Education Crossing Borders: How Singapore and MIT Created a New University

Education Crossing Borders

Education Crossing Borders

How Singapore and MIT Created a New University

Dara R. Fisher

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fisher, Dara R., author.

Title: Education crossing borders : how Singapore and MIT created a new

university / Dara R. Fisher.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019040780 | ISBN 9780262539036 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Singapore University of Technology and Design—History. |

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. | University

cooperation—Singapore. | University cooperation—United States. |

Education, Higher—International cooperation. | Transnational

education—Singapore. | Education and globalization—Singapore. |

Universities and colleges—Singapore.

Classification: LCC LB2331.5 .F57 2020 | DDC 378.5957—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040780

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

To all my friends

in the Little Red Dot

Contents

Cast of Characters

Introduction

Part I Framing—Establishing the Partnership and a Vision for the University in the East

1 The Fourth University

2 Beyond 02139—MIT and the World

3 Arriving at a Conceptual Design

Part II Founding—Recruiting and Socializing the SUTD Pioneers

4 The SUTD Pioneers

5 Getting to 11:1—Building a Faculty and Research Agenda

6 Finding the Risk Takers—Campus Building and the Pioneer Batch

Part III Formation—Realizing and Localizing the SUTD Vision

7 Fighting the Paper Chase—Developing SUTD’s Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Academic Culture

8 Stay Up ’til Dawn—Creating the SUTDent Culture

9 Its Campus Will Be in Changi—Building and Managing a Cross-Border University

Part IV Fracture—Establishing SUTD’s Identity Independent of MIT

10 SUTD on Its Own—Ending the Educational Collaboration with MIT

11 Building a Cross-Border University—Implications for Scholarship and Practice

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Cast of Characters

The list below contains the names of the individual characters I describe in this book. As I explain in the introduction, I changed the names of these individuals—and concealed details that would reveal their identities to the greatest possible extent—except in cases where the individuals were either known public figures or provided explicit permission to use their names (in both cases I note their names with an asterisk). I have omitted dates of service for some of these individuals to further protect their confidentiality.

MIT Faculty, Staff, and Students

Dr. Thomas Tom Magnanti*

MIT Institute Professor

SUTD President, 2010–2017

SUTD President Emeritus, 2017–

Dr. Robert O’Malley

MIT Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Cluster Lead (Sophomore Cluster), MIT-SUTD Collaboration

Dr. Arjun Bhat

MIT Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

MIT-SUTD Collaboration Director, 2010–2013

Dr. Arthur Foster

MIT Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Cluster Lead (Freshman Cluster), MIT-SUTD Collaboration

MIT-SUTD Collaboration Director, 2013–

Dr. Luis Sosa

MIT Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

IDC Co-director, 2011–2014

Dr. Jack Powell

MIT Professor, Department of Biology

Dr. Joyce Williams

MIT Professor, Department of Chemistry

Brian Zhang

Master’s Student, MIT Technology and Policy Program

Research Assistant, SUTD-MIT International Design Centre

SUTD Trustees, Faculty, and Staff

Philip Ng*

Chairman, New University Steering Committee, 2008–2009

Founding Chairman, SUTD Board of Trustees, 2009–2016

Dr. Chong Tow Chong*

SUTD Provost, 2010–2017

SUTD Acting President, 2017–2018

SUTD President, 2018–

Dr. Pey Kin Leong*

SUTD Associate Provost for Education, 2010–2017

SUTD Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies and SUTD Academy, 2017–

Dr. Andrew Meyer

Pillar Head, Engineering Product Development, 2010–2017

Co-director, SUTD-MIT International Design Centre, 2010–

SUTD Associate Provost for Graduate Studies, 2018–

Dr. Frank Jacoby

Pillar Head, Engineering Systems and Design, 2016–

Dr. Peter Eide

Cluster Head, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, 2014/15–2016

Ang Chok Tong

Senior Director, Office of Campus Infrastructure & Facilities, 2009–2018

Corinna Choong*

Senior Director, Marketing and Communications, 2009–

Marjorie Patel

University Librarian, 2011–

Dr. Carsten Hopfeller

Assistant Professor, Engineering Product Development

Dr. Elena Lipohar

Assistant Professor, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Loke Jia Hao

