Appointment as dean of the School of Economics and Social Sciences
Developing faculty for the School of Economics
Faculty recruitment
Faculty support
Interviewee background
Planning the social sciences programme
Role as Associate Dean of SOSS
Social cohesion in Singapore
Social issues in Singapore
Social Science Research Council
Starting SOSS
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Appointment as dean of the School of Economics and Social Sciences
Roberto S MARIANO -
Developing faculty for the School of Economics
Roberto S MARIANO -
Faculty recruitment
Roberto S MARIANO -
Faculty support
Roberto S MARIANO -
Interviewee background
David CHAN -
Planning the social sciences programme
Roberto S MARIANO -
Role as Associate Dean of SOSS
David CHAN -
Social cohesion in Singapore
David CHAN -
Social issues in Singapore
David CHAN -
Social Science Research Council
David CHAN -
Starting SOSS
David CHAN
It was right along the kind of institution that I would like to see develop in Asia that would have international credibility, and be competitive with the top [economics] research and teaching institutions in the world. And that’s an interesting opportunity and an interesting challenge, something that is quite different from the usual mode of teaching. Hopefully I would still be able to do my research, which up to that point was the combination of teaching and research, was the primary main activity that I’ve always been doing up to that point [at the University of Pennsylvania].
There is another one major exposure which also made it much easier for me to accept the offer, when the offer eventually came sometime in 2000, [Singapore’s] Ministry of Manpower came to the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Economics, looking for me and Professor Klein. Professor Lawrence Klein, he’s a Nobel Prize winner in economics and is very famous for his econometric modelling work for forecasting and policy analysis. And MOM [Ministry of Manpower] people essentially asked if we could do a one-year project for them, constructing an econometric model for Singapore for the manpower needs assessment of Singapore.
And we ended up doing that. It ended up to be a two-year project and that was just finished shortly before I came to join SMU. So that’s another [Singapore-related work experience], and there was a lot of policy making analysis on employment pass holders, and of course, also on the other side, the unskilled workers. Little did I know that I was going to be one of those EP [employment pass] holders.
But even since, because I’ve been in Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania since 1971, from the early ’80s onwards I was doing a lot of consulting work in Asia and—so that I really was very much at home, even though Philadelphia was my base, to be in Asia. I spent one year in the Philippines. I’ve done consulting work for Bank Negara, the current central bank governor there was my student at Penn.
The other thing that I decided was that I’m not going to do a shotgun approach in terms of developing the faculty, because that’s going to be an exercise in futility and nothing will get done if you try to do everything all at the same time. And I already had five or six to work with anyway and they do cover different areas. And so my initial strategy was focus on econometrics and attract good, young econometricians, as well as senior ones, who are interested in being in Asia
But at the same time also hire other people, as opportunities arise in other [key] areas that we still need to fill up because you need macroeconomist, microeconomist, public economist, monetary theory and all sorts of other areas. But econometrics and statistics, partly because that is my area of expertise, that developed very quickly and we were able to attract very good people. Assistant professor level, those just getting their fresh PhDs, it was no problem attracting them over as long as they were interested in coming to Asia. My having taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where about three-fourths of the time I was teaching the PhD programme, also helped me identify students that were PhD graduates from Penn who might be interested. And I over the years attracted about six or seven of them to come. All of them were my former students in econometrics and I know them, they know me, and they felt very comfortable coming here. They’re still here, all of them, but now getting to the point of tenure decisions and things.
The senior faculty are always hesitant to come and because what you want are still relatively young, but pretty well established, who would provide mentorship, and at the same time project the image of the university internationally. From the beginning that was hard and up to now that continues to be, to me, one of the major [challenges]. The other is because it’s a new university, the policy making or policies in place sometimes get developed as we go along. Of course there are ways of looking at how other universities have done it and then, and then patterning your structure and processes after that. But you’ve got to remember we’re in Asia, we’re in Singapore, at the same time we want to be competitive internationally, and there are times when there could be clashes of priorities and of cultural perspectives on how these things should be done.
