and social responsibility. We all were committed to keeping that even if it meant thinking again about whether this was the way we wanted to deliver it, etc, but we were committed to this, and so it remains.

And the second basket in this pillar is something that we call big questions, and it is a course that will have themes that change over the years. This time around we are experimenting with a course called Happiness and Suffering, the big questions that confront humanity, and it is really interesting because you could approach happiness from a philosophical perspective, a neurological perspective, a psychological perspective, and that is exactly what is happening. The course will expose students to multi-disciplinary ways of thinking about a particular theme. Other possible themes over time—war and peace, wealth and poverty, law and justice. These are all areas that I think we want our students to be at least acquainted with, if not more deeply engaged with, because these are questions that they must think about at some point in time as human beings, not just the capabilities that will enable their work, important though that is.

So that is the sum total of the core curriculum, almost. There are two other dimensions. We have asked that there be a Singapore studies requirement and an Asian studies requirement. Students will have to fulfil the requirements, though it can be fulfilled from the core curriculum or from the disciplinary curriculum. If you were doing a course on doing business in China in the business school, it could fulfil the Asian studies requirement, or if you were doing a course on Singapore history in the cultures of the modern world basket, it could fulfil that Singapore studies requirement.

Finally, I would just say that we have very deliberately tried to integrate the co-curriculum with the core curriculum. We have always had a requirement for community service and internship. Well and good.

We are weaving that into those pillars as well. The capabilities pillar is where the internship requirement sits because it is about capabilities, about work capabilities. And we are also now going to make it credit-bearing, on top of it being hundred percent requirement, because we want to make explicit the learning that students are getting out of the internship. There is a lot of tacit learning, but how do they think about what they have learned, and how do they be conscious of that, that they can use some of that in their future lives?

The community service is weaved into the communities pillar, and again it will be credit-bearing and we will render visible the learning outcomes. We have set up something called the Reflective Practice Unit, which is residing with the Dean of Students outfit, and the group of colleagues there who are devising the scaffold for reflection, and a set of questions that will guide the students after they have done the community service, while they are doing the community service, and indeed before they start the community service to reflect on what it is they are trying to learn from this, and what indeed they have learned from it.

The final civilizations pillar will also have an activity component — in addition to internships and community service—this is the global exposure component, and we have asked that a hundred percent of our students have some global exposure during the course of their four years with us. We are mindful that for some students there might be some challenges if they are working part time to support the family, being away for a semester doesn’t just affect them, it affects their family. We are working on ways of mitigating that, and I have seen over my years how a student who does have that global exposure comes back enriched, and I really would like for that to have touched every student’s life.

And then, of course, at the faculty level, faculty are constantly trying to juggle between the different demands of being an academic—teaching, research, contributing to service in the University and beyond the University. And how do we create time and space for them and offer them resources that will support the research? So in the last year, we have put in place a capacity-building fund where we have said to colleagues, if you have a really good idea about a societal challenge that you would like to address, make an application to this fund, not to do the research itself but to build the capacity to do the research. So, for example, the fund would bring in, say, a postdoctoral fellow to work with you, and together you would put your thoughts on paper on how to put together a very compelling research grant that you would go externally for competitive funding. It is about ensuring that there are enough of the kinds of databases that are needed to support the work of faculty, and so forth. So, it is also about putting policy in place where a faculty member who wins a major research grant might have the ability to take time off from a little bit of teaching for a year, maybe two years, to concentrate on the research. But I do want to emphasize that even while we are working through some of these policies, this is a university that does place a lot of attention on the high quality of education, and that means we do want faculty members who are active in research, who are ambitious in their research, but we don’t want faculty who only want to do research to the exclusion of teaching. Because if that is the case, this individual belongs in a research institute not in a university. A university is about both education and research. And at different points in our journey as an academic, we might tilt the balance a little bit here or there, but fundamentally those two activities are important. So, it is about putting in place policies and practices to enable that balance, and hopefully, with all of that, we are able to support faculty to achieve the dreams they want to achieve in research and in teaching.

When I was an undergraduate in my final year, the head of department said to me, “Would you be interested to be an academic?” and I had not really thought about that. I was always interested in teaching, I was very interested in education as a line of work. And my mother tells me that when I was three, I lined the dolls up against the wall and taught all the dolls. I have always wanted to teach, and I was headed directly for that. But my head of department said, “Well, you know, as an academic, you get to do that, but you also get to do more. And you have demonstrated an ability with research even as an undergraduate, and wouldn’t you want to be an academic where you could balance both of
those things?” And I thought, well how interesting is that? I get to teach, and I get to do the research that I have come to quite enjoy.
The National University of Singapore was good enough to give me a scholarship that took me to London for my PhD. And those were three very memorable years. I learned a great deal about what it meant to live independently. I learned a great deal about what it meant to navigate different cultural contexts with students from all over the world. I learned what it meant to develop relationships with people from scratch, and I think it was quite instrumental in shaping my approach to education and people in general.

So, I went away and I came back. I had a bond to serve and that was six years of it. I thoroughly enjoyed the six years, but even during that period and after, I would sometimes get offers from other universities to say, “Would you come?” And I remember two offers from the UK, and one from Australia and one from the US, and it was always family that kept me here. It was always family that I wanted to be with. The role of being an academic in a university means that you nevertheless get to travel for conferences, you nevertheless get to collaborate with people across boundaries, and go on fellowships for extended periods to other universities. And so the tremendous experience I had overseas as a student was further augmented through the international collaborations and international visits.
So, I stayed on at NUS as a faculty member despite the overseas offers of faculty positions, and in my third year back from London with a PhD, the then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences called me up one day and I thought, “What did I do now?” And he said, “Would you like to be sub dean?”, as we were then called, assistant deans, in effect. The assistant deans at that point in time were all faculty members unlike the SMU context where they are professional administrative staff. And I took that on thinking, oh yeah, sure, I have got time on my hands, I can take on something more. And I did a lot of things that today in the context of NUS would be done by high-level admin staff—organizing open days and producing the faculty newsletter and so forth.

