The Emergence of Interdisciplinarity: How USP Started

Prof Lo:

I don’t think interdisciplinarity was an explicit objective from the beginning. The first iteration of USP was the Talent Development Programme (TDP). The TDP was meant as a programme to challenge the university’s top students, hence the word “talent”. It was more dispersed, so everyone in their major could be selected for the TDP and they would do something extra within their major. It wasn’t “coherent” like USP, in the sense that it brought everyone together.

Also during that time, NUS moved towards an education system closer to the American style. Instead of specialising early and following a set path – closer to the British style – students can choose different modules to customise their education – closer to the American style. There was a feeling that in this new system, NUS needed to have some kind of core curriculum requirement, so the university introduced the Core Curriculum in 1999 as part of the education reform. USP was then formed by bringing together the TDP and the Core Curriculum in 2001.

At that time, there were no full-time USP faculty. There were people scattered around NUS who were interested in teaching in a way that’s more for a less specialised audience, professors like Prof Kuldip Singh and Prof Ali Namazie from Physics.

My sense was that USP was bringing together two programmes that in retrospect, from my point of view, weren’t naturally aligned. In the way the TDP was originally conceptualised, it was meant to challenge students in their specific discipline: for example, the top law students get to do a specialised programme and do a more advanced class in their major. The Core Curriculum went in the direction of breadth: arts students should know something about science, and science students should know about the arts. I’m not sure if there was a clear-cut sense of “NUS wants more interdisciplinarity and therefore they set up the USP”.

Prof Lo:

That’s a tough question. My impression is that it was never that mindful and intentional. From 2001 to around 2007, the nature of the USP classes changed, and periodically we would look at what we are doing and formulate the principles. The teaching of science has always been more challenging in a way – how do you teach science to non-scientists? I don’t want to speak for Prof Kuldip or Prof Ali, but my sense was that the classes were introduced more as exposure modules, very much about giving people a taste of the subject – “exposure”, as the name suggests.

As the years went on, I think the USP classes started to think of themselves less as exposure modules and more as something else. I don’t think anyone was particularly satisfied with the exposure modules. The exposure modules were oftentimes, by necessity, superficial, and there started to be a movement towards teaching these classes in a way that offered more depth. They would offer depth in a more limited topic but that topic wouldn’t pretend to be really comprehensive. In some ways, it was more “this is a very narrow topic but it can be a microcosm of some larger issue”.

There was “external pressure” as the General Education (GE) modules were introduced one or two years after USP started. USP was created by bringing together the Talent Development Programme and the Core Curriculum, but that essentially left the entire university without a core curriculum, so that element re-emerged under the name “General Education” a few years after the creation of the USP. That then meant that there a lurking question of “How is this USP module different from the GE module?” The change over time in the content of USP classes was a bit of an organic process: if I were to teach this for GE, it would be more watered down. Often, the USP version of the class wouldn’t go in the same direction as the GE.

USP classes had no imperative to provide the same kind of coverage that other faculties would, to make everyone learn a set curriculum. By 2008 or 2009, the USP classes would often take what seems like a seemingly small topic, like entropy, and teach what most faculty thought to be a methodological approach to this topic. Some people said that all USP science classes taught scientific reasoning. What the scientific reasoning applied to was different, but all the classes were about how scientists think. Similarly, there was a class on Africa and anthropology but the focus wasn’t on Africa, but on how anthropologists think. That is what the USP curriculum became: it was about giving the students a set of methodological tools.

In sum, I would say that the features of what we have come to identify as the USP (interdisciplinarity; but also a focus on skills, and on depth and rigour in addition to breadth) came about via a confluence of factors. Sometimes working together, sometimes working against each other; some factors were external, and some internal.

Prof Kang:

We used to run multidisciplinary seminars at the end of every year from around 2006, and we would invite speakers to present. It’s like a conference where we could feature experts in their field but also some student projects. For students, they had to consider how to position their Final Year Projects which they did in their department, to a broader audience so their projects become accessible.

One such seminar that we set up was on the concept of time. We invited professors from FASS who did literary and cultural work on time as well as Physics and Engineering professors who came from a scientific perspective. My background is more quantitative so I’m more familiar with the scientific view of time, so it was very interesting to hear about it from the other side; I remember someone who talked about the cyclical nature of time in Burmese society.

Prof Lo:

I think interdisciplinarity in USP really first started as a more structural requirement. In the early days, we talked about multidisciplinarity, and specifically, you could say that USP modules were multidisciplinary – they would bring together different disciplines. But you could say that the curriculum was multidisciplinary: structurally students had to do different types of modules in various domains. Multidisciplinary doesn’t necessarily come from the module; it could come from the curriculum structure too.