Professor, Architecture and Sustainable Design

SUTD Students and Alumni

Shafiq Abdul Rahman

SUTD Pioneer, Class of 2015 (EPD)

House Guardian

Rachel Chua

SUTD Pioneer, Class of 2015 (ISTD)

Jacob Lim

SUTD Pioneer, Class of 2015 (ASD)

Campus Builder

Yap Jun Kai

SUTD Pioneer, Class of 2015 (EPD)

Campus Builder

Introduction

Universities are singular institutions. They have common historical roots, yet are deeply embedded in their societies.

—Philip Altbach¹

At 9:10 a.m. on the third Friday of term, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Joyce Williams gazes across her largely empty classroom, currently occupied by 19 of the 52 students she expects for her 9:00 a.m. freshman chemistry-biology class session. After a final scan of the many empty chairs in front of her, Joyce calls to her co-instructors at the back of the classroom, asking if they’re ready to begin class despite the morning’s poor attendance. Acknowledging their supportive nods from the back of the room, Joyce launches into her prepared slides at a frenetic pace, whipping through an overview of DNA structures in preparation for the first exam the following week. At points, when her delivery clearly outpaces their comprehension, a few students timidly raise their hands, asking her to clarify or rephrase the key concepts.

As she lectures, Joyce paces around the large classroom, which is filled with small clusters of tables and chairs designed to enable the MIT-designed pedagogical approach called Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL). White boards and projection screens line the walls and every piece of furniture is on wheels, allowing students the flexibility to form groups in which they can tackle in-lecture problems or larger lab activities. At this early hour, the room is scattered with the remnants of the previous day’s classes: worksheets and school-branded sweatshirts litter the large tables, and a small 3-D printer hums in the back of the classroom, producing a black shell-like prototype for a student’s class project.

Over the next hour, sleepy students walk one by one through the classroom’s back door, taking their places at the tables, opening their laptops to the week’s slides, and logging in on their computers or smartphones to Learning Catalytics (LC), an MIT-designed real-time assessment system, through which they submit answers to the many competency-check questions Joyce asks during lecture. By 10:30 a.m., 45 users have logged in to LC. Now, at near-full attendance, the class breaks for a hands-on lab activity, in which small groups of students use chemical processes to extract DNA from fruits, filling out worksheets as they progress through the exercise step by step.

Although Joyce delivers the class material as if she’s presented it this way for years, this still largely experimental course is being taught only for the second time. It is the brainchild of one of Joyce’s MIT colleagues—the result of a faculty initiative to rethink chemistry and biology education by integrating interconnected content from two freshman core classes into a cohesive whole, rather than by teaching related concepts within the two distinct subjects. As such, the course’s teaching team is still in the process of perfecting that balance: one of Joyce’s co-instructors quietly shares with me during a break in the lecture that last year’s first-year students struggled to make deep connections between some of the biology and chemistry content; this year she hopes that adjusting the course syllabus will correct that problem. Regardless of the broader outcomes of the course, today’s class has clearly been a success. As the session wraps up just before noon, small groups of students excitedly show me Ziploc bags and test tubes filled with mucus-like DNA extracted from bananas and strawberries, handing Joyce their completed worksheets as they walk out the door to grab lunch at the campus cafeteria.

