The story
In September 1904, Tan Jiak Kim led a group of representatives of the Chinese and other non-European communities to petition the governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir John Anderson, to establish a medical school in Singapore. It was noted by Anderson that there were other petitions prior which were not successful due to concerns over having a sufficient number of students and support from the local community. Tan, who was the first president of the Straits Chinese British Association, managed to raise 87,077 Straits dollars from the community, including a personal donation of $12,000. On 3 July 1905, the medical school was founded and was known as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School. At Anderson's directions, the school was hosted temporarily at a recently emptied block at a Government-run asylum in Pasir Panjang while providing the staff required to run the school.
In 1912, the medical school received an endowment of $120,000 from the King Edward VII Memorial Fund, started by physician Lim Boon Keng. Subsequently, on 18 November 1913, the name of the school was changed to King Edward VII Medical School. In 1921, it was again changed to King Edward VII College of Medicine to reflect its academic status.
In 1928, Raffles College was set up as a college for higher education in the arts and sciences.
University of Malaya in Singapore (1949–1962)
On 8 October 1949, Raffles College was merged with King Edward VII College of Medicine to form the University of Malaya. The two institutions were merged to provide for the higher education needs of the Federation of Malaya.
The growth of University of Malaya was very rapid during the first decade of its establishment and resulted in the setting up of two autonomous divisions in 1959, one located in Singapore and the other in Kuala Lumpur.
Nanyang University (1955–1980)
In 1955, Nanyang University (abbreviated Nan-tah, 南大) was established on the backdrop of the Chinese community in Singapore.
University of Singapore (1962–1980)
In 1960, the governments of then Federation of Malaya and Singapore indicated their desire to change the status of the divisions into that of a national university. Legislation was passed in 1961, establishing the former Kuala Lumpur division as the University of Malaya, while the Singapore division was renamed the University of Singapore on 1 January 1962.
Present form
The National University of Singapore (NUS) was formed with the merger of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University on 6 August 1980. This was done in part due to the government's desire to pool the two institutions' resources into a single, stronger entity and promote English as Singapore's main language of education. The original crest of Nanyang University with three intertwined rings was incorporated into the new coat-of-arms of NUS.
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Most departments of the university were situated at the Bukit Timah campus, with the gradual shift to the Kent Ridge site starting in 1969 and completed in 1986. NUS began its entrepreneurial education endeavours in the 1980s, with the setting up of the Centre for Management of Innovation and Technopreneurship in 1988. In 2001, this was renamed the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre (NEC), and became a division of NUS Enterprise. NEC is currently headed by Wong Poh Kam.
NUS has 17 faculties and schools across three campus locations in Singapore – Kent Ridge, Bukit Timah and Outram. NUS also collaborates with many other universities around the world, such as Harvard University, Yale University, UCLA, and Georgia Institute of Technology.
NUS has a diverse range of students and faculty stemming from distinct foreign nationalities. 65% of faculty and staff are foreign nationals, ranking it 3rd (tied with Nanyang Technological University) in terms of foreign representation among faculty across the top 100 universities according to QS. It remains one of the few top 100 universities with more than 60% of foreign faculty. Likewise, 36% or 12,057 of students are foreign nationals, with 62% them being post-graduate students.
In 2025, NUS celebrated several milestones. The university commemorated its 120th anniversary, together with the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. NUS Engineering celebrated its 70th anniversary, while the Duke-NUS Medical School and the NUS High School marked their 20th anniversary. For its 120th anniversary, NUS organised a year-long lineup of events including a Distinguished Speaker Series, gathering experts from around the world to talk about pressing issues of the future. Notable speakers included AI experts Professors Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
From Wikipedia’s article on National University of Singapore, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4