Another way to think about interdisciplinarity is about the community: when you’re in a USP classroom, you are in a classroom with students from different disciplines. From the hindsight of 2022, it’s no longer unique, but in those days there were no Residential Colleges. The multidisciplinary nature of the USP classroom was quite unique.

Multidisciplinarity in the community and the curricular structure just happened in USP, but there came a little more push to make each of the classes more interdisciplinary. Some argued that certain topics do not benefit from interdisciplinary perspectives, and you need to know a certain topic very well. There wasn’t a hard and fast system of how to implement multidisciplinarity, but we weren’t too concerned about that because we still had the broader curriculum structure, as well as the multidisciplinary nature of the community.

Prof Lo:

There was a lot of navel-gazing into what made USP special as a programme, which itself was a struggle. In the early days, it seemed frustrating from all the broad discussions. We had retreat after retreat where we talked about “what is the mission of USP?” When you’re putting a programme together, there’s so much actual stuff you have to do – design your class and so on – but also have some large, almost philosophical discussion was challenging. So one kind of challenge was that many of us were trying to get on with designing and teaching classes and having to think about these larger philosophical issues.

 One of the things implemented in USP was writing classes, but there were no other writing classes anywhere in NUS, other than writing classes that were more about communication. Because of that, we couldn’t bring in joint appointees from the rest of NUS and we had to hire a whole bunch of people to teach writing classes, including myself. Many of us were quite young and fresh out of graduate school. As a teacher, you are learning a lot, and as young faculty members that had to do curriculum planning, it was quite a challenge. Many of us had to learn and do things very quickly. For example, things like Folio and the Writing Centre happened within the first two to three years, which is pretty good!

 There was quite a bit of institutional support. The writing programme was very much set up in consultation with the Harvard writing programme. In the early days of USP, we had a lot of consultants; one of them was the director of the Harvard writing programme Nancy Sommers. Our writing programme was somewhat modelled after theirs, to the extent that in the first year an experienced teacher from Harvard – Stephen Donatelli – came over to teach and hire faculty. Anyone we hired for WCT we sent them to Harvard to visit, just for two weeks, to sit in classes to learn how the programme was being taught.

 At the beginning of the programme, there was a lot of talk about USP being a leadership programme. We had other consultants who were from fields related to leadership – another professor, of economics, I think, from Harvard. And we would bring in a business school professor to helm a faculty retreat to pontificate about. There was a push from the university that USP should be about training leaders, and many of us resisted it, or at least said that if it’s about leadership, it shouldn’t just be about political leadership. We mooted one or two leadership-type classes, but they didn’t gather a lot of momentum. While Aaron Maniam does his leadership class now, it was quite late and by that point, USP wasn’t seen as a leadership college any more.

Prof Kang:

 After the core curriculum ran for one year, we felt that it didn’t quite live up to our expectations. One of the things we were most worried about NUS students, was that they were too quiet and not expressing themselves, even if they would be thinking about something in their brains. They don’t ask questions nor do they volunteer their opinions in a crowd; this was something corroborated by employers in the industry.

 The writing programme wasn’t just academic for us; we wanted to give students the opportunity to speak more and write more so that they feel more confident. In fact, I think it was overly successful because USP students won’t stop typing in the Battle Royale chat. I think we chose to focus on writing instead of something else, like oral skills, because of the way we conceptualise writing as a way of thinking. The university began to see two types of writing: there’s “writing” like in Pharmacy and CELC which teach students how to write in a way that’s catered towards a specific audience. Then there’s “Writing” like in USP which is more argumentative, about connecting evidence to a conclusion in a logically thought-out manner. This form of communication isn’t easy, it’s maybe a few steps above your “normal” communication.

I remember that back then, we were accused by others of being elitist because of our small class sizes. If you dig up newspapers from 2001 or 2002 you’ll get reports of us being elitist and we had to explain that while we admit academically bright students – we’re not shy about that – we don’t want to be thought of as “admitting people who are more well-connected”. We weren’t “socially elite” but more “academically elite” to use that word. We had these problems for a while in those early years.

Prof Lo:

I would say so, but this is certainly just my perspective. I don’t think any of us felt that it was something we knew how to do, so we went along or humoured it. There was one retreat with the American business school professor at which each of us had to do some homework, to pick a film in which you think that some character demonstrates some leadership. It basically was a class assignment. I remember Philip Holden, who became deputy director eventually, talking about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

To be fair, towards the end of USP, leadership was a thing, but I think we had successfully broadened the concept beyond just political leadership. “Thought leadership” in those days wasn’t that much of an idea; in the early days leadership was understood more narrowly like political leadership. Part of the resistance came from us wanting leadership to be a bit broader: we want to produce leaders in their field and thought leaders. You could say that’s still a thing, but it never became one of the pillars of USP.