While some lauded Yale-NUS as a groundbreaking endeavor, many members of the Yale community expressed deep concerns that the liberal arts would be compromised on a campus overseen by a regime which severely limits freedom of speech and even criminalizes homosexuality.

Proponents of Yale-NUS are quick to note that Yale’s agreement with Singapore includes strict guarantees for free speech within the confines of the campus. But opponents insist that an environment of censorship off-campus is antithetical to the principles of liberal arts education.

In recent months, critics within the Yale faculty have gained support. In April—more than a year after the formal announcement of the project—Yale College faculty passed a controversial resolution expressing concern over the “history of a lack of respect for civil and political rights” in Singapore and urged that liberal arts values “not be compromised.”

Because the campus is a project of the Yale Corporation, it never required faculty consent, which surprised and upset some professors.

“The problem is that the places these universities have been going—the wealthy, undemocratic societies that are able to foot the bills—bring compromises as well as possibilities,” said Yale professor Christopher L. Miller. “Our name should not be sold without our consent.”

However, sociology professor Deborah S. Davis, who is co-chair of the Faculty Search Committee for the Social Sciences of Yale-NUS, emphasized that Yale-NUS is distinct from Yale in New Haven. “It has nothing to do with Yale. It’s not a branch campus. It’s not Yale College,” she said.

Indeed, Yale’s expansion abroad may be a way of marketing the university, according to Richard Edelstein, an expert on international education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, at Berkeley. “There is a business strategy dimension to this that is clearly at play,” he said. “The question is whether it really advances the institutions’ interests.”

Regardless of concern over the use of the Yale name, this question of how the new campus aligns with Yale’s mission remains the focus.

“[Yale’s] mission is not to educate the entire world. The mission is to turn out good scholars and citizens,” said Yale English professor Mark Oppenheimer.

DEFINING HARVARD’S BORDERS

Yale’s pioneering moves in Singapore have led to discussion in both New Haven and Cambridge about the benefits of establishing a physical presence abroad. But while Yale forges ahead with its new campus, Harvard plans to strengthen its existing framework and connections rather than build from scratch.

“We don’t want to just focus on one area of the world and put a disproportionate part of our attention on one location in which we invest a huge amount of our effort,” said Faust. “We would rather support activity much more broadly.”

Dominguez described the opening of campuses abroad a “fad,” and he said that Harvard is not interested in jumping on the bandwagon.

“It simply became clear that it was not just something that we didn’t want to do, but that there were a lot of other, better things we could do,” said Dominguez. He added that pouring resources into a single physical facility may actually limit the range of opportunities for students and faculty abroad.

According to Faust, Harvard’s goals are best achieved by connecting the Harvard community with programs, collaborations, and partnerships abroad. She specifically cited edX—Harvard’s new online learning tool created with MIT—as an example of using technology to cross borders. And while Faust does not support building a full-fledged campus abroad, she has been an advocate of tempered expansion overseas, noting Harvard’s international offices, which serve as a home base for students interns and faculty researchers.