Prof Su Guaning steps down as President of NTU

So after 8 rather tumultous years, Prof Su Guaning steps down as President of NTU.

It seems not to have been an easy time for him managing the transition between the past and the future. I guess it never is. But NTU has always seemed like it lacked the ability to learn from the 'mistakes' NUS made during her transition. It had clearly been a painful process for the NUS, and NTU proceeding half a step behind could have avoided some of the pitfalls that NUS appeared to have made, but somehow it did not, and in the process, generated a lot of unnecessary heat and heartaches.

Not a good thing when you want to cultivate supportive alumni.

So I wish the new President, Prof Bertil Andersson all the best, though I am not too hopeful as he seems to have developed a reputation for being far more brutal and cold in his approach towards academic excellence; perhaps good for university rankings, but not necessarily best for students and staff.

Do we need to be concerned that 3 out the 4 local universities have foreign Prezzies? Nahhh....It's not a big deal. Locals are not necessarily more considerate of local cultures and needs, since they can be just as cold and heartless in their pursuit of institutional KPIs.

I am actually far more concerned that all 4 of our varsities have missions to be at the top of their league. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means we will have no universities that cater to the average students who do not necessarily want to be Nobel Prize winners. Take for example, the medical schools we have. If all of our 2 + 1 medical schools strive to train clinical researchers par excellence, then who will train good doctors; doctors who care, but do not necessarily win academic awards, and chase fame and fortune?

Doctor's ethics in Singapore - the Tan Tock Seng Hospital study

Salma Khalik reported on the Tan Tock Seng Hospital survey of doctor's ethics recently.

I think the TTSH study is to be commended because I think we need to keep examining this issue and to keep a close watch of our local attitudes towards medical ethics. Having said that, I think there are a number of methodical difficulties in the way the study was conducted. One primary problem is that the sampling of local and foreign trained doctors immediately creates a bias. Most of the doctors who were trained overseas could have had a very different starting point as compared to those who had been selected into the NUS Medical School. Thus the difference in ethical attitudes may have been primarily due to the survey sampling biases.

At a personal level, however, I have witnessed myself the degeneration of professional attitudes in successive generations of students and doctors coming through. I have posted indirectly on some of these changes :
http://gigomole.blogspot.com/2009/03/are-we-ethical-society.html
http://singaporemd.blogspot.com/2009/06/patient-advocacy.html

So I am really not surprised by the findings.

But even as I am not enamored with the medical school curriculum locally, I think it is more than a bit unfair to lay the blame on the medical school training.

Students who make it to the medical school have largely been forced fed by a drivel of elitist attitudes towards life by the time they come to medical school. But I must be careful not to over-generalize. Many students and doctors I see still have exceptional qualities and will make exemplary doctors. But an increasing number just show themselves to be self serving, egotistical monsters in the making. For these, their basic attitude is that society 'owes' them. I can't help feeling that this malignant life view had been created by the journey through some of the elitist schools that we have. By the time they reach medical school, their basic attitudes have already been formed.

The data produced by the TTSH study may simply reflect the proportion of students from 'elitist' schools who go to NUS as compared to those who have to go overseas. I would highly recommend that the authors re-look their data and see what the secondary and JC education background of their respondents were.

Sadly incorporating ethics teaching in medical school may not be as successful as some would hope.