This course—designed and delivered by MIT faculty, using MIT technologies and the MIT-developed pedagogical approach—is in many ways quintessential of MIT, an institution that prides itself on boundary breaking and innovation in both research and education. But perhaps the most boundary-breaking aspect of this introductory chemistry-biology course is that Joyce Williams is not teaching it at MIT; rather, she is teaching at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), a small start-up university 10,000 miles from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Joyce Williams’s freshman chemistry-biology class is but one small component of an almost decade-long collaboration involving MIT in Cambridge, the university in Singapore that would eventually become SUTD, and the Singapore Ministry of Education. In Education Crossing Borders I chronicle this collaboration as a whole—from its roots in the Singapore Government² as early as 2007 until late 2017—to examine how MIT’s institutional identity, educational practices, and administrative processes were communicated and transferred to SUTD, and how actors in Singapore localized and contextualized these ideas from MIT to better fit the Singaporean educational and cultural context. In this introduction, I situate my study in existing theories from the fields of cross-border higher education and organizational behavior, describe my research methods and my role and positionality in conducting this project, and provide a blueprint for the structure of this book.

MIT has a broad history of international educational engagement beginning well before the SUTD partnership, as I describe in chapter 2, but it was by no means the first institution to create educational offerings or collaborations overseas. In the early 1930s, Florida State University (FSU) began to offer its educational programs to American military and civilian personnel living in the American-controlled Panama Canal Zone (PCZ), the first known offering of an American higher education program at a location outside of the United States.³ In the near century since FSU reached the PCZ, cross-border higher education (CBHE) offerings have expanded and diversified to a remarkable extent, mirroring the trend of globalization in other areas such as economics and telecommunications, and in the field of higher education more broadly.⁴ Today, top universities both within and outside of the United States seek to outpace one another’s drive toward internationalization, seeing which institutions can recruit the best foreign talent, provide the greatest diversity of overseas opportunities for undergraduate students, or stake university crest-bearing flags of research or public service around the world.⁵ Furthermore, CBHE endeavors often prove extremely lucrative for universities as they engage in overseas contexts, bolstering university coffers in an era of decreasing public funding for higher education and research, particularly in the United States. It has been reported, for example, that New York University (NYU) received an initial gift of $50 million from the government of Abu Dhabi to begin talks to create a branch campus in the United Arab Emirates, in addition to the funding it received to actually construct and operate this institution after an agreement to do so had been reached.⁶

Although CBHE may take a variety of forms, perhaps the most visible—and costly—manifestation of this trend is the development of new cross-border academic institutions, either operating as international branch campuses (IBCs) of a home institution or as independent, degree-granting institutions themselves.⁷ The earliest development of American IBCs dates back to the 1950s, when Johns Hopkins University opened an outpost of its School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, a campus still in operation today.⁸ Although a few universities developed and maintained IBCs and cross-border institutions in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the first major wave of American IBC development occurred in Japan during the 1980s, when American universities sought to leverage opportunities to expand into the world’s then-fastest growing economy.⁹ In the 1990s, the number of IBCs experienced tremendous growth, as French, Australian, Mexican, Chilean, Irish, Canadian, Italian, British, and Swedish higher education institutions began to export their campuses abroad.¹⁰ This trend in growth has continued in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and as of 2011 more than 183 IBCs were in operation worldwide.¹¹

Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education institutions have also supported development of new, independent colleges and universities, not just IBCs, outside of their national borders. In these cases of large-scale CBHE engagement, a college or university in one country helps a foreign government—or another nongovernmental entity—create a new, degree-granting institution in another country. One of the earliest examples of this phenomenon comes from the 1950s and 1960s, when MIT collaborated with the US Department of State to create new higher education institutions in India and Iran.¹² Today, perhaps the best-known developer of cross-border institutions is NYU. Aside from developing two independent, degree-granting portal campuses—one in Abu Dhabi (mentioned earlier) and one in Shanghai—NYU has plans for the future development of portal institutions in Europe.¹³ Given that these independent institutions don’t always bear the names of their collaborative founders as they do in the NYU case, this type of large-scale CBHE is often less visible than the development of IBCs; nevertheless, their impact is also substantial.¹⁴

