Top 10 NUS; Russell Square; Mood of London

Varsity's target: Break into 'top 10' in 20 years

Focus will be on high- level research, high international profile, leadership scheme

By Sandra Davie July 8, 2005 The Straits Times

THE National University of Singapore (NUS) yesterday mapped out how it will answer the call to rise and be among the world's top 10 universities.

Aiming to break into the top league in 20 years, it intends to focus on three areas: developing a high level of research, building a high international profile and boosting a special leadership programme.

NUS president Shih Choon Fong unveiled this game plan yesterday when he launched this year's commencement for about 8,000 graduands.

It comes one week after Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan challenged NUS to go beyond its 18th best university global ranking by the Times of London and be in the Top 10.

Said Professor Shih yesterday: 'NUS has the right ingredients to move forward into the top 10.'

He believes a key factor is raising NUS' profile across the world. It has begun its mission.

NUS will form an alliance with the world's top research universities. Eight have agreed and they include the Australian National University, and Yale University and University of California, Berkeley in the United States.

Once it is formed, NUS will set up a 'global university town' in Singapore where top academics and students from member universities will congregate to do research.

NUS is also likely to be home to a new institute that is planned among the 36 members of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, which Prof Shih heads.

To be called the Asia Pacific World Institute, it will gather the best academic minds to research scientific, social and economic issues of global importance.

Crucial to this build-up is ground-breaking research, said Prof Shih, who pinpointed several areas where NUS can make its mark.

One is multidisciplinary research such as that done at the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering.

There, research is conducted by teams of engineers, mathematicians, computer experts, medical scientists as well as social scientists.

'Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the future are more likely to be made in intersections of disciplines,' he said.

The game plan cannot be complete unless NUS produces outstanding graduates, a point raised by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew last Sunday at a dinner to mark the centennial of the NUS medical faculty.

To produce such graduates, NUS needs to attract able students. It plans to do so through its university scholars programme, which every year offers its most talented 180 students three options: do research, be an entrepreneur or focus on bicultural studies.

Those who pick the bicultural track, for example, can spend their first two years here and complete their course in an NUS partner university - Beijing University.

Students who want to make their mark in business can spend a year in NUS overseas colleges in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley in the US, Shanghai or Stockholm.

Prof Shih is confident that, 'with a dynamic Asia propelled by the rising economies of China and India, the Top 10 club will surely include Asian members within the next two decades.'

Another key strategy to get into the Top 10 would probably be to persuade the Times to retain their current measurements and weightings of factors for the rankings. :p

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Russell Square is still cordoned off today, and it's rather quiet I must say. The park is closed. The IOE is deserted. mmmh. The main activity today seems to be in the area between SOAS and IOE, where Socialists are trying to recruit to their cause. *sighz*

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And from James Meek, an article that expresses well the feeling of fellow London-ers:

'Savagely woken from a pleasant dream' Londoners woke yesterday still basking in the warm glow of their Olympic triumph. Then came the news they had dreaded - and half expected - since September 2001. James Meek walks through the streets of a suddenly pedestrian city

Friday July 8, 2005 The Guardian

All the shock was Wednesday's: London's Olympic day. All the horror belonged to Thursday: London's day of bombs. And the fact we were not surprised makes it no easier. No easier to know, now, that on that mild grey morning, among the millions moving through London's transport system, with their banal thoughts of delays and meetings and lunch and holidays and money, were a handful of people whose thoughts were not banal at all.

Like many east Londoners, I went to bed last night astounded to find myself living within walking distance of the Olympic Games. Like many, I woke up not in the least surprised to find myself living within walking distance of a ruthlessly executed act of mass murder.

I take the 73 bus between Hackney and central London most days and, on Wednesday, for the first time ever, the driver made a news announcement over the PA. "For those who are interested," he said, "London has been chosen to host the 2012 Olympic Games." Nobody could quite believe it.

Next morning the same bus drew up at the stop outside my house, the doors opened, and for the second time ever, the driver made a news announcement. A different sort of announcement. It was easy to believe. But did it have to be so soon? As I walked towards Newington Green, on my way to central London, I passed a delivery van from London's Evening Standard newspaper travelling in the opposite direction. "Thursday's breaking news," proclaimed a poster stuck to the side. "Olympic Triumph Special Supplement."

I stood in a doorway for a moment to shelter from the rain and call my wife, who was working not far from Russell Square. As we spoke a man passed me, one hand pushing a baby in a buggy, the other hand pressing his mobile to his ear. "... I was just worried ..." I overheard him say.

