Selecting General Electives For The New University

 So one of the understood things that we had as a team was to say that one way in which the SMU graduate will be distinctly different from the NUS and NTU would be we try to make him as all rounded as possible. So what I did was to get people like Patrick Loh, who does science kind of thing, and we said we're going to get you into doing the scientific thing because you run farms, you got organic things involved, so you're going to carve out a new kind of syllabus which will teach people entrepreneurship, the business strategies by which you can set things up. I got a historian from NUS, Malcolm Murfett to come and teach history. But I said the history we're going to teach here is not your usual history. I said, maybe think of four major business major icons say you take the Sony boss; you take the big giant, Bill Gates; you take two from Asia, two from the West, bring them together as a case study because the history of these giants is also a history of the times. You know what I mean? Could this have happened when World War II was going on? What kind of giants emerged from that? Was it defence equipment, defence products that would be the biggest sellers at that time? Or were the defences already in place and they created the war just to make sure the defence weapons sold? So I said, tease your students and all that. 

So I picked people I knew, I picked people who were themselves very, very brilliant. Life is not always very kind to the people who are really brilliant. So some of them were frustrated where they were, and so they were very happy to grab at this new opportunity to teach a course which they themselves put in place. Because these courses didn't have to go through the university committees and all of this. What went through the university committee is the broad thing, the creation of a general elective program. And the rest was left to me, and I left it to my wonderful people who came from all over the blooming That's how we went. We wanted to create the East-West thing so we had dances East and West, music East and West, everything East and West, and I insisted on that. Some of the modules still carry on having that same name, East and West. Some of them have changed over time. 

But the idea was to create a person who was sensitive, not just to the East, because the idea was a global experience. The new graduate would fit anywhere in the world. The old graduate would fit in Singapore as a wonderful employee. But the new graduate has to be a wonderful employee, whether in Chicago or Dubai or Shanghai or Malaysia, Sabah, Sarawak, wherever he or she found the opportunity. So that created the platform by which I chose my professors. I chose professors obviously quite deviously as well. I chose good ones, good rankings and highly respected individuals so the students felt like, wow, they're being taught by somebody special not the ordinary run-of-the-mill prof, that kind of thing. So it was quite an exciting time, yes.