The following article was published in the Business Times on 25 Oct 2003.
Striking a delicate balance
Business Times Singapore, 25 October 2003
YES, he had some sleepless nights a few months ago when two of his 'star' professors were embroiled in a public dispute with the Ministry of Manpower over their interpretation of foreign worker statistics.
'Arrrgh, I guess it did!' Dr Su Guaning admitted, now laughing, when asked if the episode gave him anxiety and more. 'Because, on the one hand, these two are very valuable members of the faculty,' he said, referring to Chen Kang and Tan Khee Giap, economists in Nanyang Business School who have been producing biannual forecasts and doing policy analysis on the Singapore economy for years.
'On the other hand, if it causes a political storm, it is not particularly good for the university, so we had to ... find some resolution.'
The 'resolution', eventually, saw the two professors conceding, in qualified terms, an error in interpreting the labour data on foreigners' share of new jobs created in Singapore.
What if the two professors had staunchly stood their ground?
'Well, it is always possible to go and argue it out in a very public manner in the press and all that, but I think it does nobody any good,' said Dr Su. 'So I think it's best when something like that happens to keep it off the front pages and have more of a private consultation. But that's probably an exception, I would say. I would hesitate to draw a conclusion from (the episode) that people should be ultra-careful and self-censor; I wouldn't encourage academics to do that.'
The impact on faculty morale 'was a little severe in the beginning', he said. 'But now, with the issue having passed, I think it has come down quite a lot, and I think - I can't speak for everyone, but from my point of view - it's sort of back to how it was, maybe with a little bit of greater caution among the academic staff, just in case they step on some painful issues that have political implications.'
The incident is, 'in some sense, part of the experience that we'd have to go through, in terms of our local environment and how we should operate', he added.
'So I wouldn't look at it too negatively. I'd say, let's move on, and we shouldn't hesitate to bring out things. But I do think it is useful, to some extent, to have some consultation process - for example, on whether this is going to be a politically sensitive thing.'
And that, of course, is itself fraught with pitfalls. 'We have to be careful about that, because if you have too much of a consultation process, you lose your objectivity. But on the other hand, if you ask all the academics, please consult before you put out something, I think you're going to have a big problem because nobody's going to bother to do anything! So that's another balance we're going to have to strike.'.