There’re also certain technical matters like the different tracks in the faculty, which is not common in many places, having a practice track that is of sizeable quantity and also performing very key functions and responsibilities in the university is not a common thing in the university scene in the United States, and so we have to develop a well reasoned out and consistent set of policies for this, we’re still doing it up to now. I mean the process continues, the process of improving how to approach all of this.
That was a given, the people that I was recruiting understood it, and it was also made clear to them that in order to get promotion—even renewal of midterm reappointment and eventual promotion to tenure—that they have to do research and that’s why these three programmes are being set up to really help them. It is also understood that it’s built into the budgeting of the schools that the university would support the research activities. There’s a very generous allocation of school money to support presentation of papers in conferences. In many universities in the United States there is not as much support for this simply because funds are limited, but here we give the [standing faculty] budget to support the trips abroad, to go to conferences and present papers.
Supplementary research funding up to as much as two-ninths of the base salary is also provided on an application merit basis, and sometimes this research funding support is automatic and built into the contract, written into the contract.
So all of these are really to support the young faculty any faculty’s efforts to produce research, but on the other side of it is a very strong statement that you are there expected to produce research. It’s very difficult, it’s a lot of pressure on the faculty because in addition to that they also have to teach well because of the requirements of our pedagogy—we’re still predominantly an undergraduate [institution] and so we cannot neglect teaching, teaching has to be important as well.
Yes, sure. Before SMU, that was before 2005, depends on how far we go back, well if I could, let’s go back to the days before I entered academia. I actually joined as a police officer in the Singapore Police force at 18 years old for quite some time, then did my undergraduate studies at NUS [National University of Singapore]. And somewhere in the early 90s, that’s when I began to get interested in Psychology, which is the field that I am trained in now. And I decided to leave the police to go to academia, where I got a scholarship from NUS, National University of Singapore. And that comes together with a bond, where they paid for my PhD education in the United States, came back and I served as an Assistant and then Associate Professor with them for a couple of years. And how I came to SMU was actually, somewhere around 2003 or 2004, Professor Tan Chin Tiong, who was then the Provost of SMU, read about me in one of the alumni magazines that NUS produces and he thought that “Hey, that’s a Singaporean guy there doing Psychology” and I only knew later that he said he felt that we need him to come and start some psychology programme and so on. He contacted me, asked me out for lunch, and I said yes, and then the semi-offer was kind of made over lunch. At that time, I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no either. I was saying let me think about it. To be very honest, I went back to my office, went back to normal and didn’t think much about it for one year. Why? Because I was actually on the tail end of completing a longitudinal study at NUS then, trying to look at the effectiveness of a scholars’ program. Obviously, it would be unethical to leave when you are still in the middle of study. So it didn’t occur to my mind that I should leave then. When the study was over and it was time to think about my next phase; that was when I had the connection again with Chin Tiong, with SMU. That was a year later after that lunch. And then I got bit interested to be part of something new, then came for the job interview, that was at the old campus at Bukit Timah, somewhere around early 2005 I think. I got the job offer and started with SMU in 2005, July, which was exactly the same time that the Bras Basah campus started functioning.
We decided that we’re going to offer a bachelor of social science degree. I think maybe within one year, we were preparing that already. And we did this in a somewhat unusual way because this degree was being designed within a management university. So right from the beginning this is social sciences with a link up with business and management, and the kind of students that you would like to develop should have that kind of interest.
When I looked at the different programmes in the world that would deliver this kind of unusual synergy, it was Oxford’s PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics] programme that fascinated me, where there was an effort to do an interdisciplinary, but within—well, the PPE is a Philosophy, Politics and Economics and that became the best training ground for civil servants in the UK. But the approach of really merging these three disciplines into a very powerful kind of training was what I tried to emulate in the BSocSci [Bachelor of Social Science] curriculum. But instead of the three traditional PPE disciplines, it was psychology, political science and sociology. Economics was already going to be covered already because introductory economics and so on were already there. So the PPE programme at Oxford does philosophy, political science and economics, but for our purpose, for our degree, we again introduced an innovation and said ok, we’ll do, psychology, political science and sociology as the areas that BSocSci programme would get into.