A couple of years after that, I had another call from the then dean who said, “Would you like to be vice dean?”, and that is associate dean equivalent. And I thought, well, all right, we’ll give it a try. And I did that for a short period, and the then vice-chancellor called me and said, “would you like to be dean?”, and I thought, oh, this is getting serious. I took that on at a young age of 35. It was not easy. I had senior colleagues with many years of experience in their 50s, even 60s. And they would say to me, “Well, you know, I’m used to working with people with 35 years of experience, not 35 years of age.” So, I sort of took that, and I said, that is all right, I will show them that it is not the biological age that matters. Was there something about the gender? Maybe, because these were senior male professors. And it was not entirely easy at the beginning because the university at that point in time was deeply into change. It was a teaching university that was shifting to become a research-intensive university.

It was a point in time when there was a new president, the position had morphed from vice chancellorship of the British tradition to presidency of the North American tradition. The then president was a Singaporean who had returned after decades in the US and used to a very different environment and ambitions. And he was ambitious for the university, rightly so, and it was about steering change of a very large, very established, very historical university. And I was dean right then at that point in time. And it meant that I had to learn about change management. And it meant that, while I embraced the ambitions of the university, the new university in that sense, I also had to be mindful that colleagues had different expectations of them in the past and so forth—a familiar story about change management. And so I learned how to hopefully, successfully, straddle a path between pushing for ambitious goals while being empathetic to individual needs.
I was dean for three years and a bit, and then the president called me again and said, “Would you like to join the Provost’s Office?” And at that point in time—a little confession—as dean at that particular point in time, I had a lot of people management to do. There were the intellectual things to do about devising curriculum and so forth, and that was the fun and easy part in a certain sense because it was
an intellectual exercise. But effecting that change was about working with people and bringing people along with you and a lot of hand-holding, a lot of cajoling, a lot of persuasion, and it was tiring. And the role in the Provost’s Office, which was much more policy-oriented, was a welcomed one because I wanted a rest from the daily engagement with people and so forth. Even while I enjoyed and relished that, and saw the importance of such engagement, it was tiring. So I switched then to a much more policy role.

My first role as vice provost was vice provost for education. And I looked after everything from undergraduate to postgraduate education which included masters and PhD programs, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. I learned so much. I learned so much because I chaired a committee that looked at all curricular proposals from across a comprehensive university. I learned about engineering and dentistry and medicine and architecture and everything else. I had a group of people in the curriculum committee who were experts in their own domains and forged a really nice partnership with the committee members until today, and this would be about 13, 14 years later. The group would still say, come, let’s go together for lunch. I reminisce about the days when we talked about curriculum centering on better dental care or building bridges or whatever it was. So that was really nice.

Then I was invited to concurrently head up a research institute. When I was dean, I had convinced the president to put in money to set up an Asia Research Institute. I had thought, how can we in Singapore not be the voice for understanding Asia from Asian perspectives, whether it is by Asians or from an Asia perch as such? And he was good enough to put in quite a bit of money for that. And so, at that point in time, I took on the directorship while concurrently holding a vice provost role. That was fun as well. There were difficulties of all kinds which I won’t go into, but the ability to shape a research agenda was tremendous.

I then was asked whether I would take on a different portfolio from the education one and the research one, and that new portfolio was to do with global relations. It was about the university looking outward, establishing its relationships, collaborations and so forth. And it came at a good point again because I had spent some years doing the two pieces of work, and I have realized now that every three or four years, I was changing portfolio in NUS, and even though I have been with NUS for 24, 25 years, it felt like I was changing jobs more frequently than that. I went and I did the global relations role which was amazing. I met so many wonderful people from different universities around the world, and made good friends. I went to many meetings of presidents and vice chancellors accompanying my president. I learned what it meant to think about a university’s future, chart the paths, forge collaborations.

The biggest project that I did in that capacity was to work with my then president to tie up with Yale in establishing Yale-NUS College. And that again taught me so much about how to see things from a different cultural perspective, not to take what we know for granted, verbalizing things that are tacit knowledge, navigating different cultures, politics, negotiating with a partner institution, negotiating with the Ministry of Education, looking at legal documents, editing every last word, looking at financial spreadsheets, hiring people. That entire journey was a five-year journey even though the work with Yale in particular was for about three years, because the two years prior to Yale coming into the picture, we were studying the feasibility of setting up a liberal arts college in Singapore and the best model for that. We were studying liberal arts colleges in the US, and we were actually in conversation with the Claremont Consortium as well. So I learnt to deal with disappointment when negotiations don’t go the way you hope. I learned that getting on the exercise machine was really important at the end of a day, to keep healthy and alert. And just observing an amazing president like Rick Levin at Yale and his vice-president, Linda Lorimer, taught me a great deal, and I think those kinds of relationships and experiences stay with you forever.

After I finished with that, I was asked whether I would do another portfolio at NUS, back in the mothership, so to speak, not the Yale-NUS, but back in the mothership. And this was back to being vice provost, but this time with the academic personnel portfolio, which basically dealt with all faculty
matters. I was really thrown into all the pleasures but also pressures of whether you tenure someone or you don’t, and the aftermath when somebody is not successfully tenured. I looked into policies to improve the lives of faculty members. At that point in time, if a female faculty member went on maternity leave, it wasn’t a matter of course that they would get the tenure extension. I wrote in policies to make all of that possible. Working with many colleagues and in consultation across the university, I’d like to think that I also contributed to the lot of the education-track colleagues, who always felt a little bit—how shall I put it? —a little bit tentative about what their role was, whether it was truly valued as opposed to the tenure-track and so forth. And with the blessings of my provost and president, put in place policies that helped to put them where they rightfully deserved to be, which is respected members of a community, because of their ability to communicate with and educate our students really well, that research was not the be-all and end-all in a university.