Traditional theories of the globalization of higher education paint Western colleges and universities engaging in these large-scale CBHE projects as dominant, imperialist actors levying Western educational ideals upon their foreign collaborators, who stand at the periphery of the global cultural space.¹⁵ Under this center-periphery model, Western institutions sit at the hub of the global higher education marketplace, imposing their values, ideas, and scholarship on less influential countries in a form of educational neocolonialism.¹⁶ In this system, institutions in the countries at the periphery act as consumers of knowledge delivered by the central actors without consideration of the otherness of uniquely local ideas, approaches, and methodologies.¹⁷ Furthermore, this model reinforces a sense of inferiority in the communities at the periphery, which feel the necessity and obligation to acknowledge the standards—moral, cultural, intellectual and political of the central actors in lieu of their own.¹⁸

In recent years, however, scholars have developed numerous critiques of the center-periphery model. As a result, theoretical—and practical—discussions of CBHE have experienced a shift away from this rhetoric to a post-structural understanding of the processes of and motivations for CBHE partnerships.¹⁹ Given this new understanding—which emphasizes difference rather than the hegemony of the Western approach to education—CBHE scholars posit that local actors have individual agency to interpret and modify the Western educational model to fit their local context.²⁰ Furthermore, under this perspective the faculty, staff, and students at an IBC or cross-border institution have agency to actively respond to the homogenizing pressures of globalization, creating a bridge between the norms of the global system and local needs, traditions, and understandings.²¹ In doing so, these actors then, in turn, help to create a unique culture at the IBC or cross-border institution spanning both the global and the local by adapting foreign educational systems and norms to the local context.²² The anthropologist and global economic theorist Arjun Appadurai refers to this process as indigenization.²³ In CBHE contexts, incorporating indigenization into theoretical frameworks not only provides local actors with agency within the IBC or cross-border college or university, but also draws focus to how these individuals can create campus cultures and structures compatible with local customs and norms.²⁴

Although indigenization has been theorized in existing conceptual higher education literature, limited in-depth empirical work has been conducted to examine this phenomenon in practice. Sociologists and organizational theorists, however, have researched and theorized on these processes for many years, albeit in organizations outside of the higher education space. For example, in her book Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan, D. Eleanor Westney describes how Japanese actors localized and modified Western organizational models for policing, postal systems, and newspapers as they imported these institutions into Meiji Japan:

Where cross-societal organizational emulation is concerned, the distinctions between copying and inventing, between imitation and innovation, are false dichotomies: the successful imitation of foreign organizational patterns requires innovation. All organizations must draw on the surrounding environment for resources and must respond to the external demands for their products or services. Since the environment in which the organizational model was anchored in its original setting will inevitably differ from one to which it is transplanted, even the most assiduous emulation will result in alterations of the original patterns to adjust them to their new context, and changes in the environment to make it a more favorable setting for the emerging organization.²⁵

Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell’s seminal work on institutional isomorphism in organizational fields similarly supports the idea of indigenization and localization processes in cross-border higher education. The isomorphic mechanisms posited by these scholars—wherein institutions tend toward similarity due to the pressures of their environments—would theoretically serve to drive CBHE institutions toward the institutional norms of the local higher education system.²⁶ Thus, theoretical justification for the existence of these processes similarly exists in the organizational and sociological literature, further supporting the rationale for empirical work in this realm.

In writing Education Crossing Borders I set out to illuminate these processes of localization and indigenization in cross-border higher education through a deep examination of a cross-border partnership between MIT and the Singapore Ministry of Education to create SUTD, the university I describe in the opening pages of this book. To this end, I address the following multilayered research question: During the creation of a new cross-border higher education institution, how are the culture and identity of the sending institution (a) communicated to and adopted at the new cross-border institution, and (b) adapted to fit the local cultural and educational context? By illuminating these processes, I aim to contribute to theoretical understanding of localization and indigenization in the realm of CBHE as well as to inform good practice in global higher education moving forward.

