On 18 March 2002, members of the faculties of Arts & Social Sciences, Business, Computing, Dentistry, Engineering, and Medicine met to discuss NUS’s current academic culture. The CDTL meeting was more or less a grassroots event: I had been asked to give a workshop to students on how to do online research, and so I asked if I could also hold a workshop or discussion on the topic of academic citizenship. I had been reading books on collegiality and academic culture, and I wanted to discuss some ideas from this reading and see what a cross-section of NUS faculty had to say about key terms such as “collegiality”. As a preliminary to this workshop, I interviewed twenty members of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences (half of whom had been here less then two years, half more than ten), asking each person to define “collegiality” and to say how it existed in his or her department.

Though the sample was modest, the results were fairly consistent. Less than half of the people I spoke with felt adequate mentoring is available at NUS, and many of those who were mentored said that it was a one-off arrangement set up by the department head. More striking is the difference between the ten-year and the two-year groups: 80% of those with ten years experience or more said they received no mentoring whatsoever, whereas only 60% of those in the two-year group felt they have received no mentoring. On the one hand, things are improving, but on the other hand respondents reported that mentoring at NUS is inadequate and that, even where relations are excellent, there is a general reserve that inhibits the sharing necessary to inter-disciplinary work.

Some of the anecdotal comments explaining views can be seen on my webpage. The most common advice received by the interviewees I spoke to was “keep your head down” and “go with the flow.” Clearly this advice is at odds with the more recent statements that have been made about NUS’s future direction, and many participants in the workshop expressed a mixture of hope about these proposed changes and worry that some of the root problems were not yet being addressed. Some of the more positive responses registered satisfaction with collegiality at NUS, and many claimed that relations between peers were better at NUS than elsewhere. On the negative side, rigidly hierarchical communication inhibits creative solutions to many university problems, and inter-faculty communication and cooperation are rare.

Part of the solution to the problems described will require institutional adaptation. President Shih Choon Fong has mentioned a “control culture” among the hindrances to creative problem-solving in his circular of 27 February 2002 and again in his recent State of the University address. Generally speaking, faculty members at NUS feel that there is a strong general desire to improve the academic culture of this university, but at the same time there is a general feeling that NUS needs to find better ways to communicate across ranks. The hope was frequently expressed in the discussion portion of the workshop that, as much as possible, NUS will discover ways to put ideas such as “faculty ownership” into actual practice.

At the individual level, anyone interested teaching, research, or socialisation in a university context might enjoy reading Robert Boice’s book, Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus, a book which makes hundreds of practical suggestions about how one can balance these three aspects of academic life. Boice has studied academic culture for thirty years and has a great deal to say about why some faculty members thrive and some founder in a university, and the recommendations he makes about this subject will interest new faculty members, those long-time faculty members who are open to new ideas and administrators who are truly interested in creating the conditions for an effective and enjoyable academic culture.

For Further Reading

Boice, Robert. (2000). Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Pan, Daphne. (2001). Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: A Handbook for NUS Teachers (4^th ed.). Singapore: National University of Singapore.

Rosovsky, Henry. (1990). The University: An Owner’s Manual. New York: Norton and Company.

Sawyer, R. McLaran; Prichard, K.W.; & Hostetler, K.D. (1992). The Art and Politics of College Teaching: A Practical Guide for the Beginning Professor. New York: Peter Lang.

Wolff, Paul. (1992—reprint). The Ideal of a University. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ip, Alex. (2001). ‘Academic Controversy: The Key to Teaching Thinking in the University’, Ideas on Teaching, No. 21. Singapore: National University of Singapore.