President’s Message laurels. As the Zen master Suzuki Roshi puts it, “Everything is perfect… and there is plenty of room for improvement!” I am as excited to share with you some of the big plans I have for NUS as I am proud of our accomplishments. In a place as dynamic and forward-looking as Singapore, NUS too does not stand still. We do not simply reproduce society, but seek to transform it. We also do not just curate knowledge, but create it afresh. And if there is any disruption happening, we’ll be the ones doing it. COVID-19 has shown how quickly normalcy can unravel. It took only weeks of the pandemic for our operating assumptions to fail. Very quickly, we were forced to de- and re-construct our mental models of how society and the world work and by extension, how NUS ought to respond. It gives me great pleasure to pen the introduction to the inaugural impact report for NUS. As with all reports, the bulk of what you will read here is retrospective, and necessarily so. Nevertheless, it would be highly remiss of me to only focus on our achievements or even the works currently in progress without talking about our plans for the future. The impacts we intend but have yet to make.
Categories created based on these assumptions, and definitions of what belongs where, can as easily be challenged. This goes for categories within the University: for the disciplines that are significant enough, we name them and carve out spaces for them. We should not be overly attached to our disciplines and the boundaries we have etched between them, for they can hinder adaptability.
In 2020, NUS celebrated its 115th anniversary. By some reckoning, it is an old institution. By others, it is young. There is a famous quote by the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca the Younger that goes, “As is a tale, so too life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
As the world becomes more complex, a virulent disease will not be the last of our “wicked problems”, problems that can mutate and make a mockery of our disciplinary boundaries. Our students, problem-solvers of the future, must be able to operate unconstrained by knowledge categories, to integrate knowledge and skills across disciplines. And the University, for its research, innovations, and enterprises, will only benefit from exploring untapped margins between disciplines.
I believe this report will show that, whether seen as young or old, on many fronts NUS has been very good indeed. But we will not rest on our
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NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE IMPACT REPORT 2020
