THE STATE OF UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIA AND A WAY FORWARD

Thinking of what I have wrote in my proposal, the video that I posted up, the people I meet through Shafiza, and some of my friends whom I meet for lunch regularly, I reflect and explain my thoughts of the student body of the faculty of arts and social science here in NUS. I try to cover as many bases as possible and I really did try my best at good essay writing.

Students in the National University of Singapore (NUS) are a varied bunch. They come to university for many different reasons and contribute to campus life in many different ways. Some are incredibly active in student groups and organizations. Some are delightfully well dressed. Some are well-spoken to the point of overwhelming charisma. Some have yet to decide what to do with life. Characterizing students in NUS can be fun, and sometimes we are guilty of pigeonholing students. But there is a way to describe students in a useful manner in order to think about the state of undergraduate academia here in NUS.

Similar to how political ideology is strongly characterised in the dimension of being on the left-wing or on the right-wing, I have strong convictions to think that there is a one very central, defining dimension that can characterise every student currently pursuing a course in the faculty of arts and social science in NUS (FASS). Its not a matter of academic ability, though it is an indicator but not a neccessary condition; it is not a matter of personality, though personality tempers the said dimension. This dimension is the distinction of how personally involved you are in the subject you are taking.

By “personally involved”, I mean to say the degree of embeddedness of your subject — whether political science, communications and new media, or english literature — in your life. For a student in political science, it is a measure of how much political science manner spills over to your personal thoughts; for the next, a measure of how much you apply the lessons learnt in communications and new media to daily living; and another, a measure of how much you live and breathe English Literature. It is how much you embody your discipline in the identity of yourself. It is very evident in some literature students who are extraordinarily excited at the mention of a poet, or in political science student when giving a political exposition with incredible insight and clarity.

If creating stereotypes can ever be justified, then there are two extremes of students here in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science. On the highly “personally involved” end is the extremely motivated student, who is active in class participation and co-curricular activities, not only appreciates but enjoys the matter being taught and has a complete grasp of what’s being taught and more. On the other end is the nominal student, a student in name but hardly in spirit. He or she the person who has chosen a particular subject not because of interest but because of disinterest of other subjects, and rather focus on other aspects of (campus) life.

I hardly think that everybody is polarized to either two stereotypes but most fall somewhere in between; some people fall closer to the active kind, some closer to the nominal student kind. My point is not to disparage those who appear to be a “nominal student” either: sometimes they may very well have something else going on in their lives that is very much valid, such as business, musical, culinary, or sporting aspirations. I also recognise the fact that there will always be both kinds of people in any institution of learning.

The point is, I observed that some of the students on the “nominal” end are intimidated and insecure with their field of study. I dislike how some people feel their essays and assesment grades are private and hence feel offended if somebody were to ask to read their essays or to inquire about their exact grade. I dislike that classes are generally quiet and requires massive amounts of encouragement for interaction, even between tutor and students. Ultimately, I think that it is detrimental to both the individual and the entire academic student body.

I have been on the nominal end before. Admittedly, it was a mistake to take a second-year history module without neither taking the exposure module previously or having done history as a paper at “A” levels. Thus, I did not have the proper mental tools to deal with history as a subject — I couldn’t tackle it as a field of study. I was too afraid to engage my tutor with my ignorance, and I hardly knew anybody else doing the course so I received no help there either. I merely took it because my friends guaranteed an easy distinction. It was a bad move to listen to their advice. I didn’t know how to study it, I didn’t want to study it, I eventually got a C+ for it. I didn’t even collect my essay because I was ashamed of writing it — and I am fiercely proud of my writings.

There’s a completely different story for political science. It doesn’t really matter that I’ve never got an A for a module before. I enjoy what I learn in class, I know how to “learn” political science because its highly based on thought-modelling which suits my natural mode of thinking. I disagree with some concepts and thought-models (like the bargaining theory of war), and I favour certain others (like the oscillation between classical realism and complex interdependence). Although I am very keen about receiving a first-class or second-upper class commensurate to my skills, to a certain extent my grades do not matter as long as I know that I am learning to be a better person through my studies and my activities here in university.

My concern is for students who were like me when I was taking that history module. I empathize with students who are unsure and unconfident in an unfamiliar academic setting without the cushioning effect of a class of fellow students willing to help each other out. It gets better in a student’s third year and honours year, but by the time that occurs the damage done to a student’s grades can be devastating — all aspirants to a first-class degree know that it is crucial to score an average of A minus in every semester. There is also a possibility that it will never get better. In a worse-case scenario, a student can only marginally relate to what he or she has learnt in the four years in university, throwing it all to the wind simultaneously as the paper certificate drops in his or her hands.