Walking down Essex Road, which leads from the border of Hackney through Islington towards King's Cross and the western edge of the City, everybody was talking; sometimes to each other, mostly to their loved ones on their mobiles. The networks were strained but just about coping. You kept hearing snatches of conversation as the news spread and people confronted the sudden reduction of London to a pedestrian city. "... bus is blown up ..." "... really nasty ..." " ... I'm just waitin' ..." " ... they've all got bastard attitudes ... ".

Even those who weren't speaking on their mobiles were holding them in their hands, expecting them to ring, waiting for a signal, or just as talismans of the idea of order, of the idea that this last electronic totem of technology and civilisation would lead them through a rude intrusion of chaos.

Here, only 20 minutes' walk from the immense security cordon thrown around inner London, half the people you met were beginning to acquire the kind of set, dogged, suffering face you see in refugees, and half were going about their business. They were delivering mushrooms, they were drinking pints in the Green Man, they were looking in estate agents' windows at the Angel, Islington. A grand hearse led a funeral cortege away from WG Miller's the undertakers. Death, like life, went on.

It was only when you got to the shuttered gates of Angel tube station that the full sense of a capital in the grip of an emergency began to sink in. The Angel crossroads, leading to Clerkenwell, the City and King's Cross, was thick with pedestrians marching on unexpected journeys. It was the kind of weary crowd of clerks on foot that stimulated entrepreneurs into building the Underground railway, the world's first, 142 years ago. In the last century, in two great wars, the Underground protected the people of London from bombs. One ad for the tube in the first world war read: "It is bomb-proof down below. Underground for safety; plenty of bright trains, business as usual." In this century, in a war without clear aims, end or sides, it has become - as, for four years, we have more than half expected - a place where bombs go off.

For anyone who has lived in London for more than a few years, the tube map is more than a map on the wall. It burns itself into the brain, like the circuit diagram its design is based on. At news of any disruption, little stretches of it flash red, and almost without thinking, you try to chart a way round the obstruction. For the whole system to be sealed up without warning is to find the ground beneath your feet, paradoxically, to be not so solid as it was.

There was another transport network. Even before Madrid, there was a claustrophobic unease about the tube, and ever more Londoners were acquiring another mental transport map, the complex map of the city's bus routes. There was a certain pride in knowing how to hop from route to route to get where you wanted without ever going underground. There was a special, slightly chippy pride for us in Hackney, the only inner-London borough without a tube station of its own. And up on the surface, particularly in the light space of the upper deck of a red double decker bus, looking down on the traffic and bustle in the streets below, you felt safe.

In retrospect, a London bus was an obvious target, a symbol of the city and, coincidentally or otherwise, of 2012 - the No 30 goes to the heart of London from Hackney Wick, part of the future Olympics site. Terrorists have put bombs on buses in Israel and Moscow.

Yet deep down, I suppose, I never really believed a bus would be a target either honourable enough, or justifiable enough for a terrorist. It is still a poor person's means of transport. Looking at the pictures of that ripped apart vehicle I know the cold, cheap feel of those nasty orange poles for hanging on to, and the abrasive feel of the fabric of those nasty blue seats, and think of all the faces of tired hard-working people and student tourists and truanting teenagers looking down from the windows into the prosperous world of Bloomsbury, and just hoping to get on with something good.

London buses, particularly the buses between Hackney and the centre, are also filled with immigrants, and it is very possible that if a bomb exploded in any one of them, it would kill and maim at least one person from every continent and of every major faith. On any busy Hackney bus you'll hear a dozen different languages besides English: Albanian, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, French or Yoruba.

I liked to think one of the reasons the Olympics was coming to east London was that every member of every national Olympics committee knew someone who lived there. Sitting at a cafe in Hackney not far from the No 30 route a few days ago, just back from the religious strictness of Iran, I watched the different religions pass by: a young girl in a school playground version of the hijab - jeans, T-shirt and a black wimple - and a woman in another, a black chadoor which only showed her eyes; an Orthodox Jew from Stamford Hill, with his long black coat and black broad-brimmed hat; and all the secular post-Christians with their bare heads and hipster jeans. It seemed an idyll of live and let live.

On my way from home yesterday morning I popped into one of the local newsagents to buy batteries. He was talking sadly on the phone about the atrocities and as he served me I remembered going into the same shop, at about the same time, on the morning of September 11 2001. The newsagent is Asian and I remembered that while I was in there a white woman in her 50s had put her head round the door and said to him: "Don't worry, we know you didn't want this."

It was an uneasy, backhanded sort of reassurance. The kind of "don't worry" that, if I were the newsagent, would make me worried. Now we are all very worried. Worried about our neighbour and worried that our neighbour is worrying about us. Our neighbour at home; our neighbour on the tube; our neighbour on the top deck of the No 30. Live and let live may have won us the Olympics but live and let live may not be enough. Londoners may have to learn to do the thing they hate more than anything else in the world: talking to strangers on the bus.