Daringly Different: The Making of the Singapore Management University

• Main Author: TAN, Kevin Y. L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Singapore Management University; SMU; university administration; Singapore education; higher education; Asian Studies; Business; Higher Education
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/smu_oh/26; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=smu_oh
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This is a book about the founding and early years of Asia’s first university in the 21st century - the Singapore Management University or SMU. It provides a background to tertiary education in Singapore to set the scene and offer the reader a glimpse of the landscape in which the remarkable changes leading to SMU’s establishment, and ramifications flowing therefrom, took place. So many of the key actors who were intimately connected to this grand story are still around and actively engaged in the life of SMU, and thus the book benefitted greatly from first-hand interviews with a number of them. Another resource is the series of interviews commissioned by the Li Ka Shing Library and mostly conducted by Pat Meyer under its Conceptualising SMU oral history project. This allowed the key actors to tell SMU’s story in their own voices. This is not a definitive history of SMU’s first 15 years but rather a snapshot of how it came to be established, how it was built, and how it has impacted Singapore’s educational landscape. The book shares with you that exciting, daring journey which SMU’s pioneers undertook in creating an institution that stood convention on its head and which committed itself to educating a different kind of Singapore student.