To what extent there are students who fit the profile, I do not know. From what my acquaintences can relate off-hand, sociology students seems to be less competitive and atomistic. They credit it to the fact that everybody starts off at the same page and at the same ability level. In context, not many people can claim to have studied sociology previously, and there is little exposure to academic sociology outside of university. On the other spectrum are the economics students. An economics honours student tells me that her peers are highly atomistic and almost predatory in competition. She attributes it to the fact that the nature of economics leads students to think calculatively to the point of selfishness.

Personally, I think that political science as an undergraduate academic field has different challenges from both sociology and economics, if we can assume that both reports on the nature of the student body are true. Unlike sociology, we cannot claim that students start off at an equal stage because some people are naturally politically inclined and are generally more well-informed than others even before they start off as undergraduates. These people already exhibit a lot of personal involvement in their field of study prior to undertaking the course. Classes are also structured such that it is very easy to be atomised as a political science student: only four tutorials a semester in which to interact with other people in learning creates difficulty in forming a learning group.

I have mentioned that it does get better in the third and honours year because a student essentially meets the same students in different classes over several semesters. But given the situation above, it is not inconceivable that some students could be alienated from forming or joining study cliques. Some students are less social in character — in the given situation, it really depends on social skills in making friends and thus study partners — or they might have decided to take up political science too late in their undergraduate studies, and its worsened by choices to not speak up in class, to not actively engage people (especially the tutor), to do their readings at the last minute and to not attend class altogether.

Therefore, this line of thought has led me to believe that a classmanship should be complementary, if not essential, to the pedagogy of political science in NUS (if not all the subjects in FASS). By “classmanship”, I refer to a kinship that extols closeness and promotes learning between students. It is a certain spirit of openness and comfortableness in approaching anybody for help, as well as the reciprocal spirit of willingness to aid and share, to treat other students as equals despite their current ability, and to value everybody’s opinions whether it appears “stupid” or “overly confrontational”.

This is something I personally can relate with. I feel a certain reluctance to talk to some students in political science who appear to be confident and possess that mental clarity other students do not possess. I wish I could engage them and learn from their ideas to complement my studies in political science. While I feel a great admiration for them, I simultaneously feel inferior and intimidated. Even having lunch with other political science students after class, when they talk about some things that I have little knowledge about, I question myself on why I personally do not know these facts when as a political science student I should.

However, after some reflection despite the initial feeling of inferiority, I came to the understanding that I would not have realised my ignorance or even gained at least an inkling of understanding about those things they talked about if I had not engaged them at all. If I could find more instances and more points of contact with fellow students in which I can engage them about our field of study, it would be mutually beneficial. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that students are better off sharing knowledge with each other than not. The idea is to create a social situation which will help students move out of the passive state into greater personal involvement with their field of study, or at least one that will provide public goods that will elevate the general standard of undergraduate academia.

At the most basic level, it would mean that students would at least participate actively in class and tutorials. At a better level, students would be interacting with each other on academic matters outside of class, the more groups the average person discusses with, the better. At the most idealised form we would see students actively engaging each other in public discourse through frequent forums and in written form through student-run newsletters, journals and magazines. At this stage, it is even imaginable that university students begin to socialise themselves in meaningful ways with values associated with democracy — such as responsible and civil discourse over political policy, citizen activism, inter-ethnic and inter-religious tolerance — and ultimately espouse their prerogative as the educated stewards and guardians of Singaporean society.

Until this problem can be addressed, no student-run magazine can flourish. A rumour which is circulating is that the Ridge, probably the only university-funded magazine in NUS, is not taken seriously by the students, which is exacerbated by the writers of the Ridge themselves not taking their work seriously. If the rumour can be assumed to be true, I would say that until students take their field of study and their academic tenure as undergraduates seriously, we won’t see serious student engagement in public discourse. I predict that the online form of society-led publications would fare no better. Any criticism to the quality of writing in these publications currently eventually relates to how much classmanship there is available for students to help themselves bolster the average quality of thought and writing.

