Fomative Years

Early Years at NUS

Research, Teaching &
Service as Essential
Facets of Professorship

The System and Culture
of NUS Today

Conclusion

Osmosis and Balance in the Professorial Vocation: A Profile of Professor Andy Hor (p2/5)

Academic Journeys, no. 1, January 2011

2. EARLY YEARS AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

While at Oxford, Andy received a promotional brochure from NUS, which invited applications for faculty positions. He applied, but heard nothing at first. Then, six months into his post-doctoral term at Yale, he received the unexpected news that he had been shortlisted for a lectureship at NUS. Invited to interviews conducted at the Singapore Embassy in Washington DC and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Andy was subsequently offered a position at NUS. The decision to take up the offer was not going to be easy, as he had come to really appreciate the life of a researcher at Yale. NUS, at the time, was hardly a global name and Singapore was even considered to be a Third-World country by some of his friends and labmates. After much deliberation though, the pragmatist in Andy realized that it was more realistic to take up a tenure-track position at a ‘national’ university than to continue at Yale and then look for a more prestigious academic position in an Ivy League university or a US$100,000 salary from a job in the chemical or pharmaceutical industry in the US. At NUS, the path of his academic advancement seemed much clearer. He could take a step at a time, prove his worth, establish a name for himself, and look out for the next opportunity. Andy decided to make the move, joining the NUS Chemistry Department in 1984, at a relatively young age of 28. It was a pragmatic decision and, in retrospect, a right one. Enjoying academic life in Singapore decades after making this decision, Andy is convinced that NUS has given him all the support that he needed at that initial stage of his career.

Reflection 15: Before deciding to join NUS, what were your other options? What made you choose NUS? In hindsight, what disadvantages have you experienced because of this choice? What advantages have you gained, expectedly and unexpectedly, in choosing to join NUS? What general advice would you give colleagues, students, and alumni who have to choose from among different academic institutions (for work or studies)?

At that time, NUS was in large part a teaching institution. Lecturers were generally ‘tenured’ after six to nine years of service. Research was not emphasized and many academics did not exert themselves in that area. In this regard, Andy was fortunate to have started his career in a department that actually encouraged its junior faculty to excel not only in teaching, but also in research. Where research was concerned, Chemistry was, at the time, among the leading departments in the entire university. Its Head, Professor Ang Kok Peng, was a politician and a very senior and authoritative figure who advised Andy to start his research programme early. This was not typically something that junior faculty in other departments would have been encouraged to do.

Reflection 16: Who was your first mentor (formal or informal) at the start of your academic career? What advice did you get? Did you get conflicting advice from others? What do you think of all this advice, looking back today? Is it important for university departments to have a formal system of mentorship for new faculty? If so, what should such a system aim to do and how should it be done?

Other Chemistry professors that Andy looked up to included Huang Hsing Hua, then Deputy Vice Chancellor of NUS, and Koh Lip Lin, who was also a politician and had been the Dean of Science before Andy came on board. Ang, Huang, and Koh were all research-active and well ahead of their time. In general, though, the department’s research culture was rather relaxed. Facilities and equipment were not as advanced or easily available as they are today. Half the faculty were not research-active and there were few who could manage to publish about three or four papers a year. It seemed to Andy that those who published actively did so not because they felt threatened or insecure, but because they had a genuine passion for research. Salary increments were set at S$125 per year with a rare provision for a doubleincrement to reward excellent research. A number of research-active faculty had modest grants that were sufficient to support a very small team of graduate students and research assistants. The real reward for doing research was, however, intrinsic. Those days, as Andy recalls, were happy ones.

Reflection 17: What motivates you to do research? Would you do as well or even better with more external inducements? Has the pressure to produce publications helped or hindered your research?

But that was also an environment that produced a number of high achievers and academic leaders, such as:

Today, the quality of research at NUS is significantly higher than in the 1980s, when the university was not really looking to be highly ranked internationally. In fact, faculty were not at that time told that they needed to compete internationally and be at the forefront of research. They were simply encouraged to produce good work. Today, there are many more categories of research funding available and applications are more rigorously assessed. Startup money for research projects can be as high as S$1 million. Unfortunately, as Andy laments, many faculty have become so focused on building their research teams that they have lost the motivation to teach well.

Reflection 18: Have you ever felt that your teaching duties have become an unwelcome distraction from your research work? If so, how has this feeling affected your ability to teach well? How have you dealt with this feeling?

