Yale-NUS board appointed

November 21, 2011 4:00 pm Leave a Comment

Yale and the National University of Singapore announced the members of the founding governing board for their jointly-run liberal arts college in a Monday afternoon press release.

[ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”1061″ ]

As the new college’s highest governing body, the board will function similarly to the Yale Corporation, Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer said. With half of the board’s 10 members nominated by University President Richard Levin and the other half nominated by NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan, the group will “provide strategic direction and oversight” for the new college, according to the release. The Singaporean Ministry of Education made the final appointments.

In the past, Yale administrators have described the board as a means to ensure the school’s educational quality. All five of Levin’s nominees to the board — including Levin, Lorimer and former Yale Corporation Senior Fellow Roland Betts ’68 — hold Yale degrees, which Lorimer said was a conscious decision on Levin’s part.

“I think we decided this is a major initiative for Yale, and we wanted those who would make the most serious effort and also those who had experience at the University,” Lorimer said, adding that all 16 members of the Yale Corporation hold Yale degrees.

Members of the new governing board will serve three-year terms, starting immediately, during which the board will help appoint the college’s president and faculty and also oversee the construction of the new colleges, Lorimer said.

Levin’s nominees vary in background, but all have connections to higher education administration or experience working in Asia. The other Yale affiliates on the board include Catherine Hill GRD ’85, current president of Vassar College, and Clark Randt ’68, ambassador to China under President George W. Bush ’68.

Kay Kuok Oon Kwong, the executive chairperson of Shangri-La Hotel Limited and a current member of the NUS board of trustees, will be the board’s inaugural chairperson.

“I see the opportunity to develop a novel, world-class educational experience as a rare privilege,” Kuok said in the release. “The board and I are deeply committed to working with the leadership of Yale-NUS on an education that will draw from both Yale and NUS, a truly distinctive experience that will develop the brightest students into future leaders for Asia, and the world.”

While the cost of the college is being entirely paid by the Singaporean government, only half of the board is affiliated with either the Singaporean government or NUS. These members include NUS President Tan and Ng Cher Pong, Singapore’s Deputy Minister of Education for Policy.

Since it was announced in September 2010, Yale-NUS College has drawn criticism from those who allege that the Singaporean government may restrict academic freedom at the school. But Lorimer said she did not believe this would happen and that Ng’s participation would be a major benefit for the new college.

“It’s extremely valuable to have a member of the Ministry of Education on the board because it adds a link to the Ministry and shows the Ministry how the college is progressing,” Lorimer said.

The Yale Corporation also includes two government officials — the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut — but the roles are largely ceremonial and neither can vote on Corporation decisions. For Yale-NUS, Lorimer said the board will look to “active representation from the Ministry of Education.”

The two remaining members of the board are Gautam Banerjee, executive chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Chong Siak Ching, president and CEO of Singaporean company Ascendas.

CORRECTION: Nov. 22

A previous version of this article stated that Presidents Levin and Tan officially appointed the board members. In fact. each president nominated half the members, but Singapore’s Ministry of Education makes the official appointments.

Miller: ‘We are committed to pursuing an appropriate resolution’

October 3, 2010 11:53 pm Leave a Comment

Yale College Dean Mary Miller, in an e-mail to students Sunday evening, made clear that the University is on board with any forthcoming investigation into the conduct of New Haven police officers during the raid on the Morse-Stiles screw at Elevate Lounge early Saturday morning.

The e-mail comes after a meeting tonight between college masters and deans and top administrators, including University President Richard Levin, to discuss the University’s continuing response to claims that police officers used excessive force during the raid.

“I think it’s important for students to know that this being taken seriously by the University,” Miller said in a phone interview Sunday night.

Read the full text of Miller’s e-mail below.

To Students in Yale College:

President Levin and I met tonight with the Masters and Deans of the colleges whose students were most involved in Friday night’s incident on Crown Street. The Secretary, Associate General Counsel and other senior administrators joined us to review the situation and to decide on next steps. Marichal Gentry, Dean of Student Affairs, was assigned to be the lead liaison with Denise Blanchard, Captain of Internal Affairs of the New Haven Police Department, who will be overseeing the process which may lead to a formal investigation.

Dean Gentry will be reaching out to the Captain tomorrow to underscore that the University stands ready to assist in every way possible to advance an investigation. We will make space available on campus if that is desired and will facilitate the scheduling of any interviews needed by New Haven Police’s Internal Affairs unit.

The fact that criminal charges are pending against several Yale students needs to be factored into the timing of University processes since we would not want inadvertently to interfere with the legal defense of those students. We will be developing a memorandum to address some of the issues raised by students, such as whether students should have had the right to use their cell phones while a police action is being conducted.

We know that many students have experienced a very disturbing event. We have heard their voices, and we are committed to pursuing an appropriate resolution of the issues.

Yours truly,

Mary Miller

Dean of Yale College

D-Day for for Yale Investments Office

September 23, 2010 5:44 am Leave a Comment

The wait is almost over: The Yale Investments Office is set to release the results of last year’s endowment performance very soon, likely today.

Administrators have said they expect the endowment to earn a positive return, somewhere between 0 and 10 percent, but those in-the-know at Yale have kept silent about what the actual figure will be. Experts in the investments world believe the return will probably mirror that of Harvard’s endowment, which returned 11 percent this past fiscal year.

Whatever the figure is, it is almost certain to be an improvement over the endowment’s performance from fiscal year 2009, when it lost 24.6 percent.