In addition to Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania turns out to have a flourishing PPE programme and some of the members of the advisory board that I put together were very familiar with the PPE programme that was taking place at Penn. And in this [social sciences] board we had someone from psychology, Vivian Seltzer, a professor of psychology; professor of political science and associate dean of arts and science, Jack Nagel; Herb Smith, another associate dean represents sociology; and the fourth member of the advisory board is no less than the dean of arts and sciences at that time, Sam Preston, and later Barbara Bushnell [should be Rebecca Bushnell]. These were the advisory board members that provided external guidance on how to develop this curriculum. I also enlisted their help in recruiting faculty, identifying people who would be interested in coming.
Well, when I first joined, it wasn’t a School of Social Sciences. It was School of Economics and Social Sciences. And actually it was predominantly economics, the faculty were like, I think, there were like 30 over, maybe 40 over economists and like two or three social scientists. Well, economics is part of social sciences in the broader sense of the word. But the way we use it here was that social sciences is, whatever in social sciences that is not economics, and the university at that time, before I came, had already decided to develop majors in psychology, sociology and political science. So at that time, social sciences composed of these three disciplines, and economics was separate. It was very obvious at that time, the Dean was Bobby Mariano, of course Chin Tiong was the Provost and I did realize after I said yes to come to SMU was that their plan was for me to come and help set up the social science aspect of it. At that time, of course I believe the understanding was still within the school, with a possibility that if things work out, it might become two schools and so on. Nothing was said to me at that time but very soon after I started, Bobby, the dean actually asked me, and said “Could you be the associate dean?” At first I said no, and the reason was that, well, I wouldn’t want to join the school on the first day and become the associate dean, because being the associate dean is not about your academic knowledge but about the understanding of the administration and so on. And there are senior people around and I believe the school can definitely function without an associate dean in social sciences for one term at least. So I said no at least for the first term and I think it was only in the second term and maybe even towards the end of the first year, that I agreed to take up the job because it becomes quite obvious that at that time, my inputs were being sought and I needed to give inputs and having the associate dean, or agreeing to do the associate dean, was actually helpful because you can actually be in a legitimate position to get certain things going. So then I became their associate dean that lasted for a year, and for various reasons, the SMU leadership decided to form two schools out of the one school and so then we had School of Economics and School of Social Sciences and naturally I was then the associate dean and so I became the interim dean of the school of social sciences for a year, and subsequently we did an international search and had a new dean from overseas came and took over and I went on to become the vice provost in the university and headed the office of research and also took care of the post-graduate research programmes for about a year or so, maybe a year or two, and then I became the Deputy Provost also a year later.
