The fourth university

Wayne Soon's post on Singapore Angle got me thinking again about a liberal arts college as our fourth university. I'd love to see this happening, but something tells me we'll be getting a souped-up polytechnic instead: the policy-makers who matter like Lui Tuck Yew didn't attend places like Dartmouth and Williams, and for the most part didn't do their bachelor's degrees in the US (graduate degrees don't count). They just won't get it, I suspect. They ought to be reading John Henry Newman, Allan Bloom, James Freedman, and Martha Nussbaum; but they'll end up merely thinking of the usual economic imperatives -- ignoring the contributions made by US liberal arts graduates to the world's most powerful economy. In any case, haven't we moved beyond the profit motive? Shouldn't we be moving in that direction?
Posted by kungfuzi at 10:09 pm |