Palestinian authority assails Yale conference

September 1, 2010 4:48 pm Leave a Comment

The U.S. representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the political authority in the Palestinian territories that answers to President Mahmoud Abbas, wrote a letter to University President Richard Levin on Monday accusing Yale of hosting anti-Palestinian extremists at a recent conference on anti-Semitism.

The conference, “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,” took place Aug. 25-23 at the Loria Center and included presentations from 110 scholars, three of whom PLO representative Maen Rashid Areikat in his letter called conservative radicals: a former Israeli military officer, the legal representative of an organization that monitors human rights organizations, and the founder of a media watchdog organization.

“It’s shocking that a respected institution like Yale would give a platform to these right-wing extremists and their odious views,” Areikat wrote.

Two of the presenters named in the letter said it was inaccurate to characterize their politics as right-wing. The third could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Jonathan Fighel, the former military officer, said he spent much of his career in the army helping to coordinate the Oslo Accords of 1993, which sought to lay a path for future peaceful negotiations between Israel and Palestine. He added that he has worked as an academic since he left the army in 1996.

Levin said Tuesday that he would respond to the letter personally on Wednesday.

Salovey loses his mustache

August 29, 2009 12:26 pm Leave a Comment

Update, 3:35 p.m. Sunday | Salovey stopped by the Freshman Bazaar this afternoon and, again, was decidedly mustache-less. Photographic evidence above.

This is not a joke: Provost Peter Salovey appeared at the Freshman Assembly ceremonies this morning without his trademark mustache.

It is unclear when Salovey — who was the subject of a false rumor two years ago that he dropped his mustache, briefly sending the campus into a tizzy — decided to shave. It is worth noting that Salovey’s predecessor as provost, Andrew Hamilton, decided to shave his similiarly giant mustache around the time he assumed Yale’s second-ranking position.

We’ll post a photograph as soon as we get one, and we’ll let you know if Salovey has any comment on his new facial hair stylings.

(Photo: Reed Reibstein/Contributing Photographer)

Double your Freshman Assemblies, double your fun

August 28, 2009 2:54 pm Leave a Comment

The 1,300 or so members of the class of 2013 are arriving at Yale today, but thanks to a space crunch in Woolsey Hall, it will be nearly four more years before they actually gather altogether in one place.

That will happen on Old Campus for Commencement in 2013. Previously, students in each class gathered together twice: once for the Freshmen Assembly before the start of freshman year, and again at Commencement.

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Levin: Universities ‘will emerge leaner and stronger’ from downturn

August 4, 2009 2:33 pm Leave a Comment

University President Richard Levin’s summer media blitz continues this week with an essay in Newsweek that outlines his views on how colleges and universities should respond to the economic downturn.

“For private endowment-dependent schools, two questions loom large: Did we spend too much during the good years? And did our unconventional investment model expose us to too much risk? The answer to each question is no,” writes Levin, who is also the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics.

Levin has contributed to the magazine before, including an article about globalization and education that he wrote in 2006 for Newsweek International, which is edited by Yale Corporation fellow Fareed Zakaria ’86.

In case you missed it…

July 16, 2009 5:03 pm Leave a Comment

A video of University President Richard Levin’s hour-long interview with Charlie Rose of PBS last night is now online. In the interview, Levin declared himself a fox (as opposed to a hedgehog, making reference to Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor), said he would “personally love it if we had a little more structure in the undergraduate curriculum of our colleges,” and outlined some of his thoughts about the recession.

Levin last spoke with Rose in 2004, when they had a similarly wide-ranging discussion. Sartorially inclined observers might notice that the president wore nearly identical clothes both times he sat down in Rose’s studio.

Set your TiVo: Levin to appear on PBS tonight

July 15, 2009 5:24 pm Leave a Comment

University President Richard Levin will sit down with Charlie Rose of PBS this evening for an hour-long interview. The show airs at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

Levin last spoke with Rose in 2004, when he and the television host talked about everything from Yale’s relationship with then-President George W. Bush ’68 to the skills required to run a university and the health of the American economy. Click here to watch that conversation.

If you use Hotmail, you haven’t gotmail (from Yale)

July 13, 2009 3:14 pm Leave a Comment

Don’t try to send an e-mail to an msn.com, hotmail.com, or live.com address from your Yale e-mail account; Microsoft is currently blocking all e-mails sent from mail.yale.edu to those domains. According to a message on the Yale ITS website, Yale is working to contact Microsoft to resolve the issue but does not know how long it will be before it will be fixed.

In other news, people actually still use Hotmail.

Update, 12:33 p.m. Wednesday: Hotmail users — many of whom are clearly very passionate about their e-mail service provider — can now sleep easy. ITS reports that the issue with Microsoft should now be resolved.

Student activities fee increases to $75

July 2, 2009 10:04 am Leave a Comment

Updated 7:44 p.m. Elis will find a bit of a surprise when they look at their Yale account statement today: The optional student activities fee has been increased from $50 to $75 for the next school year.

The Yale College Dean’s Office said in April that it was considering raising the fee, which provides about two-thirds of the YCC’s budget, in order to help the YCC balance its budget after University-wide cutbacks forced the Dean’s Office and the President’s Office to decrease their contributions to the organization. At the time, administrators indicated they were inclined to raise the fee but said no official decision would be made until the summer.

It does not appear that students received any notification of the fee increase until it popped up on their account statements today. For at least the past two years, undergraduates have received an explanatory e-mail message from Student Financial Services at the time the fee was charged. The message provided details on how students could opt out of the fee if they so desired. (The option to opt out of the fee is still available on the Student Information Systems Web site.)

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