Interviewee Background

So I entered the University of Singapore in 1969 and practically got absorbed. And my head of department and the vice chancellor, who was then Dr Toh Chin Chye respected member of our community, deputy prime minister and all that he didn't see it fit for me to leave the university even though the Public Services Commission wanted me to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

So I finished the honours degree in 1973. Then they gave me a scholarship to do a master's degree, then the government gave me a Colombo Plan scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of Adelaide. So all of that took quite a few years, but from 1973 onwards, when I graduated with the honours degree, myself and another classmate called Maxwell LeBlond quite a famous Singaporean personality we were both immediately inducted into the teaching faculty of the university.

So that in brief is my career up till about 1991. I stayed on in the English Department [at the National University of Singapore]. The university moved from the Bukit Timah campus to the new Kent Ridge campus, so everything was now wonderfully embellished and all that. We had a great time discussing the politics of space in the use of the new university. This is interesting because the old university in Bukit Timah was structured along the old colleges of England, so East, West, North, South, right? And people, when they walked, you always met each other. So the science faculty, the arts faculty, the whatever faculty there were, you met in the quadrangles, the green. But this new university, you radiated out which meant that you almost never met anyone. You just sort of went out and there were no quadrangles and all that. And, of course, because I'd been involved in student union activities and all of that, this was a very quick reminder of how the government had, in a way, managed the university students. Because we were naughty, you know, we were young. And so in the old Bukit Timah campus, we used to demonstrate, lead matches down the quadrangles, protest and all of that. The Vice Chancellor would come down from his high office and say you guys are being very naughty, I'm going to get the police on you and all that, and once or twice he did. But in the new campus in Kent Ridge, there was no place to do that. There was no galvanisation of student power and that kind of thing. But guys like me by then were already on the other side, and what I found very interesting was that the swanky new facilities were very, very good, but a little bit of the old warmth that we all enjoyed at the cosy campus in Bukit Timah was somehow eroded. 

Anyway, I continued until 1991 when the newly born-again Nanyang Technological University because Mr Lee had shut down the old Nanyang University and for 10 years it remained as NTI, Nanyang Technological Institute and in 1991, he brought it back under a new name, NTU. So the university stages were restored. So they wanted somebody to help them set up a literature and drama department. So they asked for me. Anyway, cut a long story short, I was sent on secondment to NTU to set up this brand-new department called Division of Literature and Drama. So I did that. And I continued doing that.