I suppose my key advice is don't waste your time here, that there are lots and lots of opportunities. And yes, you want to achieve everything you can in your studies, and we want you to excel in your studies and achieve the highest grade degree you can. But at the same time, as a University, we offer a broader education as I said, that more holistic approach to education, and whilst I appreciate every student needs to achieve an appropriate balance for them, I would very much hope that they explore the co-curricular side of the education at SMU and excel in that as well as excelling in their academic studies. So, I would encourage them whether they are a new student coming to the University or they are senior student to always think about that balance and not to get too over balanced on one or the other.
Clearly the University was established to be a focused University around a small range of social science disciplines. The immediate strength of the University is the strength of those disciplines. And my role and the role of the President and the role of the leadership team across the University is to make those the strongest they can be. Fundamentally, that reputation issue that I just referred to is addressed through creating strong, highly-regarded, reputable disciplines and recruiting high-quality students who become our alumni and ambassadors for the University. So long as we keep making the right decisions, in terms of faculty hires and in terms of students and producing the quality that we are producing at the moment, both in terms of research and teaching outcomes, the University's reputation will pick up. And I think the big advantage is that are our size and the juxtaposition and interrelationship of those disciplines means that we can create mixes and experiences for both students and faculty that other universities can't. We can combine courses and modules and allow students to flow across our schools in a much more flexible way than other universities.
The big questions in society are not going to be answered by single disciplines. They are going to be answered by disciplines coming together and either doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work. Given the size of the University, and as I said the strong interrelationship between the disciplines we have, that really gives us a competitive advantage when it comes to answering some big questions in society, and having the impact that we want to on society. So we talk about making meaningful impact. I think our size and ability to flex our multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity really enables us to have a deeper level of impact.
The other issue I will focus on is how student demands will change because students are more demanding, and so I think that our holistic and well-rounded approach to our education clearly provides a broader experience for the students. But I think at the same time, because it is not narrowly focused on the discipline, and because we have the expectation around internships and global experiences and volunteering and we are trying to develop that broader person, I think we are challenging our students—the heart of education it seems to me. When I was at Durham, we used to say to students at graduation and commencement, we used to say, “I hope you have had a challenging time.” And then we say what we mean by that is we hope that we have really pushed you, and we hope we have developed you intellectually, and we hope that we have developed those skills that we want you to develop. It seems to me that that so long as we get that challenge right, then we will address the level of student expectations.
But I think in terms of digital learning and the way that pedagogy will need to change, certainly we will have to adjust the way that we teach. We will have to move into blended, we will have to move into digital, we will have to move into online. We will have to upskill the faculty and support the faculty in terms of that shift. Our students will always be one step ahead of us because of the generational issue and so forth. But I think the two changes that I see perhaps impacting on SMU: one—greater presence and success of our education in this part of the world and its ability to compete with the traditional dominant countries. And secondly, the move to digital education, and how we will have to adjust our pedagogy and teaching techniques accordingly.
One of the attractions to me, as I said earlier, was that I felt the values were commensurate. Although Durham is different from SMU, values wise I felt there was a really strong connection, and in some respects, the things that I value were slightly greater emphasized here than they were at my previous institution. So, the values side of things hasn't surprised me because, in effect, I think it's been reinforced in the last four months or so.
What surprised me? I suppose two things have surprised me. One thing is the Ministry of Education, there is a sense of a national project, that SMU is part of the national project. Again, for me, that was a big attraction. I think what surprised me is the real sense of connectedness between the University and a range of Singapore stakeholders, both government and industry, and a real sense of ambition for the University and a wish to support us and help us in a way that I have not experienced before. A real warmness to the University and a real willingness to help and have conversations, and to understand us and to even change policy or change the way that they are interfacing with us to help us. So that has been a real kind of novel experience for me in that I have experienced an environment in which government and industry has tended to be quite distanced from universities, and you had to work very, very hard to get their attention. But here that has not been a problem.
