Building a New Academic Institution: the Singapore University of Technology and Design

CHAPTER 7 Building a New Academic Institution: the Singapore University of Technology and Design

Thomas L. Magnanti

The creation of any new university provides an opportunity to build upon the great traditions of higher education as well as to do some things differently, even challenge elements of the status quo. This chapter describes the creation of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), a university established in collaboration with MIT that, in its design and aspirations, seeks to model MIT, a technically-oriented innovator in education and research that embraces both scholarship and practice. SUTD was established in a mature national environment of higher education alongside several world class institutions. It was intended to provide an alternative path for students, utilizing a distinctive footprint and distinctive approach to education. From the outset, SUTD strived to rethink many elements of a modern technically-oriented university. It was founded with a unique organizational and degree structure, without traditional departments or schools. It abandoned large lectures and instead embraced a hands-on, active learning approach to education, organized around cohort-based learning communities. Its approaches to education and research as well as its facility design and space allocation have been crafted to foster “multidisciplinarity.” It even abandoned the agrarian academic year calendar. It has been developed to date in what might be thought of as four phases:

1 Conception and founding (August 2007–January 2010). Development of the overall footprint, basic organizational structure, blueprint for undergraduate education, and governance structure, as well as collaborations with MIT and Zhejiang University. 2 Early development (January 2010–May 2012). Development of the undergraduate curriculum (course and course sequencing), hiring of pioneering faculty and staff, recruitment of pioneering undergraduate students, launching of the SUTD-MIT International Design Center. 3 Launch period (May 2012–January 2015). Operation at the interim campus,initiation of undergraduate, master’s degree and PhD programs, addition of new research centers, preliminary accreditation, further

hiring of faculty and staff, including a full complement of senior academic administrators. 4 Full anchoring (January 2015-present). Move to permanent campus, graduation of first two undergraduate cohorts (August 2015 and 2016), final accreditation.

1 Conception and Founding

In 2007, Singapore had three publicly funded universities. The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) are full-fledged comprehensive universities, and the Singapore Management University (SMU), as its name suggests, is a university anchored in management, but also with schools of social science, information systems, and law. All of these universities have been remarkably successful, with NUS’s and NTU’s reputation rising quickly to the point where by 2016, they ranked number 12 and 13 in the QS World University Rankings. SMU also has excelled, ranking 54th worldwide and 2nd in the Asia-Pacific region in a recent University of Texas at Dallas “Top 100 Business School Research Rankings.” In August 2007, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced the government’s commitment to increase the cohort participation rate in publicly- funded universities from 25 percent to 30 percent by 2015 and convened the Committee on Expansion of the University Sector (CEUS). Dr. Tony Tan, then chairman of the Ministry of Education’s International Academic Advisory Panel (IAAP) and subsequently president of Singapore, served as advisor to the committee. One option was to expand the existing universities. The government decided instead to create a new university, often referred to in subsequent months as either the new university or the 4th university. By creating a new university, the government intended an alternate educational pathway and the development of different types of innovation than might be achieved by expanding existing universities. The CEUS final report (Liu et al., 2008) suggested several core principles in the design of the new university with the following objectives:

– This new university will aim to provide a differentiated education, increase choice and diversity in the university landscape, and help supply the additional capacity needed to provide more students with a publicly-funded university education. – The new university will distinguish itself through an interdisciplinary approach to education. Beyond discipline-specific knowledge and skills,