And that was about the time that a search firm came knocking at my door, and they said, “You know, there is a position at SMU that might use your experience,” and I thought, oh, but I haven’t finished my work at NUS. I still have many other policies that I want to try and introduce and so forth.” And they said, “Come, come, just have a chat.” So I had a chat with them, and then I said, “No, but I haven’t finished my work,” and then they said, “No, no, why don’t you talk to Arnoud?” So I ran along to Raffles City or Fairmont or wherever it was, and we had a coffee and I said, “I haven’t quite finished my work,” and he said, “I understand, but think about it, we’ll chat again.” And we went again to that same coffee lounge in Fairmont hotel, and he said “You know, these are the sorts of things we want to do at SMU. Your entire portfolio shows that you could do all of this. Think about it.” And I went away, and I thought, oh, this is tough. This is really attractive because if you look at what I’ve done over the years, I’ve sort of always been involved in new developmental projects, and this was one of them, except it’s a whole university. Oh my, isn’t that exciting? And then, of course, truth be told, there are all the personal ties, the friendship ties that you’ve cultivated over 25 years. It is my alma mater. I’ve always imagined myself eventually retiring from my office in the Geography Department, right at the corner with a wonderful tree right in front as I look out of the window. I thought this was so difficult. And Arnoud said, why don’t you speak to a couple of our trustees? So, bit by bit, he reeled me in, and I must say he did a really good job of it, and that’s what happened. I went to speak with Paul Beh, and I spoke with Timothy Chia, and I remember it was around Christmas time. As it turned out, those conversations were much more about persuading me to take on the job, than in assessing me. And that was very flattering, if nothing else. I was very grateful for the trust, having just met me over coffee, for them to sort of try and persuade me to take on the job. It was something that I should not take lightly, I thought to myself. I spoke with my family, and I decided that I would try. I would take the step and move ahead.

And that was when I was told, come and meet with the faculty senate exco, come and meet with the deans and so forth. And I felt that if I were to do that, the news would be out that I was going to come to SMU or contemplate it. And I thought it only fair that I spoke to my president and provost back at NUS, and that is what I did. I went to them, and I said, this is what has happened. I want to be very transparent even though, you know, it wasn’t a done deal at SMU. I might come across terribly and the deans and the vice provosts at SMU might revolt and say, “No, don’t take her”, or maybe things will work out and I might actually leave NUS. And I remember I was quite close to tears when I was talking to them because, “Oh, how can I leave NUS?”

And so started the journey where they talked to me about whether I should go, and, there were two things that were said to me that were countervailing, but which I took to heart. One was a comment that, “As your provost, I must do everything I can to retain you at NUS, but as your friend, I think you should take this challenge up because I think your potential is above being a vice provost.” And I thought okay, it is very kind of you to say so, I will take that on board. I had another piece of advice which was, “As your friend, I think you have the potential to do more but as your president I want you to stay. And even if you’re walking down the aisle to get married to someone, you can still turn around. Don’t feel obliged
because you’ve had all these conversations with SMU.” It was true that I had gone quite far in my conversations with SMU, that I felt it was very bad form, first of all, for me to take SMU quite so far and then to back off. But it wasn’t just obligation which was the point of my then president’s message to me: “Don’t do it out of obligation. Do it because there’s a difference you want to make.”
And at the end of the day. I thought, I will try. I think there are things I would like to do, ideas that I would like to bring to a new institution, and I will try. And so I took my life in my hands and crossed the road. So then I ended up in SMU and have learned a lot in that process as well. It has been humbling and gratifying all at the same time.

Dare to dream. Dare to dream. Very often, we think because we have to do all these things—that maybe many men have less responsibility for—we won’t be able to juggle it, so let’s not try. Very often we think there are all these more senior people—by age if not by experience—let me not put my hand up for something. And even if called upon, maybe I shouldn’t say yes. Very often I think we actually can do more than we think we can. I am not suggesting that we bite off more than we can chew, but actually when it comes down to it, we can chew and we can swallow too. And sometimes we are a little bit more reticent than we need to be.

If it is possible to have a mentor, somebody that you can speak with, to learn from and with, it really does help. I don’t think we have enough women role models in senior positions, and if we did have senior women, sometimes these are not people who spend time with younger people. I think that part of the responsibility of being a woman in a senior position is to try and give time to younger women.

I have been hugely encouraged by the reaction. I have had colleagues who said that the “what” in the garden which I had described in terms of the four “I”s: the internationalization, the integration, the industry, innovation, was something that they felt they could easily internalize instead of a laundry list of 20 things that we wanted to do. It had been distilled in a way that they felt they could walk around and actually repeat what it is we wanted to do. That was one of the things I was trying to achieve, that people would know and it would become instinctive, rather than scratch their head and say, what was it the president said of the 20 things she wanted to do? I can remember two or something. So that was a part of it, and the reaction has been positive. Everybody could recite that back to me and probably can do it in their sleep now.

The other part was much more in a sense, touchy-feely and much more relational, and it was about the garden metaphor that I had used. People felt like—at least the reaction I got from like maybe 50 different people who have spoken to me or written to me—all of them except one said that was a metaphor that really worked. Many people said they could relate to it. It makes sense when you say that we want to cultivate this beautiful garden for everyone. It was a happy feeling. There were those who said they can totally understand the need for some weeding periodically. They can totally understand the need for pruning periodically, and there were those who said we recognize the hard work behind gardening. So, the reactions were varied, but the metaphor worked I think for many people. As I mentioned there was just one person who said that it was kind of out there, but one out of 50 is not bad.

