Risks Involved

The only risk as Kee Yang [Low Kee Yang] told me was if the government changed its mind and shut down the university a year after it was formulated or whatever. But he said that the Singapore government is known throughout the world for one thing that once its made up its mind to do something, it's decisive, its resolved, and usually it doesn't like to admit that it failed. So he said will at least have a ten-year run, and he says, since a few of us and I saw the names and I knew Chin Tiong [Tan Chin Tiong] from the old university and I knew Kee Yang, most of these people, Pang Yang Hoong and Michael Gan, they were colleagues in the old university and so I said, well, if you guys think it's ok, who am I, I'll join you guys. We're all together in this. So that was it. So, I saw lots of opportunities because they knew about me, and they knew my positions about certain university policies and all that, and they said, SMU is going to do away with everything that you didn't like in NUS [National University of Singapore] or in NTU. It's going to be a brand new university; it's going to be totally autonomous. We're going to be powerful, we will have the say; we will forge a new tertiary landscape. So I saw that, wow, at last my day has come, that kind of thing.