AlumNUS | April - June 2011
Profile
As a geographer and lecturer at the NUS Department of Geography, Professor Lily Kong is more than familiar with the concept of space. Yet charting her career in the space of the first woman Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences (FASS), as well as the first woman Director of Asia Research Institute (ARI), and now as the Vice President (University and Global Relations) of NUS, requires overcoming two challenges - gender and youth.
collective memory. I was interested to interview the hawkers and the patrons, and learned about the historical evolution of hawker centres as social institutions. To that end, I was glad to capture a snapshot of this rapidly changing landscape for posterity.” With a laugh, she conceded, “Of course it also became the perfect excuse to do “field work” and eat hawker food!”
Memory of landscapes For someone so enthusiastic about food and geography, it came as no surprise when Prof Kong cited some of her best memories of her undergraduate years as hanging out with her close friends at a cosy red-brick corner of the aromaladen Arts Canteen. On the NUS landscape then and now, she observed, “We have not torn down very many of our existing Three Passions, One Dream Job buildings but have instead built new buildings around them. Juggling the multiple roles of teacher, researcher and The corridor I walk down today is the very same one I have administrator, Prof Kong admits that all of them have given her walked down as an undergraduate.” For Prof Kong, the rushes of passion at different points of her life. She loss she feels most acutely is in her social, not her physical added, “I joined academia landscape. “I refer to the loss because I wanted to combine of friends with whom I have teaching and research. I have lost touch” she lamented, with always wanted to teach. As a sigh. a child, I would line all my dolls up in a row and deliver a New Spaces of Learning lecture! As an undergraduate, I As new spaces of education discovered my love for research. emerge with the Yale-NUS I did not start off wanting to be liberal arts college tie-up, – Prof Kong on her aspirations for the new Yale-NUS in management but started to Prof Kong shares more about liberal arts college. wear the hat of an administrator the stage of development in when I became a Sub-Dean of this initiative she heads. She FASS in 1994. To me, the opportunity to do all three is truly a elaborated, “Over a two-year course, we have worked hard dream come true.” with our Yale colleagues to discuss the different dimensions of pedagogy, curriculum college size, financing, staff hiring Prof Kong was twice a recipient of the NUS FASS Teaching and student profile selection.” Excellence Award as well as the recipient of the NUS Outstanding University Researcher Award. “My aspiration for the new college is to have students who are inquisitive to the nth degree, with a love for learning for A Full Plate its own sake. They should be intelligent, engaged in critical Prof Kong took up the delectable assignment of writing the thought, full of innovative ideas, effectively communicative, book “Singapore Hawker Centres - People, Places, Food” and able to make connections across different domains. I at the invitation of the National Environment Agency. She envision a close-knit college of students and professors, said, “Hawker food is such an integral part of the Singapore with the latter deeply interested in bringing out the best in landscape and life, as well as the locus of our social and students,” she shared, with a smile. As the youngest Dean of the Faculty, she quipped, “I do feel that my youth is a greater challenge than gender. A very senior colleague once said to me, ‘I am used to working with people with 35 years of experience, not 35 years of age.’ Nonetheless, I am grateful to have great support from all my colleagues – young and old, male and female.”
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My aspiration for the new college is to have students who are inquisitive to the nth degree, with a love for learning for its own sake.
Three Passions, One Dream Job Professor Lily Kong (Arts and Social Sciences, ’86), Vice President (University and Global Relations) of NUS, offers insights into carving her personal space in the world of academia
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