I REFER to Sunday's report, 'Students protest uni censorship'. In justifying its decision to prohibit its student media's coverage of a visit by the Singapore Democratic Party, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said it did not wish to publicise an unsolicited visit 'in furtherance of a political objective'.

The subtext is that NTU, as an educational institution, must remain neutral with respect to politics. This appeal to neutrality is mistaken. In excising one point of view (the opposition's), NTU, far from being neutral, is committing itself to a political viewpoint. The political viewpoint NTU adopts is inconsistent with its honour code, which enshrines the pursuit of truth and respect for the individual. These values inform the right to academic freedom, which, as legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes, is a structural part of any culture in which each individual is responsible for deciding, as a matter of personal conviction, what amounts to a good life and to a just political society.

This principle of ethical responsibility requires that certain fundamental questions be determined according to one's conscience, insulated from the state's view about what is good or right. It is a principle powerfully expressed in Article 15 of the Constitution as a right to religious freedom.

Singapore's universities, like all universities, have the special mission of promoting the ethical responsibility of its students, and of citizens more generally. This was the essence of why the National University of Singapore and NTU were corporatised in 2005. As then education minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said in Parliament: 'When you free up the external links, your real intent is to create a new internal culture.'

This view is echoed by Harvard professor Frederick Schauer, who argues that it is implicit in the university's special mission that it possesses institutional autonomy to explore unpopular ideas and challenge received orthodoxy.

Hence, while the Government may, under section 5 of the NTU Corporatisation Act, establish certain policies on higher education for NTU to implement, the precise implementation of those policies must be left to NTU's management.

Given that NTU, as a university, exists primarily as a long-standing project in promoting ethical responsibility, it is imperative, first, that its ethical and political culture be bracketed from politics more generally, and second, that this culture be formed organically, through free decisions by its students.

It is, therefore, disappointing that NTU's management imposed its own political viewpoint through censorship, for the stated reason that it is 'ultimately responsible' for the published contents of the Nanyang Chronicle and Spectrum TV. If anything, ultimate responsibility for expressed convictions must emanate from individual students themselves.

Zhong Zewei

This article was first published in The Straits Times on 9 Oct, 2008.

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