I would digress from the main topic at hand at the moment to comment on the quality of writing of tertiary publications, whether electronic or paper-bound. With an exogenous challenge of a lack of a serious audience, I think many of the publications face pressure to move towards frivilous matters which cater towards the lowest common denominator of students. Therefore to try to attract any readers at all, they have to resort to sensationalism and publish stories such as “The Best Place to make-out in NUS” or “What Should I Do The Morning After?”. While the quality of serious writing does to a large extent determine the quality of discourse, there simply isn’t enough reach to effect such an impact. Similarly, the dearth of students attending current affairs discussions or supporting student-led initatives (such as the one against the tuition fee hike) can be attributed to the same reasons.

Classmanship at the end of the day works towards the benefit of all. One concern I have been hearing is that if we speak up in class, then everybody profits at the expense of the speaker because he or she gives up exclusive knowledge of a subject therefore losing out in terms of competitiveness. The thought of letting other students free-ride without any reciprocal benefits is not very attractive. In addition, bell-curve grading is another legitimate concern because it gives students incentive to be competitive. At worse, bell-curve grading causes students to act in a predatory manner through informational denial or misleading information in order to get ahead by worsening his peers.

Classmanship will work in defiance of the internal logic of both concerns. The former concern only works if only one person speaks up on a certain topic with no responses from other students. If another student comments or counters, then it is logical that any student should speak up to clarify his or her own mistakes. If many students respond, then the effect will be culmulative as the initial speaker receives multiple inputs about his or her perspective which is an incentive to speak up, and the students who are passive and are less personally involved with respect to their academic field of study gain insight which brings up their general understanding of a subject and therefore allow them to give comment in future discussions.

With regards to the bell curve, if students help each other out enough and if the general academic level can rise beyond expectations, the lecturer cannot help but give good grades, or at least sufficiently acceptable ones. Even if the lecturer has to mark according to a bell-curve, it is preferable that we finish a module with generally high level of command of the subject among the students but some individuals obtain lousy grades due to relative marking, compared to everybody finishing with a mixed level of understanding and an average understanding of the subject. Practically, you have the entire class covering for you if you miss a class, or never finished your readings.

A last characteristic of classmanship is self-perpetuating. Classmanship is unlike a study clique system because it is by definition inclusive and therefore socialises new students to behave in a similar manner. Then its only logical that classmanship pushes nominal, passive students towards the personally involved archetype. Classmanship also survives beyond modules and semesters. While study cliques may have to reform due to academic nature (members have different modules each semester and therefore the quality of discussion suffers), classmanship offers an alternative because most everybody is in your clique. In effect, the entire class is one giant clique.

Again I wish to digress from the main topic to comment, this time on co-curricular activity (CCA) points. My main grouse with CCA points is two-fold: first, it encourages us to participate for the sake of participating and therefore it demeans the true importance of co-curricular activities; second, it discourages students to put time in other activities which are not awarded points, for instance, tutoring of fellow students. My concern is that too many students will be too busy earning points to actively engage each other in multiple points of contact, stifling the formation of classmanship both in terms of individual time and spirit. On the other hand, most students who do not stay in campus residences do not need to concern themselves with CCA points. Thus, its the foreign students who have to spend time on CCA points who stand the most to lose.

Another point is class participation credit. The thing is that it will never work in fostering classmanship. Logically, increasing the credit associated with class participation will tend to increase participation to a certain critical point. However, we don’t know how long or how much credit it will take, and increasing the credit will make grading too arbitrary because it depends too much on the lecturer remembering how much which person has participated, if participation can ever be quantified. Classmanship must come from within the student body and not motivated by direct credit gains. Direct participation credit also does not give incentive for students to meet beyond the scope of observable interaction, while classmanship implies that students must be motivated to independently interact outside of class.

The question of practicality ensues. Even in a class of twenty or thirty, it is inevitable that cliques form within the class. What more can be said about a university class of 300 to 500 students in political science, each student at different ability levels and minimal contact between students? I would argue that first, that university students are at a period in life when they are more mature and are able to handle themselves better socially. Second, the fact that each student is at different ability levels and have minimal contact with each other necessitates a form of classmanship to exist in order to improve pedagogy.

Fostering classmanship is the next step, and I hardly think that anybody will disagree with me that it is not an easy task. Really, I think it all boils down to values. I am deliberately avoiding the use of the word “culture” because it is too amorphous, too overused and therefore too meaningless as a concept. If not, values essentially shape culture, therefore circumventing the argument. The situation right here and right now in NUS is shaped by the values undergraduates socialise among themselves, the values that they have received in their previous institutions, the values that society has impart to them, and the values that the current administration has taught them to value.