When I think about Gardens by the Bay and how large a garden it is with different parts of the garden, you have the domes which require different temperature, different treatment, you have the different ethnic gardens, etc. I use that as a metaphor because I don’t mean that the garden is just one monolithic whole. There are different patches in the garden. We all have our role to tend our patch of the garden, but the whole is a beautiful garden, and it is greater than the sum of the parts. My role, I think, is to identify —working with colleagues—what are those parts of the garden that we want? Do we want the domes? Do we want the ethnic patches? Do we want some outdoor garden? Do we want the gardens sheltered? Do we want a pavilion in the garden? And that is the next order of detail that we are getting down to that needs to be worked through with everyone.

So, if I say we are going to have more integration as part of the garden, how is that to be played out? Is it integration in interdisciplinary terms, for education, for research? Is it integration across the alumni-student cycle? Those are different parts of the integration garden, and we need to agree what integration looks like, and we need to find the right gardeners for the different practices of integration as such. We need to be able to identify the strengths and passions of the different gardeners, some of whom prefer to be working in a greenhouse and others who are very happy to be out in the sun, some who like to be tending to the pond in the garden and so forth. And so it is about good judgment as to what the strengths of individuals are, and we all have strengths and weaknesses. We all have blind spots. We can’t do certain things, and why do we then pursue a path, a track for an individual where that is where his or her weaknesses are? Should we try and match where the strengths are so that the individual comes to work, on a daily basis, feeling fulfilled, that my strengths are recognized and what I am doing is making a difference to the larger garden. It is easier said than done. It is definitely easier said than done. But I think the metaphor worked because people recognized that that is what we need to do, we need to recognize the strengths of different people, match the job and the strengths, and sometimes, to then move on from what is your strength to another area where you don’t have strength, but because you are interested and you want to learn, you are actually developing a different skill set as well. And as I said, all of this works very well in theory. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, to mix my metaphors.

That is a really good question. When one is in one institution twenty-five years or thereabouts, you begin to take many things for granted. What it has done for me is to help me listen all over again, and to do something that I have always held fast to, but maybe over time in one institution, you need to do less and less of it because you already know the institution very well, and that is to “climb into other people’s shoes and walk around in them”. It is a line that I take from Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I have known that line since I was fifteen, and I believe in it very firmly. Coming here has made me recall and remember how important that is. That certain perspectives that you take for granted, that you have thought but of course that’s the way to do it, and that’s the way we have to approach it, well, hold on a sec. Climb into somebody else’s shoes from a different context, a different university, development path and think about why it has been done in a different way. So, I am delighted that I’m reminded of a favourite line from a favourite book from many, many years ago.

Harking back to what I said a moment ago, we are not going to win in a scale game. I think we must continue to be innovative as a university in the way in which we do things, not necessarily just in the innovation and entrepreneurship space, or start-ups and so forth, even though that is something we want to do. It is about how we think about education, how we approach interdisciplinarity, how we engage industry and so forth. There are opportunities for new ways of thinking about these various dimensions of a university that we can continue to try to develop, to innovate. Other universities may think, well that is an interesting model, we might want to adopt and adapt that, or we don’t think that is the way to do it, but that has given us an idea for doing something else. I really believe that a rising tide raises all boats. It is not about one university developing at the expense of another. If another university innovates and it pushes us to do so, that is great for the higher education landscape. I would dearly love to see the universities in this spirit of healthy competition, but also cooperation and collaboration.

A provost’s role is much more internal. It deals with everything academic. The president’s role is both internal and external. Internal in the sense that at the end of the day, the president’s responsibility is for the entire university. And it is only that you have the key person of a provost who helps you with many of the internal academic things, but ultimately the responsibility is still yours. Added on to that would be other internal roles for the corporate running of the university. Issues to do with finances, issues to do with the long-term financial sustainability of the university, issues to do with risk management, safety, security, HR for the non-academic side of the house. That entire spectrum is also the president’s responsibility.

But over and above that, is an external function, and the external function is a function external to the university within the country but also beyond the country. And the key offices that I would have a great deal to do with, one would obviously be corporate communications and marketing, where it is about how we project ourselves, who are we as a university, how do we manifest a university that is vibrant, relevant and making a difference to society. Part of it is about projecting all the good work that the university does. And it is entirely possible that we do a lot of good work, but if we don’t have that machinery and the strategy to project ourselves well, a lot of the good work can go unnoticed. My role as president is to represent and re-present the university.

There is a second office that I would have a lot to do with and that is the international office. And that is about projecting the university internationally. It is about developing the opportunities internationally for collaborations. It is about making sure that the good things that we do are known much more internationally because that has a virtuous cycle in terms of bringing opportunities to the university.

Then, of course, there is the external world where I would have a primary responsibility, although I would not be the only one responsible for this, and that is advancement. That is about bringing resources to the university to do all the wonderful things that we want to do as a university. Imagination is free. Ambition can be free, but making it happen is not free. So we really do need to work at building a resource base that is robust, not just for the here and now, but for the long term. If I am to see myself as a steward, then my responsibility is not to steward the institution just now but for the longer term. And to the extent that I am able to work with all colleagues on campus because all colleagues have a responsibility or a role—maybe not a direct responsibility, but a role in helping with bringing in gifts to the university because people believe in us and what we want to do. It is my responsibility to shepherd everyone to do this as well as we can.

