MARCH 5 — Singapore’s universities are top-notch. The latest QS World University Rankings saw the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University graded among the world’s top 10 for several subjects. Other international rankings in recent years have suggested something similar.

Yet, one aspect of our academic prowess has not been addressed: Has Singapore produced world-class public intellectuals?

This must not be misinterpreted as academic elitism. After all, public intellectuals need not be university professors. To paraphrase the literary scholar Edward Said, a public intellectual is someone who articulates social issues in the public sphere, and oftentimes against the grain, to “alleviate human suffering”. Public intellectuals are thus guided by a sense of ethics, not populism.

Elsewhere, journalists, poets and civil activists have figured as public intellectuals — but so too academics.

Said himself was hailed as one. During his life, the Columbia University professor spoke about the sufferings of Palestinians and drew the world’s attention to the ways in which European colonisation of the Orient is nurtured through art and literature.

A more contemporary example is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky, given his sustained critiques of the excesses of American foreign policy.

Scaling the ivory tower

Before we can claim that Singapore has its fair share of Saids and Chomskys, let us turn our gaze to the ivory tower of the academia — a hurdle, I believe, to the flourishing of public intellectuals here.

In my days as a local journalist, I have heard reporters express exasperation when interviewing academics. They are too theoretical or removed from the ground, most say.

Today, as an academic, I continue to hear such complaints from not just within the media — but outside it too.

There is some truth to this. Academics in both the humanities and scientific fields can get trapped in obscure language that even their colleagues find hard to understand.

An extreme case of this is last month’s announcement by two respected scientific journals that they had mistakenly published 120 false papers produced by a piece of software.

There is little doubt that academics must express themselves clearer outside the university to be considered public intellectuals.

However, the academia’s ivory tower has also been structured by a general fear of abstract reasoning in our society.

By this, I mean that our dominant thought processes are far too governed by material realities and quantifiable results to see value in academic theories.

Driven by this fear, it is easy for the general public to dismiss academics as peddling “airy-fairy ideas”.

Scaling the ivory tower means accepting the value of abstract reasoning as a crucial part of anyone’s critical thinking process, especially that of public intellectuals.

Exercising academic freedom responsibly  

But the dearth of public intellectuals in Singapore also requires us to call out the elephant in our room — academic freedom. This issue dominated my social media feed last week after a complaint was lodged over a local academic’s Facebook post allegedly decrying “alternative modes of sexual orientation” as “cancers” and “diseases” to be cleansed.

It was not the first time that our universities have had to grapple with academic freedom. Some years back, University of Yale faculty members protested against the establishment of the Yale-NUS College on the belief that academic freedom here is restricted. Other examples abound.

In this latest case, though, debates about academic freedom gestures to the perennial issue of free speech and the right to offend.

Here, a netizen cites from the United Kingdom-based Academics for Academic Freedom campaign, which states “that academics, both inside and outside the classroom, have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward controversial and unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive”.

I am inclined to agree. There is merit in providing a “safe place” for a learned expert to test his or her ideas — even controversial ones — in the pursuit of scientific progress.

After all, some of the finest breakthroughs in human knowledge such as Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution went against “received wisdom” of their time. In fact, the latter is still disputed today.

It is undeniable that we need academic freedom to understand the workings of our natural world. Academic freedom begets cutting-edge science.

Beyond science, though, the value of academic freedom becomes murkier. I would like to purport that it is equally crucial for another reason — namely, the pursuit of a just world.

Here too, there have been breakthroughs. Take, for instance, Stuart Hall’s nuanced musings about racism. Closer to home, there is Mr Syed Hussein Alatas, who had dismantled the colonial myth of South-east Asia’s lazy natives.

Yes, these academics spoke against “received wisdom”. True, they have offended. Yet, what earned them the rightful mantle of “public intellectuals” are the “whos” and “hows” of their offence.

In both cases, their critiques were directed at a dominant power group — white majority in Britain for Hall and European colonialists eyeing South-east Asia for Alatas. In doing so, both display the sense of ethics typical of public intellectuals.

In Singapore’s context then, one needs to ask whether LGBTs can be considered a dominant power group.

A final distinction needs to be meted out as we talk about public intellectuals — the difference between academic freedom and hate speech. The former is a measured but critical postulation, while the latter involves some form of dehumanisation at play.

The dangers of dehumanisation can be gleaned in the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s, where the dominant Hutu tribe-people systematically dehumanised the minority Tutsis.

A scene from the Oscar-nominated movie Hotel Rwanda (2004) dramatises a Hutu leader dehumanising the Tutsis over public radio as “cockroaches” and “infestations” that must be “quashed”.

Singapore must protect academic freedom because it is crucial to scientific progress and the creation of a just world. Yet, we must also be careful not to equate academic freedom with hate speech — a mistake that no functioning public intellectual will commit if he or she seriously wishes to “alleviate human suffering” as the sagacious Said said. — Today

* Dr Nazry Bahrawi is a lecturer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and a research fellow at the Middle East Institute-National University of Singapore.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online