In particular, one of those values is what we call affectionately “kiasuism”. It is the competitive one-upmanship with a selfish bias that Singaporeans (and not forgetting our socialised counterparts from other countries) play among each other. Another one of those values is that of leaving problems to be solved by the formal administration, often labelled as political apathy. This selfish competitiveness makes people wary of each other, creating the insecurity and the fear of speaking up at the risk of looking stupid. The apathy locks us in to the status quo because it prevents us from uniting to create change. Frankly speaking from a bureaucratic point of view, its advantageous to administer a highly atomised and disunified group of people because they can never mount pressure on the administration to do anything (assuming no intermediary body exists). Therefore, no help can be expected from the administration.

Yet another two more of these values is spoonfeeding and the sole reliance on teachers for learning. Handing material directly to students is good for rote learning, but for a discipline as subjective as the social sciences what is really needed is independence and critical thinking, both of which are not fostered by spoonfeeding. I’ve heard students complaining that they have to find all the readings on a list as opposed to the lecturer providing a coursepack. If students could collude to find readings, they would not only save on work, but gain a discussion partner. The preference to rely on people playing “teacher” roles also is

Granted, values do not change overnight. That does not mean they do not change at all, or that we do not stop trying to change values. I believe that once people become rationally aware of the pernicious disadvantages of certain values they espouse, they will aspire to change them. Awareness is key because people need to know what they are doing subconsciously is hurting them back. The goal, is to switch values from self-interest to cooperation. To move from passivity to activity. To learn not only from the lecturer in front, but from the people beside you. To not only receive, but to give in return. To graduate from sitting at the back of the class to the front. To involve personally everybody in their academic field of study.

Yes, its not something that can be achieved totally. If the risk of failure overshadowed any activity then nothing great would have been achieved in this world. The greater importance lies in setting the goal, knowing that we are bettering society for it, and working towards it.

All we need is to believe that we can make a difference. Then, we act.

Props go out to Mark, Philip (for humbling me), Edward, Christopher (for making the PS seminar possible), Kiat Han, Zi Yuan (for your personal enthusiasm and activity), Alvin (for your comment on values), Shafiza (for valuing my thought and introducing me to people), Meiling, Magdalene, Nisha, Amanda, Denise, Shan Shan, Cherlyn, Therie, Shafiza’s sociology group Alex, Jason and Karen, all the PSSOC members I know in person too many to list personally, all of you shaped my thoughts some way or another in writing this 3500-word essay. This is probably the most robust and the longest essay I have ever completed on Thoughtstreak so far. All of you influenced the thought in this essay, and all of you were in mind when writing it. Thank you all for being an inspiration.

Post scriptum: With regards to this piece, when thinking about the subject initially, I wanted to mention something about the USP and deconstruct it in terms of classmanship. I was thinking that the university was thinking strategically that the USP would be a highly selective group of students to focus building classmanship on, while the rest of the university (or FASS) was so much rabble to be left to their own miseries. I also wanted to mention that there is a direct parallel to democratic citizenship in Singapore and classmanship and it might be inferred in the mentioning of “[espousing] their prerogative as the educated stewards and guardians of Singaporean society”. However, I left both out for the reason that I am not encouraging dissent against authority, but rather I would like to see people acting independently in their collective interest for the right reasons. I also noticed after ending that gender, ethnicity and exchange students are mostly left out of the scope of discussion. I didn’t think that gender, and ethnicity played an important role as all members of either class are equal in the eyes of classmanship, and classmanship for the purpose of impressing foreign students is really a lousy and hypocritical reason. With regards to time, Three thousand words were written from 2am till just past 6am on the weekend following week 8 of the NUS schedule. That puts me on an average of at least 700 words an hour. With regards to other pieces, I have yet to complete the relationship model, in the sections about modelling short-term and long-term relationships. If I want to compete in the cicak.com essay competition on combating political apathy, I have yet to write that piece. With regards to my other co-curricular activities, I regard writing as personal development. It is vital that I write often and I write well because I have aspirations to continue writing well after my studies. But I assure you, despite my late-night scribbling I will not neglect my responsibilities. With regards to my curricular activities, I admit I am beginning to lag behind because of my assurance to not neglect my co-curricular activities. I will make time to catch up on reading and to ask around for help like I am supposed to according to what I just argued in 3000 words.