SINGAPORE – A packed Victoria Theatre greeted literary superstar R.F. Kuang with cheers on Nov 8 when she stepped on stage for her keynote speech as part of the Singapore Writers Festival 2025.

Articulate and bracingly honest, the petite novelist held court before a responsive audience. That fans were in the house was not in question: There was a stampede to get in line after the lecture for the autograph session – limited to an hour, with no photography so as to speed up the process.

While the aftermath was a tad chaotic, the China-born American writer’s lecture Beyond The Ivory Tower was a lucid, loving dissection of the enduring myths of academia and what other stories could help ameliorate more toxic aspects of the current mythology.

After breaking the ice with an anecdote about how she learnt the term “don’t pray pray”, adding to appreciative laughter from the audience “I speak Singlish now”, she dived right into her analysis of why readers love dark academia.

Her theory is that the genre offers variants of fairy stories: “The campus is fairy land. The campus obeys its own nonsensical logic with special rituals and behavioural codes and systems of prestige.”

Readers would recognise how the 29-year-old parlayed this theory into the fantastical worlds of 2022’s Babel, or The Necessity Of Violence: An Arcane History Of The Oxford Translators’ Revolution, where a colonial Britain is powered by control over languages and translations; and 2025’s Katabasis, where the acquisition of a doctorate entails, literally, a journey through hell.

Kuang is intimately acquainted with the hallowed halls of academia on both sides of the Atlantic, having earned a Master of Philosophy in Chinese studies in Britain’s Magdalene College Cambridge and is working towards a doctorate in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale University in the United States.

She set out three key myths: “First, that the academy is a pathway to upward socioeconomic mobility. Second, that the academy is meritocratic. And third, that the academy is a site of political resistance.”

Her dissection of these myths drew on the history of American universities, which she noted have always been bastions of the elite.

Some of the oldest universities were founded by slave owners and, for centuries, these institutions accepted students only from the moneyed upper crust.

The idea of the middle-class having access to a college education, Kuang said, is a post-World War II development fuelled by the US government’s GI Bill, which funded education for returning soldiers.

She exploded the myth of meritocracy, citing recent research that showed “over the past century, there’s been virtually zero change in the proportion of poor and middle-class students at collective colleges”.

Recounting a personal anecdote about a friend who was offered full-ride scholarships to the University of Chicago and Harvard University, she said: “He chose Chicago because he could drive there, but he couldn’t afford the plane ticket to Harvard.”

She also made the distinction between universities as conservative institutions that partner political structures, furthering establishment goals, versus the idealism and passion of students. “Students are historically agents of revolution… historically, when they mobilise to protest the injustices that they witness around them, their administrators respond by sending in the police, the tanks and the National Guard.

“The university seeks power, it doesn’t oppose it. At no point in our history has the institution opposed the imperialist and neoliberal projects of the US government.”

Despite her frank assessment, Kuang loves this “weird world”. “You criticise an institution because you love it and you want it to be better and you want it to become the best possible version of it.”

She devoted the second half of her lecture to alternative visions of academic structures, including governmental investment in, and funding of, education so that academics can earn a living wage and students are not mired in debt for pursuing learning.

Academics, too, can do better to share their knowledge with the world. She said: “I’ve observed this condescension and even hostility towards research outputs that engage a wider audience.”

Kuang’s lecture was held at the Victoria Theatre on Nov 8.

PHOTO: MOONRISE STUDIO

She confessed to hiding her fiction career because she was worried she would be taken less seriously. “I went on a month-and-a-half long book tour for Katabasis and I told everybody I was sick and out of the office.”

The idea of students, too, should be transformed. The system is targeted at students aged between 18 and 22, and Kuang said half-jokingly: “Teenagers are idiots. They sleep through lectures, they skim through their reading and they treat Friday sessions as the last obstacle before a weekend party.”

Adults make for better learners because they are disciplined and focused.

She offered a very Asian point of view that rigour and some degree of pain are good for the pursuit of learning.

At the end of the day, she believes academia still has a role to play in this media-saturated, short attention span world.

“It’s good to have your head buried in books and spend a few years isolated from the world while you develop as a thinker… ideal societies should protect spaces for studying that which is arcane and useless and esoteric.”