At NUS, Alexandria rewritten

Let me not be gentle. There is no justification — none, not even a sliver — for a university, any university, but especially a Singaporean university with the resources and supposed vision of NUS, to consign books to the shredder. 

It matters little how many RFID tags are embedded in their spines, how short the timeline, or what cryptic policy made the act possible. It is an abomination, a dereliction of duty so profound that it deserves not bureaucratic explanation but public shame.

What was witnessed at Yale-NUS College — the plastic bags, the stolid faces, the quick hands hauling untouched, brand-new books into the maw of a recycling truck — should haunt anyone who has ever cared about knowledge. If you have ever found solace in a library, ever lost an hour in a bookshop, ever felt your world expand with the slow, private miracle of reading, this is not a minor administrative decision. This is cultural vandalism.

Nay. Let us call it by its real name: the wilful destruction of knowledge.

No excuse, no mercy

Some will say: they had no choice. There were duplicates, security issues, RFID tags that rendered the books uncirculable, and a short timeline for action. But if Singapore, with its vaunted obsession for efficiency and forward-planning, cannot find a way to rehome books — if all that institutional muscle is so easily hamstrung — what does this say about the soul of our universities?

The excuse of a “short timeline” is a fiction, and a cruel one at that. Yale-NUS announced its closure in August 2021. There has been more than enough time for “decision-making,” for the logistics of preservation, for the simplest act of making sure books — sources of insight, joy, confusion, and argument — found new readers, new homes, new purposes. 

What happened instead? Books, some retailing for more than sixty dollars, were thrown away as if they were banana peels, as if stories and scholarship were so much detritus to be carted off in bulk, their value measured only by their weight in kilograms.

If you want to know the character of a society, look at what it chooses to discard. This week, we chose to discard books.

The vanishing library

Still, we are not the first civilisation to treat books as disposable. In the grand, blood-soaked ledger of history, the burning of the Library of Alexandria stands as one of humanity’s most profound self-inflicted wounds. With each scroll and codex lost to fire, an entire world of knowledge — mathematics, astronomy, medicine, poetry — vanished into smoke. Our ancestors mourned what was destroyed not simply as the loss of physical objects, but as a kind of cultural amputation.

The Nazi book burnings, those infamous bonfires that illuminated the night with the light of burning words, are rightly remembered as precursors to even greater violence. And who can forget the Cultural Revolution’s war on the written word, or Pol Pot’s campaign to exterminate intellectuals, their books, and the very memory of learning?

No one is claiming that NUS’s library staff are Nazis, or Red Guards, or anything of the sort. But destruction is a spectrum, and on it, the quiet, procedural binning of books sits closer to barbarism than to enlightenment.  A society does not need to make a spectacle of its disregard for knowledge. All it takes is indifference — a few forms, a few bags, a waste collection contract, and a shrug. The end result is the same: we become a little dimmer, a little less curious, a little more impoverished in the ways that matter most.

And what, precisely, are we teaching our students? At NUS, the lesson is chillingly clear: when the system finds knowledge inconvenient, when protocols prove more sacred than possibility, knowledge can be destroyed. With not even the dignity of ritual — just shredded and sent off as so much recyclable fluff.

I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which books are burned to keep a society docile, incurious, obedient. Bradbury’s firemen did their work at the behest of a fearful state, intent on keeping ideas at bay. 

Here in NUS, we do it with the efficiency of the modern technocrat: a recycling company, an RFID tag, a policy about what can and cannot be given away, and, most damningly, the absence of anyone willing to stand up and say — wait, this is madness.

A student tried to save a bag of books and was stopped by a school manager. This, perhaps more than anything, captures the sickness. The urge to preserve knowledge is punished. Bureaucratic order takes precedence over moral instinct.

The smallest imagination

Let’s incinerate, once and for all, the smokescreen of “security.” Are we seriously being asked to believe that a stack of novels, academic monographs, and reference books — each with a removable sticker — pose such a catastrophic risk to national safety that the only solution is wholesale destruction? 

An RFID tag is not a landmine, it’s a sticker. It was put on by human hands and can be removed by human hands — provided, of course, that anyone in this sprawling, overstaffed, administrative labyrinth actually wanted to do it.

Are we meant to believe that in the five years since Yale-NUS announced its closure, not a single person at NUS, not a single committee, intern, contract worker, or librarian, could be mobilised to peel off a sticker? That the sum total of institutional creativity, with all its resources and reputation, could not produce a better answer than the trash heap? 

This is not security. This is cowardice wrapped in bureaucracy, and the abdication of imagination dressed up as policy.

It’s not process that failed; it’s the utter poverty of institutional care. Universities should be sanctuaries of thought, the last places where lazy destruction is countenanced. When those at the top of our intellectual hierarchy cannot conceive of anything more dignified than pulping perfectly good books, we should stop pretending we are led by scholars when in fact, we are ruled by clerks.

It is easy to throw up our hands and blame policy, blame process, blame time. It is harder to admit that we have failed, as a community, to live up to the most basic promise of education: to preserve and transmit knowledge. Libraries are more than warehouses for books; they are the last redoubts of civilisation, the collective memory of who we have been, what we have argued about, what we have loved, hated, misunderstood. To treat books as so much clutter is to declare, in effect, that the past is irrelevant and the future is not our concern.

What will the next generation learn from this? That when expediency and intellectual stewardship come into conflict, expediency wins? That even in a society as wealthy and educated as Singapore, books — physical, beautiful, irreplaceable — are only valuable until they become administratively burdensome? That, given a choice between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing, even our universities will choose the latter?

The legacy of this decision is not simply a few thousand shredded books. It is a deep, public wound to our intellectual conscience.

Hold them to account

There is only one way forward: accountability. NUS has now apologised for what it calls an “operational lapse,” admitting that students were not offered the chance to claim the excess Yale-NUS library books before they were sent for shredding. Still, an apology after the fact is not accountability. It is, at best, a belated recognition that the bare minimum — offering books to those who might cherish them — was not met.

We are told that most books were “rehomed” within the NUS library system, and that some were offered to faculty. Yet the critical step — inviting students, the very lifeblood of a university, to take these books — was forgotten, overlooked, or simply deemed inconvenient. This is a failure of imagination and care. And it should not take a public outcry, viral images of plastic bags in the sun, and national embarrassment for a university to remember its own mission.

Now, under the weight of scrutiny, NUS has promised to organise a book giveaway, to review its processes, to be “proactive” in the future. It is a start, but I say it is not enough. We deserve more than a patch job or a pledge for next time. We deserve to know who decided that convenience should triumph over stewardship, who failed to see that destroying books is not just a logistical hiccup but a cultural blunder. Why were donations to schools, community centres, migrant worker dormitories, and literacy charities not pursued as the first — rather than last — resort? Why does it take outrage for common sense to prevail?

We are owed more than a press release or a carefully worded statement. Our children are owed a future in which the work of generations is not erased in a moment of administrative haste. Our nation is owed better than the casual discarding of possibility.

And if we do not demand better — if we allow this episode to fade under the gentle cover of “operational lapse” — then we too are complicit. We too become vandals at the gate, our silence ringing louder than the shredder.

To every parent, every student, every educator: This is the moment to put down your spreadsheets, your emails, your infinite to-do lists, and pay attention. Because the destruction of books is the destruction of possibility. It is a slow, almost invisible disaster, one we will only recognise when it is too late. Demand accountability. Demand imagination. Demand that those entrusted with our collective intellect are worthy of the job.

Anything less, and we might as well be hawling off the books for pulping ourselves — with our own bare hands.