Standing for Reason by John Sexton

Author:John Sexton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300243376
Publisher: Yale University Press

NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai as Proof of Concept

In 2006, as the leadership of Abu Dhabi and NYU conceptualized the partnership that created NYU Abu Dhabi, they set ambitious goals. They hoped to attract academic leaders and students who were as outstanding as those at the world’s finest universities. A decade later, even those expectations seem modest compared to what has happened.

The initial NYU team leader was one of New York’s deans, who moved to Abu Dhabi with her husband and young children. The successful president of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges left that institution to become the inaugural vice chancellor. The head of a major initiative in genomics in New York moved to Abu Dhabi, co-locating his lab, to be the campus provost. And so it was that from admissions to public safety to student life to technology, many of the very best faculty and staff joined the project with enthusiasm. A decade later, most are still part of it.

Those who chose to come had a range of motivations. Some faculty were drawn by the mission and the opportunity to build a curriculum from scratch, such as the innovative science curriculum that was unencumbered by the obstacles associated with reforming an existing structure. Others were attracted by research interests, as was the case with a Middle Eastern studies professor, whose hope, now realized, was to solicit and organize definitive translations of major Arabic works, or the linguistic neuroscientist who was interested in the languages of the region.

From the beginning, NYU Abu Dhabi was envisioned as a research university, with all that implies, into which a liberal arts college would be fully integrated. Beginning in 2007, three years before the first freshman arrived, the NYU Abu Dhabi team set out to recruit faculty. Some of the faculty for the new campus would circulate periodically from among existing faculty at NYU New York. Others would be selected by the departments or units in New York to be in Abu Dhabi most of the time. Together, they would develop the liberal arts curriculum of the new campus. That same year, some of NYU’s lead faculty began research projects in Abu Dhabi that operated jointly with work being conducted in New York. And leading faculty from New York organized conferences in Abu Dhabi—several dozen each year—that spanned the disciplines. By September 2010, when the first undergraduates arrived, there was already a well-established culture of advanced academic research, and faculty teams committed to teaching and mentoring the incoming class had already implemented the foundations of the new curriculum.

Not surprisingly, the groundbreaking undergraduate opportunity in Abu Dhabi appealed to a high-talent group of students. The admissions team sought a cohort—literally from around the globe—who were “clearly admissible, on the traditional norms, to any college or university in the world.” But, from the start, they understood that finding students who met this standard alone would not be enough. Each admitted student had to manifest a disposition to cosmopolitanism that revealed a commitment to creating a global community that relished diversity.

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