This advice for new students is something that I have been trotting out in the last three years, that as Provost I have had the occasion to use with prospective students. Every year around admissions season, I will address groups of students, and I will talk to them about how to choose your university. Of course, I could stand there and say, of course, you have to choose SMU, but it wouldn’t be fair, nor would it be right. I speak to students about knowing yourself, knowing your learning style, what you are comfortable with, what you want out of life, what you want to do in life, not just as a career, but how you want to contribute and make your life meaningful, and finding that environment that supports you and develops you that way.

I have said to prospective students if you really believe in the power of the word, if you really believe that communication, persuasion of ideas is something that you have great strengths in and you would like to grow that, think about SMU, because we are that kind of place that focuses on that, develops that and so forth. But I have also said to students, if you think that is important but it is not your strength at all, think of coming here because we will help you develop that aspect of you. If you are looking for an environment where you want to be deeply interactive, you are the sort of individual who learns through the cut and thrust of debate and discussion in the classroom, outside of classroom, with your friends and so forth as opposed to sitting by yourself and reading the material, then SMU is the place for you. But if you are deeply uncomfortable with engagement, and you learn much better because you have the quiet of your own time going through the material again and again and again, and you think that that’s okay and what will stand you in good stead, then maybe a different environment works for you.

If you are interested in interdisciplinarity—being able to take courses across schools, across disciplines, because you believe that is what the world requires—SMU offers you a very good chance, maybe a better chance than other institutions, because again, we are relatively small and criss-crossing campus is entirely possible, even easy, as opposed to multi-campus complexes, where it is a challenge. For prospective students, I try and guide them to discover a little bit about themselves and to find a good fit.

For current students who are already enrolled, please, please make the best of all the opportunities available to you. There are just so many opportunities on campus that are outside the classroom. Growth at SMU is holistic growth, it is holistic development. It is well-roundedness and so many things that you will learn and you will remember and cherish by way of memories, will not just be in the classroom. They will be the freshman orientation camps that you were part of organizing. It will be the community service trip that you made to Myanmar. It will be the internship where you were, excuse the language, scared shit because you have never been in that environment. There are so many opportunities that SMU offers. Avail yourself of them.

I love being at SMU. It is a grand opportunity that has been offered to me. I am very grateful for my colleagues who have been very supportive, and very proud of our students.

I always believe in a leadership team, as opposed to a single leader who is dominant and maybe charismatic, but overly dominant. I do think there are times when you need that—if you are in battle in a war, you might need that command and control person, but in educational institutions, for the most part, I think you need a leadership team. And there is a good Chinese saying for it, “Qu Chang Bu Duan” (取长补短) which is, basically the different strengths of individuals that you would bring together to make up for the weaknesses of other members in the team. And in an educational institution, that I think is very important. I think that in an educational institution, if you had an individual who was overly concerned about credit and glory to himself or herself all the time, you would lose the team.

What I do see as part of the team would be the following: I have articulated, after consultation with stakeholder groups, the key directions, and those key directions require different skill sets. If we are looking for someone to help develop the industry piece, having someone with that industry background would be really sensible, but who also understands the educational institution. That mix of it doesn’t reside in everybody, because many of us came through from an undergraduate to a PhD, to an academic career and have never spent one day in in industry. Others have. Maybe we should draw those strengths into the team. If we are interested in a university that is developing, cultivating innovation and entrepreneurship talent, you need someone who knows that space, ideally through having been in that space himself or herself, or if not at least having done research in that space and understands what innovation and entrepreneurship means.

If we are looking for someone for the integration piece, then surely you need a particular kind of personality and leadership style, that the person is able to forge consensus, bring people together, have the patience to sit down and listen to different points of view. And if you’re thinking of an internationalization piece, then you need someone with the international experience and background, you need someone who has that kind of presence when you are meeting with other counterparts and so forth. So, there will be different strengths that are needed depending on what you want to do. I have articulated what we want to try and achieve, and I am looking for individuals whose backgrounds, personalities and temperament would help make this up.

But more important than anything else, this group needs to be able to work together. This group needs to be able to recognize that this is where I have strengths and that is where I’m going to be really rowing hard and let me leave that to my partner, my colleague in the team and not try and do that as well. And I think we need for a team that supports one another, that’s willing to say, let me chime in when you are having a difficult moment, let me not try and be the one who is dominant, has a voice in everything and so forth. We have got to know when to lead and went to take a step back. Ideally we will be able to find individuals of that ilk who will be able to work well together. That for me is my responsibility, to compose the team and to build the group dynamic.

I like the fact that a university is such a multi-faceted place. If I just focus on the faculty, the myriad research questions that they ask, the sorts of things that they are sharing with their students in the classroom, I feel like a student very often and I am learning, and I am growing. If I look at the non-faculty side of the house, the expertise that people have that I couldn’t possibly have, I haven’t had the opportunity to learn and develop. So making a video, I don’t know how to do that. The deep finances that people work with, I find it fascinating to be learning all these things, even while I am supposed to be leading. And I feel very intellectually stimulated and alive as a consequence.

The misconceptions about the job. I think there are different kinds of misconceptions depending on the level of understanding of what a president does. There are people who have said to me, all presidents do is just kind of go for lunches and dinners all the time, because your job is to represent the university. It is a figurehead. And I recognize that different presidents will bring different styles and different approaches to their role, but I am not a figurehead. I don’t know how to be a figurehead. I feel deeply responsible. One of my colleagues in one of the schools said to me today, maybe you are overly responsible, and I said, I can’t help it, I was brought up in a convent. I went to the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. So one misconception is a president is a figurehead. My, very, very mischievous 74-year-old brother, still mischievous at this age, said to me, “Do you have to go to work anymore now that you are president?” He got a glare in turn. So there is a misconception about that.