I suppose the other issue that surprised me is that the University has developed around its undergraduate programs and has a very, very strong undergraduate offering, has been developing a postgraduate offer, but actually the two are not as connected as I thought they would be. Essentially, the University operates the postgraduate quite separately to the undergraduate. Now there are reasons for that in relation to government funding. But I think in terms of curriculum, in terms of term structure, in terms of course unit structure, in terms of student experience, there are actually crossovers that we need to enhance. And so that surprised me, that the University is almost run as two universities, one for undergraduates and one for postgraduates. It has not been as integrated as perhaps I have experienced in other universities, not simply those that I've worked in but many universities that I have visited.
My observation is, and it is interesting you asked that question today because, I have actually had two opportunities to talk through leadership development today. So, it has been a bit of a theme today. My feeling is that we are not developing the leadership pipeline as strongly as we need to, and that when you do systemic succession planning across the University, you start to see some gaps. So, I am conscious that we are not really developing our leadership, the cadres of leadership that we need, say at the school level, tier one, tier two, and so forth. So, one of the things I am looking into at the moment is how we might develop a leadership development program for different kinds of faculty and staff, so that we start to develop a pipeline. And what that would involve is maybe identifying 30 or so people across the University—not guaranteeing them a leadership role but saying that we think you have leadership potential—and then putting them through a common program over time that would get them ready for a leadership role were one to open up. So, the question I ask myself is if someone became ill or a particular incident occurred, who is the person that we could insert into that role? In some cases, there is a ready-made successor, but in other cases, there is no clear successor. But regardless, we have a very narrow pool of people that we can put into those roles, and we need to expand that. We need to diversify. So, I am very conscious that a lot of people who could step up to roles are men, and it seems to me that what we—and I am very committed to this—that what we want to do is develop a much more diverse, both from gender and race point of view, leadership structure in the University. That means identifying and developing a cadre of people who are diverse and can take on roles and then giving them opportunities to rehearse and enact that leadership going forward.
And we had started an experiment a year or so ago when we refurbished Prinsep Street—this is experience with SMU—that we decided that we would create a residential living and learning community. And I think a question for the University—given where it is in its development—is to what extent do we want to have a residential experience in the University? We are a city centre-based University. There is an argument that students do not want to live in a University residence because of our location; they could just as easily live at home. But on the other hand, the residential living and learning concept, the possibilities of that and what I have seen in my previous university and how that can really enhance and broaden the development of the student, it seems to me that we need to give thought to whether or not we expand what we are doing at Prinsep Street beyond Prinsep Street. There is the possibility that the University could have a second residence, and so I am conducting a review to think through whether the University expands its residential offer, and if it does, how we need to strengthen and develop the current concept that we call the residential living and learning community.
A telephone call was the first thing. I was not thinking of it at all, if I am honest with you. But essentially an executive search consultant introduced me to the University, sent me some materials. And I am a management scholar, it is a management-focused University although it does social sciences and information systems. But the fact that it was called Singapore Management University, and I have run a business school, and I am very proud of the fact that I am a management academic—that was the initial sort of glue in a sense. And then I learned more about the strategy and the ambition of the university and got a deeper sense of its values. And so those things kind of hardened the glue.
When I came for an interview, that experience reinforced something that I had hoped would be here, which is that the University thinks deeply about its curriculum. And so I inherited a Blue Ribbon Commission on Undergraduate Studies and was very impressed by the level of thinking and the way in which it had connected with key pedagogic developments around the world and brought that together into a coherent package, and then developed a curriculum that was based on three pillars—the disciplinary curriculum, the core curriculum and the co-curriculum. And Durham professed to have a holistic approach to Education and essentially the way that was delivered was to have a disciplinary curriculum essentially and nothing else. And then what we called the wider student experience, which was located in colleges, but we did not design the interface elements. We left the two in parallel and then students designed and connected the two themselves. There was not any kind of purposeful design behind it. What I really liked at SMU was this sense of purposeful design.
