letter Jessica Teng Sijie ’18
In response to last week’s opinion article: While the argument that Residential College names should be relatable is valid, I am not convinced that the proposal of “naming our RCs after members of our community” is much better. Even if having a RC named Tee Zhuo or Brian McAdoo were relatable now, I doubt that Yale-NUS students in Year 2050 will find them more relatable than the name of a donor. Furthermore, the sense of community students experience is not derived from the fact that they are named Raffles or Harvard. Rather, Raffles and Harvard have (over time) transformed from people-names to markers of institutional identity, and are now symbolic of certain ideals and visions. This will probably happen for our RCs as well.