Other people think that the job of the president must be terrible. You must have so much and everything is on your shoulders. And, yes, it is, ultimately the buck stops with me in that sense. But people sometimes don’t understand that there can be senior members of the team who really do a lot of heavy lifting. So, a provost does a lot of heavy lifting that helps the president a great deal. So, the truth is somewhere in between. I am neither a figurehead nor do I have to do heavy lifting in every single area. Not everybody understands that. A former vice chancellor gave me this advice, “Find a good team, develop a good team, and delegate.” And I will hold that in mind.

19 years ago, actually 21 years ago when SMU was first imagined and then conceived very quickly, and then developed, established and developed very quickly, I think it made a difference to the higher education landscape in Singapore in quite radical ways. At that point in time, the other universities were statutory boards, and run like statutory boards. The compensation scale was that of civil servants. The instruction manual of the public sector applied to the universities, so we were like—well, not we SMU—but the other universities were like government agencies in many ways.

The fact that SMU was established not as a statutory board, made a difference. It signalled a departure. It signalled a certain level of autonomy. It signalled a level of innovation that was expected of the university. And I think SMU lived up to that, definitely in the early years, and I would hope it continues to do so. I’d like to believe so.

From things like introducing a much more American system, with the professorial ladder with the provost and president, as opposed to a vice chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor, and the different salary structures and so forth. It brought a lot that was different to the higher education landscape in Singapore which had been dominated by a British model. I thought it was a really good thing because as a response to what SMU was doing, I think the other universities then felt compelled to innovate, and that competition I thought was a good thing, because it just prompted and motivated all the universities to innovate within their own space, and I dare say that the higher education landscape today in Singapore, is at a very high level, stands tall internationally, partly because of this impetus that SMU brought.

These postgraduate professional programs, taught masters programs, that exist in many universities, for me, is about building a more professional cadre of individuals for different industries and businesses. Unlike the research degrees, particularly the PhDs which are much more academic—even though some of them prepare graduates for industry as well— but the PhDs tend to be much more about the research, the deep thinking and so forth. The masters tend to be professionalizing. They lift the level of professionalism in whichever discipline, industry that you are interested in. So, if you’re interested in the application of IT and business, you would enrol for a Master’s of IT in Business - MITB for short, to help raise your level of professionalism in that particular area of work that you choose to go into. And likewise, if you were interested in a career in the finance industry, doing a Master’s in Quantitative Finance could really deepen your professional skill sets. We call it professional postgraduate programs for a reason. It is about professionalizing in business and industry as such. How important it is, I think it fills an important part of the whole ecosystem and the whole spectrum of offerings that we have from undergraduate to PhD, and this sits right there as part of that ecosystem.

It is important for other reasons. In business schools around the world, this is the space that builds the reputation of the business school, perhaps more so than in some of the other schools. So, if you take the School of Social Sciences for example, this is a space that doesn’t have the same dominance that it does in many business schools, and that’s the same around the world. There are variations across campus in terms of emphases and foci, but I would say that in a portfolio approach, this is an important part of the university.

There is another reason why it is important. What I have just described is a mission of why this space is important. There is another reason, and that is the margins, the profits that these programs make. These are full-fee-paying programs. They are able to bring in revenues. In many universities, this is a space where the revenues come in and cross-subsidize other programs. I firmly believe in this because a university is fundamentally about cross-subsidies. You do believe in certain programs that are important for the education of young people that are not going to bring in the revenues, but they deserve to be there. And what that is, may differ from university to university, and some universities it may be theology, it may be the classics, it may even be philosophy, but you believe that it is an important part of the students’ education, and therefore you cross subsidize. For me, the margins that these postgraduate professional programs make is not just about money making—we are a non-profit organization, we are not here to make money for its own sake—but the margins are for mission, and that is what I would keep an eye on.

It does. So that is just the core curriculum, and I have touched on the core curriculum, and how it is integrated. There are other dimensions yet of the core curriculum, a key part being residential living and learning. I am a firm fan of that experience having benefited from that myself. Your best friends are made when you have lived with them; the fights that you have had; the late night discussions and debates about things that are outside of the curriculum, but sometimes from the curriculum; the cookout sessions that you have had together. All that makes for firm bonding. In a business school context we talk about networking and how important that is, but this is a different level of networking altogether. It is not an instrumentalist networking, it is building ties and relationships that last for life. And it is also about learning to live independently away from home, even if you are Singaporean.

We have remade Prinsep Street Residences, and I am extremely proud of my colleagues who made that happen. If you haven’t had a chance to visit it, I encourage all of you to visit it. It is a lovely heritage building conserved, and that speaks to that part of me that is an urban heritage conservation scholar and advocate. It allows old spaces to find new uses, it allows old buildings to have a refresh but keeping true to the original spirit. It allows students to have programmatic elements woven into their experience so that it is not just living, it is learning at the same time, and it is working together at the same time on projects, etc. I hope we will have the opportunity to do still more of that. We are working on some possibilities, and I hope that our students, especially our Singaporean students, will step forward and avail themselves of the opportunity. It is easy to think of international students wanting that because they need some place to stay, but the real challenge and the real success is getting Singaporean students to want to stay. So that is another dimension of the co-curriculum, if you will, that I think is very important.

We have thought really hard at the Blue Ribbon Commission about our pedagogies as well. SMU from the beginning has been known for the interactive small group seminar-style teaching and learning, and I think that’s really stood our students and graduates in very good stead. It is no accident that ourstudents are thought to be more articulate, more confident in holding a conversation, a debate, putting forward a view, and that sort of setting has contributed to it.

