A scholarship should be unconditional.

A scholarship should be unconditional. By this, I mean, that no requirements should be attached to it, after the award is made. There are very good reasons for this.

Today, we learnt that NTU withdrew the ASEAN Undergraduate Scholarship of David Hartanto Widjaja, the attempted murder-successful suicide of a student at NTU, Singapore. It seems clear that this would have been a primary contributory factor into his fatal decision. He was under so much pressure - and once the scholarship that enabled him to be here at all was withdrawn, he snapped. One life was lost, another harmed. It need not have been. The awarding of a scholarship should not be dependent on performance thereafter. The student was considered good enough at the moment of award, let them be free thereafter to breathe a little and do their work in peace. Then, such tragedies would not happen.

Has no-one given thought to want a scholarship with conditions of performance attached means? It means constant, unrelenting pressure for the students. Such a scholarship is a kind of prison from which there is no escape. The student must always perform, never slacken, never fail, never make a mistake. Such pressure is harmful to any student, too much for some.

I understand that such scholarships have an informal condition that no grade can ever be less than a B (Straits Times source). That seems unnecessary. Students will have good subjects and bad subjects, subjects they like and subjects they don't. In particular, foreign students, as David Widjaja was, may have trouble with English, which would lower their grades unnaturally. They would then be penalized not for lack of subject competence, but for their standard of English. It seems rather harsh.

A scholar is a scholar. Once good enough to secure a scholarship, they should be free to work in their own way. Genuine scholars will pursue their subjects with passion...there is no need to further harrass them over grades. Let them be. Let them live. Otherwise, they might just do what David Hartanto Widjaja did...and throw his life away because NTU thought that he didn't deserve the scholarship they had awarded him.

Think of the situation he was in. He was late in his degree. If withdrawal of his scholarship meant that he could not complete it, all his effort would have been in vain. (I speak of all and anyone in his situation, not knowing his particular circumstances.) He would have had to leave the University without a degree. All would have been lost. Clearly, he thought that all had been and that life was not worth living. In a very, very real way, those who withdrew his scholarship put him in that situation and in that frame of mind. It could be said that they killed him and nearly killed Professor Chan Kap Luk.

Let all future scholarships be unconditional. Let scholars be scholars and have the academic freedom to pursue their interests in their own way without the ever-present demand for grades.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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