When he joined the department, Andy was first assigned to teach second-year courses, but was soon after asked to teach first-year courses. Looking back, he recalls taking quite naturally to the task of teaching. He looked forward every year to engaging with a new freshmen class. It was, as he recalls, a joy and privilege to be able to influence young minds. Almost two decades later, when he won the NUS Outstanding Educator Award, the selection committee noted his excellence in freshmen teaching. Recently, Andy received an email message from a former student who has just become his colleague. It read:

I was once your student in your basic inorganic class, 10 years ago, in the year 2000. I am glad to see you here in IMRE again, :). Your teaching style is indeed very memorable, very different from other lecturers, with the true and false questions, food for thoughts verses, :). I can still remember that you mentioned although you are the head of the department, you will still make the effort to teach all year 1 students, :). I am grateful for your teaching and thanks for being an excellent educator in our community.

Not long after he joined the Chemistry Department, Andy began to teach students in the Direct Honours programme, where he faced the challenge of teaching the top students in the faculty.

Reflection 19: What was the first course that you were assigned to teach? What are the challenges of teaching first-year courses? Is it a good idea for new faculty to be assigned to teach first-year courses? What are the challenges of teaching upper-level courses? Is it a good idea for new faculty to be assigned to teach upper-level courses?

Andy remembers the undergraduates of the Chemistry Department in the 1980s to be lively, talented, and focused on learning. He enjoyed good relationships with his students, many of whom – such as the following – went on to work in industry or in the education service.

Yan Yaw Kai, now a professor at the National Institute of Education (NIE), was a M.Sc. student at NUS under Andy’s guidance. He recalls how

One truly appreciates the meaning of the phrase ‘values are caught, not taught’ when one works with Andy. His enthusiasm and seriousness in research and concern for the welfare of his students are evident right from the start, and tend to rub off on those around him. While expecting high standards of performance from his students, Andy provides a corresponding level of support to enable them to meet his expectations. More than 15 years after completing my M.Sc. under Andy’s guidance, I can still count on him to provide good counsel on my development as an academic.

Reflection 20: Do you keep track of where your students have gone after graduation? Do you maintain a relationship with your students after they have graduated?

Over the years, there has been a noticeable change in the character of NUS students. Andy suggests that this may have been a result of the new modular curriculum structure introduced in the late 1990s and the increasingly decentralized nature of courses where larger numbers of students come together for shorter courses (or modules), some of which are of a cross-faculty nature. Honours classes have become much larger, so students may not get to know everyone in their classes as well as previous cohorts used to. This has also meant that each faculty member typically supervises the work of a larger number of Honours students. Inevitably, there is less time for individual attention. With its growing international stature, NUS has also become much more attractive to students from overseas. As Andy recalls, the first students from China started to come to NUS about six years after he arrived in Singapore. Students from the Indian subcontinent followed soon after. Over the decades, the flow of students has come to include many other nationalities.

Reflection 21: Do you detect a change in the character of the NUS student body over the years? If so, are things better or worse than they used to be? Have you had to adjust your teaching practice in any way?

His department Head, who was also a parliamentarian and Singapore’s first ambassador to Japan in 1968, was skilled at mobilizing people. Although Andy was new to the department, he was invited by the Head to take on some departmental responsibilities. He was sent to Brunei for a year on secondment to teach at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. It was an eye-opening experience to teach at a level that he considered rather elementary. It also provided an opportunity for him to grasp the finer points of teaching basic concepts in Chemistry. Upon his return, he was appointed convenor for second-year students, a challenge for a junior staff member without any experience in student management or counselling. When Professor Bernard Tan, then Dean of Science, set up a new Instructional Development Unit, he invited Andy to chair it. Andy accepted without hesitation. Later, he was part of a team – including Professor Tan Eng Chye (now Provost of NUS) and Professor Lim Tit Meng (now Director of the Singapore Science Centre) – that set up the Special Programme in Science (SPS) in the Faculty of Science. This programme for ‘gifted’ students in the Faculty of Science later became the model for the Core Curriculum and then the Talent Development Programme. When the idea for a Core Curriculum was mooted, Andy served on the Science Faculty’s secretariat and, in this capacity, worked with the Core Curriculum’s Director, Professor Shih Choon Fong, who later became the President of NUS. Even as a young faculty member, he was eager to accept the challenge of administrative responsibilities. For one thing, he was able to acquire and hone administrative skills that would become especially useful later in his career.

Reflection 22: What kinds of administrative and service responsibilities are appropriate for younger faculty? What were you expected to do at the start of your career? How did you feel about being (or not being) given these responsibilities at the early stages of your career? In hindsight, would or could you have done things differently? How important is it to find administrative and service opportunities that enable one to work closely with high-achieving members of the university?