Yale professor to head Singapore college

Sidebar: Yale and Yale-NUS alumni

Students at Yale-NUS College will not earn Yale degrees, but they will have a relationship with Yale: a brochure for prospective Yale-NUS students promises they “will become part of both the Yale and the NUS alumni societies.” Mike Madison ’83, outgoing board chair of the Association of Yale Alumni, said in a statement this spring that the future 2017 graduates “will be warmly welcomed as a part of the Yale alumni community.” So what Yale alumni “society” or “community” will they join?

With the first Yale-NUS graduating class five years away, details of alumni relations are still being worked out, says Yale University vice president Linda Lorimer ’77JD, but the Yale-NUS alumni will become “international affiliates”—similar to the World Fellows. The World Fellows, who spend a semester on the Yale campus in a nondegree program, are invited to alumni events and programs and included in the online alumni database (as are Yale postdoctoral fellows). But Lorimer says that neither international affiliates nor postdocs are considered alumni.

Because they don’t hold Yale degrees, Yale-NUS grads won’t be able to vote for alumni fellows on the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body; and because they haven’t spent at least one term as degree candidates at Yale, they won’t be able to serve as AYA delegates or board members. (For more, see From the Editor.) Like the other international affiliates, however, they will be AYA members. The AYA’s 2008 constitution grants membership to Yale’s international affiliates, giving them access to AYA programs and services.