According to the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Yale and National U. of Singapore Hammer Out Details of New Curriculum", 25 June 2012), Yale University and the National University of Singapore have announced a new experiment in intercontinental academic collaboration: the creation of a liberal arts college to be called Yale-NUS College. The new college, which has been in the planning stages for several years, will be located in Singapore and will open its doors to its first undergraduate class in Fall 2013. Among the faculty waiting for them will be Reedie Jeremy Kua '96.
Jeremy sees the Yale-NUS venture as a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new educational experiment while moving closer to his home in Malaysia. To do this, he will take a leave of absence from his current institution, the University of San Diego, where he is a tenured associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and will start teaching at Yale-NUS College in January 2013.
The structure of higher education in Asian countries has tended to be more rigid than that in the US. As Jeremy told the Chronicle in a companion article ("Sharing an Addiction to Learning", 25 June 2012), the academic shift from Malaysia to Reed "was a bit of a culture shock, but in a good way." He added, "it didn't take me long to realize that I liked this education system," and credited his Reed professors for sharing their enthusiasm for learning.
Now he hopes to bring this same zest for open-ended inquiry to students on his home continent and he is already thinking about the larger impact this might have. As he wrote to me, [Yale-NUS College] "could be a model for future liberal arts colleges in Asia." It's hard to imagine a better person to bridge these two worlds than Jeremy. Good luck!
