What the outcry over discarded Yale-NUS books reveals — and why it matters

The backlash wasn't just a sentimental response. It was about valuing print and the stewardship of resources.

- Gabrielle Chan

If not for the groundswell of response from alumni, 9,000 Yale-NUS library books would have been quietly pulped and never seen again.

On May 20, these books were packed into white plastic bags and loaded onto a recycling truck bound for a facility in Jurong, just a week after the college's final graduation ceremony. This act quickly ignited a wave of criticism, petitions, and calls for transparency.

Some 500 books were recycled, but the backlash arrived just in time to save another 8,500 books from being discarded. Beyond the rescue effort, this incident also brought out something deeper—that many Singaporeans still care about the printed word, and with it, the way knowledge is valued and resources cared for.

Even in this age of screens and endless scrolling, print books matter. The turning and rustling of dog-eared pages, the weight of a book in hand—these are common experiences across all ages, from a child learning to read his first storybook to an adult finding solace and community in book clubs.

Earlier in May, eight local independent booksellers came together to start a one-stop online bookstore, Bookshop.sg, offering more than 40,000 titles. Amid bookshop closures and a decline in reading habits, home-grown efforts like these are laudable.

Hence the callous treatment of books by a university library is all the more jarring, as is what the act of tossing them out represents: the squandering of resources, instead of seeking to find new homes and owners for the books.

The thought of books being left on the sidewalk to be thrown away, and possibly shredded to pieces during the recycling process, struck a nerve in me.

Yale-NUS alumni said these books had once been part of their lives—titles they read for leisure, borrowed for their theses, or saw frequently on the shelves.