I think if you look at cohesion in a very large board sense, you need to first understand differences. Cohesion comes about or the necessity for cohesion comes about only because of differences. In other words, because there are differences, then there is a need for cohesion, if everybody thinks the same, act the same, has the same view point, cohesion is not relevant. Because we have differences and together with differences, there would be disagreements. The issue then becomes how do we manage those. And traditionally, we think in terms of race and religion in Singapore, and the government is very careful because of our history of racial riots, to make sure that the races and religion respect each other, that no one should dominate, and that is a secular state, and that when things happen, the state will step in and try to arbitrate and make sure that everything sort of goes well. That has been the model, and it has worked very very well if you compare our country’s social and religious harmony with everybody else in the world. However, there are new emergent group differences, such as differences between people having very different strong beliefs, say there will be a group that is for capital punishment and another group that is against. Of course your traditional ones, which is not really an issue in Singapore, but people who so call believe that abortion is okay and others who believe that abortion is not okay. Those words are extremely loaded isn’t it? I mean, pro-life and pro-choice. I mean how can you not be pro-choice and how can you not be pro-life. And the problem with such dichotomies is that it tells us, they suggest to us that they’re opposites and you can never maximize their respective goals together, which is something that I do not believe in. I believe that life is not a balance, it’s not that when one view goes up, the other view must go down. In other words, it calls for a compromise all the time. I think that many differences are due to either misunderstanding, or the failure to realize that there are also other important issues that we both care about and agree on. And so my approach to this is that cohesion need to understand that differences are not bad things. If we don’t have differences, as one of my article goes, titled “we are in trouble”, it means we all think alike and we could all be happily wrong together. So you need to allow to have differences, the question then is how to manage them, and also how to look at the differences, from which you emerge something that is better than each of the respective views. And that gives an example of LGBT versus certain religious conservative views, that LGBT is just morally wrong. Now those are differences which are going to clash inherently because they are moral views, and you don’t expect one side to change the other side. What do you do? Now in those instances, do you fight? Do you go all the way and try to stop the others from their beliefs and activities? Now if you do that, we will all be sort of in trouble together. My approach is for people who are advocating LGBT and people who are advocating against it, to ask yourself, are there something else about our identities beyond our sexual orientations or our sexual orientation beliefs, and the question has to be yes. If for example, you and I are Singaporeans, it doesn’t matter whether one is gay and the other is not or one advocates and one is anti. The question is that surely we can function harmoniously, solve problems together, despite this particular difference that we cannot work about. And that’s where psychology and social science research comes in. We realize that we all have different social identities, could you activate certain identities such as citizenship, such as respect for human dignity, respect for social harmony, that these beliefs can be activated in addition to your moral beliefs about LGBT whether you’re for or against. I think that’s where science can help and that’s where SMU and other institutions try to promote or enhance diversity, especially when it enters into so-called morality issues like LGBT, one needs to be a bit careful. The question is not should you talk or not talk about LGBT. My position is a bit different from the government. The government’s position is that we do not rock the boat in some sense because we go along with what the social values think about. My position is that at some point, you do need to talk. When do you talk and not talk about an issue, be it LGBT or otherwise, it should be guided by our beliefs in certain common values. If we believe in social harmony and respect for human dignity, and we probably do, why can’t we let these two values guide us when to talk and not to talk? When it becomes very clear that the debate is threatening our social harmony, perhaps it’s time to take a pause. But when it becomes clear that one particular groups’ dignity is being threatened, being discriminated, our value for respect for human dignity needs to come to the fore and therefore we need to talk, such as meritocracy or fairness being threatened, we need to talk because those are our core values. And so my position is not, not to talk, but when to talk.
Well, I was appointed as a member of the National Council on Problem Gambling. And as a member, I chair a subcommittee on research. But at the same time, I was actually co-chairing the international advisory panel, that advises both the Cas well as another initiative which is the National Addiction Management Service that belongs to the health area where of course gambling is one of the several other addiction possibilities such as alcohol or substance abuse. Our Council has statutory powers; it is part of the Casino Regulatory Act. So we started before the government decided to have the casino and as we all know at that time, when the casino started, it was a big social issue. There were debates about it, the population was split sort of in the middle of for and against having casinos in Singapore. Of course, it’s done deal now, and it has been for several years, and our primary aim at that time was to ensure that, to address not gambling per se but issues of problem gambling. And we were amoral about the issue of gambling, so we do not say that gambling is good or bad, but we say that gambling can lead to problem gambling and you need to address problem gambling. Now how does that relate to research at SMU? At that time, the Council we have about 18-20 people, I was the only academic on it, and research was very important when we first started. It’s still important now because you need to know what’s going on in the Singapore context. There were not much, in fact, there may not be any systematic research on problem gambling in Singapore. And gambling behaviours are affected by of course your social cultural context. So research was very important and again immediately, as I said earlier, that you’re able to apply your technical knowledge and research skills into the real world. It becomes very real. That was something quite separate from the university and we did not actually work together. I was doing it in my individual capacity as a professional, so called “national service”. But several years ago, there was already when I was doing problem gambling for some time, the MSF, Ministry of Social and Family Development, actually approached me as the Director of the Behavioural Sciences Institute to ask whether our institute could do a piece of research with the ministry on problem gambling. And we talked, I talked to the President about it, we decided yes, and so we then worked on a few years long programme of research on gambling. And so we got actually, I have actually seven researchers, seven faculty members working with me on that.