Given the scope and nature of my research question, I turned to the qualitative research method of organizational ethnography and used the research strategies of this method to study the MIT-SUTD Collaboration.²⁷ Over a 20-month period—from January 2016 to August 2017—I worked, observed, and at times lived on the MIT and SUTD campuses, attending and participating in classes, meetings, campus gatherings, coffee dates, and any other event to which I could wrangle an invitation. The episodes and environments described in these pages are drawn from my field notes documenting these observations and informal conversations, as well as from 95 formal research interviews conducted with 89 stakeholders across the two universities (see table 0.1). In addition, I also collected numerous documents pertaining to the collaboration and the development of SUTD, including planning documents, press coverage, syllabi, student work, and advertising materials, among many others—in time, these archival materials guided my work as it shifted away from traditional ethnography and toward the discipline of social history, a process I describe in the paragraphs below. All of these varying data sources contributed to and are represented within the final narrative presented here.Table 0.1

MIT and SUTD Stakeholders Participating in Formal Research Interviews

Note: Of the MIT stakeholder interviews, data from a previous research study were incorporated for 8 interviewees (5 faculty, 2 senior administrators, and 1 staff member); in addition, 2 of these individuals were also re-interviewed for this project (see Dara R. Fisher, Faculty Experience in Cross-Border Higher Education Projects, qualifying paper for PhD, Harvard University, 2015).

*Those listed as Senior Administrators held titles such as President, Vice President, Provost, or Associate Provost or served as the head of departments or academic units (designated as Senior Management at SUTD).

**Two individuals designated as SUTD Faculty were in fact former faculty when interviewed, having moved on from SUTD to positions at other universities.

In the story of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, there are numerous characters—faculty, staff members, and students—who played important roles in shaping SUTD as the university it would ultimately become. In this book I include a subset of these characters, most of whom have been assigned a pseudonym (see the Cast of Characters that precedes this introduction for a full list of these names), with the exception of several well-known public figures (given that their identities could be easily determined by even the most casual of internet searchers) and individuals who requested that I use their real names in this work.²⁸ As stakeholders familiar with SUTD would likely recognize descriptions of many of the individuals closely involved with the project (not all of whom participated in formal research interviews), in some cases I have also developed composite characters, each comprising several individuals with similar roles within MIT or SUTD. In all cases when direct quotes are attributed to individuals who appear in this book, these characters are composites: I use this strategy in an effort to protect the identities of those who participated in formal interviews for this study, per my approval conditions set by the Harvard and SUTD Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). In addition, the SUTD IRB also required that I provide my interviewees with the option to have neither their role nor their institution identified in this work—in these cases, the individual is referred to as an affiliate. In some cases, I have also lightly edited quotes from my field notes, either for clarity or to remove any identifying information that may have compromised the confidentiality of my informants.²⁹ Finally, I must note that not all individuals who contributed to the founding of SUTD appear in this manuscript, as practical considerations in constructing a logical narrative limited the extent to which I could mention or describe all individuals important to this project, particularly in the case of SUTD’s early students.

As with any qualitative research, throughout the processes of data collection, data analysis, and manuscript writing, I confronted my role and perspective in both the environments in which I performed observations and within the MIT-SUTD Collaboration as a whole. Although no qualitative research can be considered fully objective, in the case of this project I negotiated my own insider and outsider affiliations and relationships on a daily basis, as my interest in conducting this project originally stemmed from my own experiences working as a staff member of the MIT-SUTD Collaboration for various periods from 2012 to 2016. My history with the collaboration—which I describe at length in the author’s note at the end of this book—shaped how I collected and interpreted the data gathered for this project. And, while I constructed the narrative presented here with input and feedback from many stakeholders to ensure its validity to those who participated in the creation of SUTD, it is still fundamentally shaped by my own individual lens. In an effort to communicate this perspective I have sought to place myself as a character within the book, leveraging the reflexive memos I created as a component of my field notes to situate the role of my perspective in framing the narrative I present here. Furthermore, although I made the decision not to serve as a judge or assessor of what I observed during my data collection—aiming instead to represent the experiences of the SUTD and MIT communities as they were shared in my interviews and observations—I have included a set of key takeaways from my research in chapter 11, which might be of particular interest to practitioners of CBHE.