This was something that was in its very nascent stage when I moved to SMU and the whole space was a little bit preliminary and nascent. I had the opportunity to try and get a hold of this and to shape it. This is not to say that we haven’t had professional and continuing education at SMU. We have always had that. We have had our executive development programs, and we have had our Centre for Professional Studies, and we have had institutes that do the outreach and educational programs and such. What I wanted to do and have done now is to say, come folks, let’s work together, and let’s devise a clarity of mission, and how we have organized it now is there’s executive development, and there’s SMU Academy.
SMU Executive Development is for the professional education of those who are senior executives, those with high potential. Whereas the SMU Academy is much more speaking to the Skills Future movement that has started in Singapore, led by the government, and it is much more skills-based, and it is much more rank-and-file who do need the upskilling and reskilling. So that is the conceptual division and the organizational structure. With the SMU Academy, what I did together with Arnoud was to bring together the different pockets on campus, that were doing a little bit of this work, and to consolidate it, and to devise a framework where this new SMU Academy works with the schools, works with the institutes in a collaborative way.

We have done several things. First, we have identified the four areas that we were particularly going to focus on. One is on human capital development and leadership. Two is on finance, and indeed the Skills Future statutory board has identified us to be the institution leading the finance area. Three, it is about the sort of information technology area. And four is about operations. We are devising courses. We are doing courses from the beginners, to the intermediate, to the advanced. We have devised certificate courses that can stack up to a graduate diploma or a diploma. You could do several certificates and then you could then get a diploma or a graduate diploma. And you could, in fact, stack up a certificate with a diploma, do a little bit more and get a master’s degree, for example. So, all those are possibilities, and the flexibility is particularly intended for the working adult who has constraints of time, family commitments, so do what you can in bite-sized ways that are helpful to you, for your work, and then over time as you collect the credentials, you could actually stack up.

There is one other dimension that we have done, and we have piloted that very well. I think, and we were going to do still more of it. And that is something called the Professional Conversion Programs—PCP for short. It is not a creation by SMU. It is something that the government agencies have devised, but we have experimented with it and showed that it is possible to do. And this is where somebody is perhaps unemployed, is committed to go into another area of work. The employer has identified that this person has potential, if not the expertise. This person is hired by an employer, placed with us for the training and then goes to the new employer. The individual who undergoes the training is assured of a position, or it could be the same employer who has staff whose areas have become redundant. But this is a really good employee that the employer would like to keep, and it is about giving the person a chance to go into another area within the same company. This person comes to train with us and goes back to the company. It is called Professional Conversion Program because it converts them from one profession to another. The difference from the open enrolment type courses is that the individual already has a job in hand. The matching has to be done before the person goes for training, and it is work to get it done, but it is gratifying when you listen to the testimonies of these individuals who feel that they have had a second or third lease of life as a consequence of the programs. That to me, is meaningful impact.

But as the world evolves, so too has SMU, and Arnoud has been the brains behind the SMU-X initiative which I have now put in the next category—aside from the collaborative and interactive learning—experiential learning. It is about getting out in the real world and experiencing the real challenges out there and learning how to navigate that. And SMU-X for those who are not so familiar, it is about students working in multidisciplinary groups with a faculty supervisor/mentor and a mentor from whichever organization it is they’re working with. And within the space of a semester, they are working with the client, and delivering an outcome to them. It could be a business, it could be a government agency, it could be an NGO. And the beauty of it is that we have had repeat partners who have come back to say, “The last group did something for us that was really useful. Do you have any other groups that are interested?” And I think that speaks well for what the students have been able to do. We have students who said to us that, “Gosh, that’s really stressful, that’s really tough.” And I have just kind of given them as motherly a look as I can muster, and to say to them that I understand, but we are not going to make it easier, but we are going to help you learn how to cope, because that is what is going to confront you in the world after university.

Interactive and collaborative learning which we have had from the beginning, experiential learning, and the third is something that I would like to try and get still more participation from our colleagues and that is personalized learning. That is recognizing students as individuals with different learning needs, recognizing individuals who have different interests, different ways of learning and responding to that. So more about that in a moment. From that one piece of small group teaching and learning which is about interactive approaches, we now have a tripod of key pedagogical philosophies, if you will, and approaches. The underlying philosophy is this, we see the student as an individual human being. Therefore, we need to respond to the individual, the student as an individual—personalized learning. But we also see that students are social beings who will interact, and they learn through that interaction. Hence the commitment, the continued commitment, to interactive and collaborative learning. But we also see students as citizens of a community, and that community could be the immediate local community, or they could be citizens of the nation or citizens of the world. And in all of that, speaking to our sense of ethics and social responsibility, they have a responsibility back to the community. So, to the extent that they are engaged in experiential learning, what they do could give back to the community. The projects that they do could be helpful to the community.

One of the favourite projects that I have encountered is the project where students work with the small retailers in Bras Basah Complex across the street, who are confronted by the world of e-retail and multi-channel retail, multi-channel marketing and all those sorts of things. And this is Uncle who is in his 60s, sitting at his shop thinking, “Do I close shop? Nobody’s coming to buy my second-hand books” or whatever it is. And so our students have worked with them and helped them think about continuity. That is what I mean by giving back to the community, and, of course, they are doing many other things, other kinds of projects.

And you, Pat, shared with me a project which predated SMU-X, but is very much in the ilk of SMU-X, which is our students from SIS working with the Acehnese orphans and NGOs and tracking the education and so forth, post tsunami in 2004, I believe it was. And I would love to see more of our students doing more of all of these kinds of projects.

