we are jack of all trades and master of none.
That is due to Lee Kuan Yew.
I found the following paragraphs on NTU's website:
"The university has a distinguished lineage with roots that go back
to 1955. We began as Nanyang University (Nantah), the first
Chinese-language university in Southeast Asia, through donations
from all walks of life, with the Yunnan Garden campus donated by
the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan.
Nanyang Technological Institute was reborn on the same campus in
1981 with government funding to educate practice-oriented engineers
for the burgeoning Singapore economy. In 1991 we became Nanyang
Technological University with the absorption of the National
Institute of Education."
source: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/publicportal/...+us/history.htm
First of all, anyone who is old enough can tell you
Nantah was founded by late Tan Lark Sye in 1953
but unfortunately closed down by Lee Kuan Yew in
1980. (PAP supporters among Nantah alumni
always insist that Nantah was "merged" with Singapore University to
form the NUS -- make it more palatable to public perception). On
the other hand, NTU was founded by Lee Kuan Yew in Nantah's old
campus as NTI in 1981 initially and upgraded to NTU in
1992.
Secondly, don't
forget that Nantah was a real CHINESE university (the only Chinese
university outside of China and Taiwan so
far) while NTU is an English university with
a non-significant "Department of Chinese". (NUS has one too,
nowadays, which decent university in the world does not have a
Chinese Department?).
So you see, other than sharing the same premise, the two
universities have no commonality AT ALL, what "lineage with roots"
are they talking about ?
NTU did NOT began in 1955 and NTU did NOT begin as and never been a
“Chinese-language university” as claimed in the passages on NTU’s
website.
Here is the fact:
the property of now defunct Nanyang University was confiscated and
given to NTU, the whole campus was ransacked and almost demolished,
the old buildings torn down and replaced by new ones,
the beloved Nantah Gate was defaced and cut off
from the campus by the highway (They wanted to tear down the Gate
but no contractors dared to take the
contract).
After Nantah was closed down in 1980, no one
heard about Nantah or Tan Lark Sye on media until early 1990’s when
someone in PAP sensed that China was going
to be reckoned with as another powerful country on earth. They
started to see the economical value of Nantah's name (which they
hastenly discarded in 1980) in pursuing the Chinese business, but
it is an historical fact that the
regime had been most unkind to Nantah and Tan Lark
Sye, the big question was how could they
erase this historical blackmark in people's mind ? The whole PAP
propaganda machinery with the help from media has been working on
this single idea ever since. They seemed to have found the ideal
solution to their problem, namely, to
modify and distort the history of Nantah and NTU
...
First they changed the Chinese abbreviation of NTU from LiDa to
NanDa (i.e. Nantah) on Chinese media which created an illusion on
the mind of Chinese readers and audience as if Nantah was still
alive. Later, Dr. Su Guaning started to push renaming of NTU's
official name to "Nanyang University" which naturally did not go
well with the silent Chinese community in Singapore and met vocal
opposition Nantah alumni on web (you of course did hear a lot of
opposition on Chinese media and you know why).
Consequently the idea was dropped in 2004 (the rumor has it that
Lee Kuan Yew was annoyed by comments made by oppositions of
renaming and requests by some supporters of renaming to
rehabilitate his most despised enemy Tan Lark Sye) while they were
planning a huge ceremony to be held in June of 2005.
With name-change or no name-change, now they just want you to
believe that this angmo NTU is the same Nantah built in 1953 by Tan
Lark Sye with the help from Chinese people of southeast Asia, and
it has been operating since 1955, as if nothing had happened in the
year of 1980 ("No, no, no, we never closd down Nantah, what
happened in 1980 was just your imagination, honey").
A Nantah alumnus gave me a metaphor to aptly describe the
fabrication by NTU: "Someone killed your poor Chinese mother and
confiscated your little atap hut. A twenty-ish Angmo woman comes
along and moves in the hut. they now tell you in
their 
straight-face that this "50
years" (really? but she looks like in her 20s) old angmo jarbo is
really your old mother you so dearly missed and the good news is
that she never got killed!"
How can people believe such shameless fabrication
and distortion of history? (Don't tell me Singaporeans and NTU
students are so gullible and stupid to put up with such nonsensical
political propaganda. Are they?)
http://singaporeforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1412
This fear and hatred of dialect chinese hokkiens by the old
anglophile banana Harry Lee Kuan Yew is very disturbing.