Finally, departing from the technique used in many organizational ethnographies, the story of the development of SUTD cannot be told entirely in the present; rather, as my data collection progressed I discovered that one must go back to 2007—two years before the agreement to develop SUTD was signed by MIT and the Singapore Ministry of Education—to understand how the Singaporean context modified MIT’s approach to undergraduate education as it was transferred across international boundaries. Thus, during my period of fieldwork this project evolved from a pure organizational ethnography to a blended social history, as I developed the early chapters of this book primarily through document analysis and retrospective interviews with stakeholders familiar with that period of SUTD’s development. When possible, I triangulated interviewees’ recollections with archival documents and press coverage. But this type of formal documentation was not always available, and in some cases the narrative presented here relies solely on recollections of my informants.

I have organized this book in four parts that correspond to the stages and processes of development of SUTD. Developed through emic analysis of my data informed by literature on organizational behavior, these parts chronicle SUTD’s history from its original conception to the time of this writing—and also look toward the future.

In part I, Framing, I examine how the priorities of the Singapore Government and the stakeholders at MIT combined to create a plan for Singapore’s fourth university, which would ultimately become SUTD. In the chapters in this section, I discuss not only how Singapore’s and MIT’s complex—and at times divergent—histories, values, and interests shaped the vision for SUTD, but also the rationale of both parties to engage in such a partnership. Ending with the signing of the official agreement between MIT and the Singapore Ministry of Education, I examine decision-making as it occurred in both Singapore and the United States to illuminate how Singaporean and American values and perspectives framed the institutional plan for the university SUTD would become.

Next, in part II, Founding, I turn to the individuals who lived and worked at SUTD in its first years, from 2009 (when the first SUTD staff members were hired by the Ministry of Education) to 2012 (when the first class of undergraduate students matriculated at the institution). Founders play an integral role in the formation of organizational culture, often leaving such a strong legacy that their impacts on organizational culture may prove unchangeable over time.³⁰ In this section I profile the faculty, staff, and students who belonged to the SUTD community during the institution’s inception, exploring how these individuals were brought to SUTD and how they sought to shape the new university, further localizing the SUTD to fit the Singaporean context in ways that were sometimes at odds with the vision of their counterparts at MIT.

In part III, Formation, I offer three examples of how localization and indigenization processes occurred as Singaporean actors modified the MIT approach to better fit the particularities of the Singaporean context. The three aspects of the university I describe in this section’s three chapters—curriculum and pedagogy, student life and culture, and the design and operation of SUTD’s physical campus—illustrate how localization occurred at SUTD differently depending on the extent to which MIT planners prioritized a particular aspect of developing the campus. In high priority areas such as the technical curriculum and the school’s pedagogical approach, MIT faculty provided a hands-on, collaborative role, as local actors modified and adapted practices; in contrast, in low priority areas such as the development of the physical campus, MIT actors left decision-making to their Singaporean colleagues, only attempting to modify practices after it became clear that they were misaligned with the values of MIT.

Finally, in part IV, Fracture, I examine how SUTD aimed to build legitimacy within the Singaporean institutional context as it concluded its formal partnerships with—and reliance on—MIT. As SUTD moved forward without the full weight of its prestigious international partner—as well as without many of its founding intellectual leaders—the university faced the reality of developing an independent identity within the Singaporean higher education ecosystem, competing with far more established institutions in the fight for undergraduate enrollees. Part IV concludes with a chapter in which I provide key takeaways to be learned from the case of the MIT-SUTD Collaboration, and comment as well on the scope and potential impact of this work on the field of cross-border higher education.

I Framing—Establishing the Partnership and a Vision for the University in the East

1 The Fourth University

Singapore has adopted an approach of growing our university sector in tandem with and meeting the needs