Well, in quite a number of developed countries, you have a social sciences research council or its equivalent by whatever name you call it, where they specifically not only do funding of research grants, giving out research grants, but chart the directions of areas where the nations should invest their resources in. Social research and social sciences research is very broad, they would include your political science, sociology, psychology and so on. As way back as about 15-20 years ago, when I first came back, soon after I came back from my PhD, I came back in 1998 with my PhD, I felt it was very important for us to set up a social sciences research council. I am very sure I was not the only one who thought that. But it dawned upon me the importance of it, especially many things about social behavioural, and we need to complement the STEM, the Science, the Technology, the Engineering, and Mathematics part of it, we use STEM for short. And so there was a situation where I, after I joined SMU, that’s more than 10 years ago right, there was, if you recall an Economics Strategy Committee, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Tharman, [Tharman Shanmugaratnam], and they did organize a session, where they invited the representatives from then the three universities to share their views about economic strategies of the nation. And in the audience were of course senior civil servants, but there were about half the cabinet ministers, half the ministers in the cabinet were there, including the DPM himself. And I happen to represent SMU to convey our report. Among the many things that we said, there was one bullet point which I smuggled in, and say that we must set up a social sciences research council, so at least for sure we know that that got some attention, because the civil servants did feedback to me to say that, yes there was a possibility that they were looking at it. But I am sure many people would have given the government that idea, and I am not the only one and probably not the first one. And then there was IAAP [International Academic Advisory Panel], the universities are being advised by the International Academic Advisory Panel, and we understood from the media that several years ago, when they came, the government and the panel also discussed a possibility of setting up the council. Then the ideas at least went public and said that it seems like a good idea, we should set it up. From that announcement, which was about probably two, three years ago, until recently, about half a year ago, the decision was made then to set up the council. I’m fortunate, together with Lily Kong, our provost, to be part of this 15-18 members of the council.
Yes. If you recall, the decision to join SMU was exciting, not to take risk, but to be part of something new and that was really what it was, because I had to start a new school. The decision to have two schools was made in as far as we can tell, in a relatively short time. So once the decision was made and announced, basically the school will be on your own and you had to get things going. It was interesting. There were two things. One, you want to make sure that the existing students are taken care of, that the transition is smooth. At the same time, the school is attractive enough for people to want to join you, both the faculty members, as well as the students. So first, you need to make sure that you’re building the house in place, get your pillars, you know, okay. And that wasn’t too difficult for me, fortunately, because of my work experience, both in NUS and in the police. It was not too difficult to know what needs to be done. It was hard work but it wasn’t like, okay, I have a problem, how do I actually solve this new problem. So like any startup of a new university, it was not difficult but it was hard work. What was interesting was to make sure you balance the socio-political aspects of starting a new school because we are still in the same building with the School of Economics, they at the 5th floor and we were at the 4th floor, then questions will naturally arrive about the sharing of facilities, and things like that. Fortunately, the SMU leadership was very supportive of the new school. We had very good, a small but very good administrative staff to help me and together we basically put together schemes, school policies, handbooks, recruitment. I still remember that within the year that I was the interim dean, I attended each and every job talk of a faculty member, and we hired 12 members, 12 new faculty members within a year, which was kind of record breaking. But before we hired each, for each one we hired, we had at least four to five people that we interview, so you can imagine the number of job talks that we were all enjoying sitting through them.
