Yale-NUS is closing down. No students were consulted about this decision. With this dissolution comes the loss of a unique campus culture. It is not about being “snowflakes”. It is natural to feel unfair and be against your school’s closure.
Furthermore, this is a huge disservice to their newest batch of students. What’s the point of forming a new club, if you’ll never have new juniors join it? As these last 4 years tick down, batches graduate and seniors leave. Professors see the writing on the wall and move away while there’s still time. Finally, they will be the only ones left, having seen their college community die out.
If NUS and NTU merged on the same basis of promoting so-called “interdisciplinary learning”, many students and alumni would also be pissed off. After all, they spent many formative years there, making memories and doing activities that they hope will make an impact in the future. But this is a step further. Imagine tomorrow, NTU announces that it’s no longer taking any students. Its buildings will be taken over by NUS. Its curriculum will be redesigned, all the clubs they have with so much heritage and history will be absorbed by NUS. This would be an utter betrayal.
Beyond that, when Yale-NUS is advertised to students, a big narrative that they sell is that it’s a young and energetic campus community. This is what the students signed up for, not to have the rug pulled under them at the first instance. They worked hard to build communities, poured in efforts to create something significant that will outlast them, and in an instant it all comes crumbling down.
In total, Yale-NUS will have 9 graduated batches. That’s all. Less than 2500 people will have ever studied there. You’ll never get to go back to campus to give a talk, or see the new batch of EXCO running your clubs, taking it in directions you would have never expected. Everywhere else will move on, but Yale-NUS students will never get the opportunity to see their community grow in all the ways they hoped it would.
Make no mistake, Yale-NUS will never exist in a similar capacity ever again. Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates who passed through the college know about what an impact it has made on their lives. People find friends, opportunities, and love in these places. They want to continue telling their stories. But who will care when the college becomes history? Who will remember them?
