Fitting NTU to a T

Fitting NTU to a T

With engineering at its core, NTU should be the university with exciting interfaces between different disciplines rather than follow a comprehensive model like Harvard or Berkeley said NTU Provost Bertil Andersson.
“There’s a lot of new knowledge today and what students require is inter-disciplinarity,” he told the Enquirer in a recent interview.

“No one wants to be just an engineer; no one wants to be just a scientist. Young people today want to have a broader base; they want to look at the totality and to understand more things.”“No one wants to be just an engineer; no one wants to be just a scientist. Young people today want to have a broader base; they want to look at the totality and to understand more things.”

And NTU’s strength lies in its ability to be a university “based upon engineering and science, but having these interfaces”.

For example, combining engineering with biology creates new devices and biomaterial while engineering with business is “very important for the industry”, Prof Andersson explained.

About half of the current university undergraduate population are engineering students, and the university has marketed itself as one which offers a well-rounded global education with a distinctive edge in science and technology, according to its website.

In a speech at NTU’s 50th anniversary celebration four years ago, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong challenged NTU to choose between the Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) model.

“Both are outstanding institutions. But whereas Harvard is strong in all disciplines, MIT builds its reputation on its Science and Engineering schools, even though its Humanities and Social Sciences departments are world class,” PM Lee said. “NTU has to choose between these two models. You can aspire to be either like Harvard or MIT, but you cannot aspire to be both.”

If NTU were to become the MIT of the East, its name should stick added Prof Andersson, using the Ivy League in the United States as a comparison.

“If you look at the Nobel prizes in the last 50 years after World War II, which universities have the most Nobel prizes?” said Prof Andersson, currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Nobel Foundation.

“It’s Harvard – it’s a comprehensive university. No 2 is Berkeley, it’s a comprehensive university. And No 3 is Oxford, Cambridge, also comprehensive.”

However, in the last 15 years MIT, Stanford and Caltech are first, second and third respectively with Harvard ninth on the list, he said to prove his point.

“Many of these universities have a “T” in their names. MIT is not just engineering; it also has humanities, so it’s also an interdisciplinary university but the engineering is in the center,” said Prof Andersson, adding that comprehensive universities may be too diluted to really concentrate on their research efforts.

Hence there’s no reason for NTU to drop the “T” from its name. “The ‘N’ is for Nanyang, the ‘T’ is for Technological, the ‘U’ is for University – I think everyone has its share,” he said. “And then the ‘T’ stands for the core of the university.”

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