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Last month, as Donald Trump continued his attack on American universities, something else happened in academia: Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college founded by the National University of Singapore and Yale University in 2012, quietly ceased to . And with it, thousands of books and DVDs disappeared.

I was one of the inaugural faculty when I joined in 2011. It¡¯s not every century that Yale or the National University of Singapore decides to found a new college, and I was excited to build a community of learning for the new millennium and to add my own breath to the wind of freedom that liberal arts education is supposed to fan.

At that time, there was no president or campus yet, let alone a library, but I ravenously submitted hundreds of book requests in anticipation. And, alongside a dedicated staff, we gradually built a small but carefully curated collection ¨C not enough for sustained research, perhaps, but ideal for undergraduate teaching. There was not a bad book among them. I know ¨C I ransacked the library weekly and continued to pester the friendly librarians with all manner of requests for additions.

But, in?, NUS¡¯ president announced that after the class of 2025 the partnership with Yale would end. The reasons remain : surmises include a change in the prevailing geopolitical winds, accusations of elitism and whispers that we were ¡°too woke¡±. NUS insisted it was simply time to scale liberal arts education more widely and do it alone. So, henceforth, no more Yale, just NUS College. New Haven shrugged ¨C it had treated us with benign neglect from the start and it had other crises to manage.

The final graduates marched last month. But after all the music and applause and goodbyes had faded away, what remained was the sound not so much of silence as of shredding.

On the Monday after commencement, the students who remained on campus found men hauling books toward a . The stage for this liquidation was the ¡°Oculus¡±, the college¡¯s symbolic eye to the sky ¨C a square aperture atop a round fountain, which, in the true questioning spirit of the liberal arts, inverts the traditional Chinese cosmology of the round heavens and the square earth.

Most of Yale-NUS library¡¯s collection of 45,000 volumes is being absorbed by NUS¡¯ Central Library. But 20 per cent was marked for destruction. The reason was that these titles were duplicates or had a ¡°low utilisation rate¡±, but the waste of it all prompted an outcry.

Even worse: weeks previously, student assistants ¨C part-time hires ¨C had been asked to the surfaces of hundreds of DVDs with penknives, rendering all of them inoperable.

This was another stab to the heart. In the early days of the college, a dear colleague and I had made an impassioned appeal to acquire the storied Criterion Collection of DVDs for the benefit of the community. But now all the Kurosawas, Ozus, Fellinis, Bergmans are gone ¨C reduced to shards of shiny plastic in a landfill somewhere.

My student likened it to Hannah Arendt¡¯s ¡°banality of evil¡±. I wouldn¡¯t go that far. This was not on a par with Nazi book-burnings ¨C or, indeed, with US red states¡¯ removals of LGBT children¡¯s books from public libraries, or with the purging of ¡°DEI¡± materials at the . But while it was by no means a crime against humanity, it was certainly a tiny crime against culture.

Someone, somewhere, tallied the costs of air-conditioning and humidity control and storage facilities and deemed that all those books and DVDs were unworthy of keeping. A committee ¨C perhaps, made up of what my mentor calls ¡°people with small brains and big calculators¡± ¨C cared more about the bottom line than those cumbersome vessels of scholarship.

NUS ultimately for its actions and managed to salvage?8,500 books for a .?It¡¯s not clear how many DVDs remain.

True, libraries shed books all the time. That is their prerogative. Collections are living organisms; not everything can nor ought to be preserved. A total library would be a bibliographic nightmare, like Borges¡¯s Library of Babel. But neither is a library a fast-fashion store. You don¡¯t discard last season¡¯s items because nobody wanted them.

If we curated shelves only by popularity, we¡¯d be left with?Atomic Habits?and?Sapiens and little else. But a library ¨C especially a university library ¨C needs to be the archive for the obscure, the unfashionable, the not-yet-understood. Its purpose is deep cultural memory across many centuries. And not just memory but hope: that someone, someday, might find a forgotten book and read it anew. A great university should own more unread books than read ones.

In the age of AI and information excess, maybe analogue libraries are obsolete. Aren¡¯t PDFs and databases enough? Perhaps. But a library is more than a delivery system ¨C it¡¯s a sanctuary, a commons, a promise to the future.

There¡¯s an old (certainly ) quote attributed to Caliph Omar about the Great Library of Alexandria: ¡°If the books contradict the Koran, they are heretical and must be burned. If they agree with it, they are superfluous.¡± In the end, of course, all the library¡¯s books were burned in a catastrophic fire. But perhaps many of them would ultimately have met a less infamous but equally early demise anyway. Because the point is that you don¡¯t need fire to destroy a library ¨C just indifference.

was associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College and is now in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.?