So just to summarize, the philosophy behind how we conceive of our students and the pedagogies that reflect that. And just two days ago in The Straits Times, a writer commented on how technology will take over the world of learning. And I have resisted and cajoled my colleagues to resist doing what some universities do, which is to say our target is to put 70% of our courses online or 80% or 50% or whatever it is. And I have resisted doing that because I don’t think it’s just about how many courses we have online, but what do we do with the technology, and what learning outcomes are we trying to achieve, and how does it speak to our pedagogical framework and beliefs? And so I’ve encouraged my colleagues to think about how technology enhances the personalized learning rather than detracts from it. I have encouraged them to think about how technology contributes to the interactive and collaborative rather than to take away from it, and how does technology help the community projects that our students are doing that they can deliver something still more effectively to the community.

Just as an example with personalized learning, it is about using technology that can track a student’s learning and the areas where the student’s learning needs beefing up. And technology can help you with that and help the instructor identify the needs still better, and maybe even identify the resources to help the students still better. With the games, the gaming culture amongst young people, some of our colleagues are devising apps and games for the students to enhance their learning. And I have said to them, well, why won’t you do games that enhance the interaction and the collaboration rather than take away from it. It is not just about sitting in front of a TV screen or a computer screen and watching a talking head. So, use the technology to enhance the interaction and collaboration. And likewise, if a student or group of students were doing a project on say food poverty in Singapore, and trying to identify where the needs are, well, geospatial mapping helps with that. Why wouldn’t our colleagues in Social Sciences and SIS work together with students to devise apps and so forth that can contribute back to the community and by identifying where the needs are and finding technologies that will help the delivery of that will help to address the needs. So that is the technology that my colleagues in the Centre for Teaching Excellence have embraced.

So in preparation for that, we had talked about our areas of excellence, and we have identified five in the last little while, and they have been good in terms of sort of focusing our minds a little bit on some areas. But as we talked about the areas of excellence, we realized that, what was important to us was, of course, excellence, but excellence in what? To what end? What were we trying to do? And it was very clear to us when we framed it that way that what we were trying to do as a university was to do research that made a difference to society and economy and polity. And so we started thinking about, well, what are the challenges that are out there in the society and economy, etc that we were trying to address? And we started off thinking, should we be talking about Grand Challenges? And that is a familiar concept—Grand Challenges. But we also realize that we were really much more focused on societal challenges.

And so began the very interesting journey of asking ourselves what are the key societal challenges that we see, that we think as a university we can contribute to with the kind of expertise that we have within our university? And we came down to five areas. One is understanding economies and financial markets. The second is about quality of life and social fabric of a society. The third is about managing sustainability. The fourth is about advancing innovation and technology. And the fifth is about navigating borders and boundaries because we are living in Singapore that is so open, that we need to think about it in terms of the mobilities of people, goods, services, capital, and so forth.

These five areas were also attractive because it allowed a lot of our colleagues to have a mission. The research that a lot of colleagues do somehow contribute to one or more of those dimensions. And in that sense, there was a certain sense of inclusiveness, whereas an area of excellence, to some extent connoted that there were those who were not so excellent, who were not involved in those areas. It was not the primary reason why we made the change, but it had a nice salubrious side effect in that sense. These societal challenges have now become concretized. Each of those areas has more granular elaborations which I will not go into at this point in time, because even at this broad level, I think it is easy to understand what it is we are trying to do. We have put in resources, we have encouraged our faculties to step forward with ideas for projects, and there is some quite exciting projects that have been put forward.

Just as an example of the interdisciplinary opportunities that this approach fosters, we now have colleagues in the School of Information Systems and the School of Social Sciences who have gotten together to do research on something that they have titled, Making Smart Cities for All. And it is looking particularly at those components of our community that are sometimes a little bit forgotten, a little bit marginal or marginalized, depending. It might be the migrant worker groups. It might be the elderly. It might be those with mental well-being challenges. It might be the caregivers who are taken for granted so often. And how does the smart city work for them? What I like about it is that it has a real engagement with the intellectual work that is going on around the world, but it also has a very real practical implication for our communities, and it is in this interdisciplinary or at least multidisciplinary—it is bringing different academic communities into conversation with one another. So that is an example of what we are trying to do, and there are more yet, and we are going to continue this effort of putting resources to encourage this kind of work. I am optimistic about what my colleagues will come up with.

Professor Lily Kong is SMU’s President and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences.

Professor Kong is SMU’s fifth President, and the first Singaporean to lead the 19-year old university. She is also the first Singaporean woman to head a university in Singapore. She was previously Provost of SMU, Vice Provost and Vice President at the National University of Singapore (in various portfolios), and Executive Vice President (Academic) of Yale-NUS College.

Professor Kong is widely known for her research on religion, cultural policy and creative economy, urban heritage and conservation, and national identity.

An award-winning researcher and teacher, Professor Kong has received five international fellowship awards and has also won the Association of American Geographers Robert Stoddard Award for Distinguished Service (Geography of Religion and Belief Systems).

Prof Kong was conferred the Public Administration Medal (Silver) in 2006.

President (2019-present)

A relatively young university

As a woman in senior management

Blue Ribbon Commission for Undergraduate Education

Capacity building

Career in Singapore prior to joining SMU

Dare to dream

Garden metaphor

Getting a different perspective

Healthy competition, cooperation and collaboration

Internal and external role

Know yourself and find a good fit

Leadership styles, group dynamics

Learning & delegating

Making a difference in higher education

Postgraduate professional programs

Prinsep Street Residences

SMU Academy

SMU-X courses

Societal Challenges

A relatively young university

As a woman in senior management

Blue Ribbon Commission for Undergraduate Education

Capacity building

Career in Singapore prior to joining SMU

Dare to dream

Garden metaphor

Getting a different perspective

Healthy competition, cooperation and collaboration

Internal and external role

Know yourself and find a good fit

Leadership styles, group dynamics

Learning & delegating

Making a difference in higher education

Postgraduate professional programs

Prinsep Street Residences

SMU Academy

SMU-X courses

Societal Challenges

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