by Edgar Liao

During my research for my Honours Thesis (which addressed the topic of student activism), I combed through student publications produced in the early years of the University.[i] Some of these publications can be found in the Singapore / Malaysia and Rare Books collections of the Central Library in NUS. And there, I found treasure – traces and archives of some less-remembered facets of the history of the institution and of Singapore.

The various Halls and student societies had produced several journals, resulting in a fascinating range of content. Hall magazines illustrated the hostelites’ camaraderie forged through regular activities within the conducive hostel environment, while Medico, the medical students’ journal, drew flak for its over-excessive sexual jibes and innuendoes, and the New Cauldron by the Raffles Society concerned itself with all things literary.

Other works took on a more political nature. Evidence of university students being politicized by the tumultuous circumstances in Malaya during and after the Second World War comes from explicitly political publications, produced to stir the student body’s political consciousness. The earliest examples of these are the Malayan Orchid and the Lark – both mentioned in Yeo Kim Wah’s seminal work on student activism in the early 1950s - (”Student Politics in University of Malaya, 1949-51″ in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (September 1992), pp.346-380).

The Dominance of Fajar

The most renowned of this sub-genre remains Fajar, the organ of the left-wing University Socialists Club (USC). Unfortunately, within the Singapore Story, the group remains too starkly associated with the 1954 Fajar trials, and its legitimisation of Lee Kuan Yew’s left-wing credibility. As a result, the USC has a prominence which tends to overshadow and effacing the diversity of political opinions and expressions of student activism in the University. In actuality, the USC seem to represent only a vocal, albeit influential, minority within the student body.

Fajar remains a banned publication, and cannot be located on LINC (the Central Library’s search engine) or accessed without authorization. Thanks to a letter from my supervisor, I got that authorisation. “What can be cooler than quoting from Fajar?”, she said (though not in those exact words).

Student days in the Undergrad

Another critical source of information about University students was the organ of the Students’ Union, the Malayan Undergrad (later the Singapore Undergrad). Within its yellowed pages, one could find publicity efforts and post-event reports on social and sporting activities on campus, academic happenings such as exhibitions, and the occasional guest lecture by a visiting luminary. There were even occasional poetry and prose pieces.

The Undergrad also featured regular opinion-pieces, editorials and complaints by University students and, sometimes, even the staff. These pertained to issues ranging from the serious, e.g. the students’ political position vis-à-vis the University administration, to the controversial, e.g. the recurring matter of ragging (very much unlike the boisterous festivities known as Rag-and-Flag Day today!), to the slightly insignificant, e.g. hostelites protesting about poor hall facilities or unpalatable hall meals. The Undergrad also served as the vehicle of expression for the more politically active members of the student body, voicing out their plethora of opinions, ideologies and concerns fuelled by youthful idealism.

One interesting aspect of ploughing through these sources was coming across familiar names, underlining the brevity of modern Singapore history. The names also suggest another start-point for a fuller and richer understanding of the University’s history, i.e. from the perspective of students. Their time as students is part of the institution’s past, and also perhaps a critical formative experience of these individuals and their peers.

Some of these names have returned to become part of the institution. In the Kritik, the journal of the Philosophical Society started from 1959/1960 for example, a student named Ten Chin Liew wrote prolifically on liberal ideology. Presently, he is the Head of the Philosophy Department.

Kwa Chong Guan, familiar to Singapore scholars, and students taking the SSA2211 module (The Evolution of a Global City-state), wrote in the Singapore Undergrad in the mid-sixties. In a 1967 National Day issue for example, he questioned the possibility of creating a Singapore culture, an issue which starkly remains with us today.

In addition, it was fascinating to discover that Wang Gungwu, the doyen of Overseas Chinese Studies, was a flamboyant, multi-talented literary pioneer during his days at the University, a revelation derived from his writings in the Undergrad and the literary collections of the period, and backed up by Patrick Anderson’s impressions of him in his memoirs, Snake Wine. Furthermore, Wang found the time to be a student activist and leader, and co-founder of the University Socialist Club.

And naturally, the current leaders and politicians of Singapore were also using these publications as a platform to practise and express their political views in their student days. There is an inescapable irony when you consider some of the then vocal student critics of the PAP government – such as Tommy Koh (now Ambassador-at-large for Singapore), Kishore Mahbubani (Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy) and S. Jayakumar (Deputy Prime Minister) among others.

The Yakking of the Yakkity-Yak

Yet, the most interesting student publication that I came across – but unfortunately found little use for my HT due to its nature – is the Yakkity-Yak. I had no idea what kind of a document it was when I randomly requested for it. Its badly-fading red hard-cover, with the words Yakkity-Yak scribbled with a white marker on it, hardly provided any clues.

I opened the unassuming cover and was immediately greeted by the headline of a report on the sacking of University’s Vice-chancellor Alexis Opium-time. Another smaller headline on the same page trumpets ‘Sensational murder in Varsity Campus, see pg 4’. Alexander Oppenheim was indeed Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1957-1962 but there was no other corroborating source about his sacking or a murder on the campus…

It soon became clear what Yakkity-Yak really was. Think mrbrown; but in printed form during the 1960s. The Yakkity-Yak was a satirical annual newsletter published on the occasion of Welfare Week – a designated week each year when the students would engage in charitable activities and similar projects in line with the “Be with the people” policy that the Students Councils embraced from the late 1950s. Its ostensible purpose was unsurprisingly to raise funds.

The writers of the newsletter, ostensibly motivated by a streak of anti-establishmentarianism and imbued with the spirit of flippancy, continuously poke fun at university and government policies as well as issues on campus. For example, some aspects of the PAP’s rhetoric towards the University then were mocked by a report in the 1961 issue about university staff having to be relocated from the ‘300 feet tall ivory tower in the University’ in which they were accommodated. The reason for the move - the tower had to be demolished because it was ‘a colonial replica and the sooner we get rid of it the better’ (Yakkity-Yak 1961, Vol. 1 No. 3, p.2).

A dig at the PAP’s cultural policies depicted a word ‘Censored’ stamped diagonally across a column with no text, headlined ‘Yellow Culture Column’ (Yakkity-Yak 1961, Vol. 1 No. 3, p.2). Another more flippant article screams the headline ‘Girl Found Raped’ and goes on to report about a fresh-woman participating in an orientation game and successfully meeting the objective of finding another student named James Raped. The library holds about ten years’ worth of similar stuff, starting in 1959.

In sum, an integral part of what the ten weeks of researching for my HT had meant to me remains the excitement and thrill of digging and exploring and finding things you never ever expected. These gems include the rich collection of student publications from the University of old through which, for those of us who have been part of NUS, our predecessors had left us their worlds and their words, their thoughts and experiences of their own search for brave new worlds.

Yet, it is the differences between the present and the time when these forerunners roamed about the University’s walkways which are most striking. A comparison of publications reveals dissimilarities, which must inevitably be explained in terms of the development of the University.

In a newly-forged nation trying to exist in a world undergoing decolonization and ideological polarisation, changes in the University’s environment and culture, its position and purpose were perhaps inevitable. Considering the socio-political milieu and changes it had to grapple with, this enticingly opens up new grounds for historical inquiry.

The author will be graduating from the Department of History, National University of Singapore with his BA (Hons) in July. He will be entering the Masters programme in the same department come August 2007.

[i] University of Malaya (1949-1959); University of Malaya in Singapore (1959-1962); University of Singapore (1962-1980); National University of Singapore (NUS) (from 1980 onwards).

Tags: NUS, student publications, University of Singapore, writing honours thesis

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