The National, an English language paper in Abu Dhabi, published a huge, fascinating piece last Friday about NYU Abu Dhabi. John Gravois seemed to tackle the story with the idea that in order to understand the motivation and scale of the project, you have to get into the mind of the man behind it all – John Sexton, NYU’s president.

“With Sexton, digressions quickly metastasise into ideas, ideas into schemes, and schemes into rosters of personnel,” Gravois writes, and this already explains a lot, conceptually, about NYUAD. The piece describes Sexton’s manic devotion to a girl’s debate club he founded (to the detriment of his own school work), the class that he flew to Abu Dhabi to teach every other week, and some of the controversies surrounding the project. What it doesn’t tell us, however, is how the locals feel about NYUAD.

As current students, it can be difficult to appreciate what Sexton is trying to do for the university, because as much as we would like him to, he’s not thinking about us individually. Rather, he’s thinking about the school as a whole, and not even right now, but in the future. Regardless, it’s hard not to gain a new kind of appreciation for the man after reading the piece.

Here is the full thing, but we’ve chosen some choice quotes after the jump.

[Sexton's] fortnightly trips to the UAE are a symbol of his devotion to one of the most audacious, ambitious and strange projects in academia today, the creation of New York University, Abu Dhabi. With his Emirati counterparts, Sexton is proposing to build an American-style research and liberal arts institution that will attract the world’s most elite students and scholars from day one. Just as grandly, Sexton envisions the Abu Dhabi campus as a kind of network hub that will operate in tandem with NYU in Manhattan to power a new “global university” comprising study sites on five continents. And as if all that were still too modest, Sexton believes these global moves will slingshot NYU into the ranks of the Ivy League. If the Abu Dhabi and New York campuses aren’t both ranked among the world’s top 10 universities in 20 years, he says, he’ll consider the whole undertaking a failure.

…

Many academics regard the offshoring of education as a grubby enterprise, a profit-maximising strategy that is bound to dilute academic standards. But in Sexton’s mind, NYU’s best shot at competing directly with schools like Princeton and Harvard lies overseas. He is betting that the right kind of global presence will actually lure cosmopolitan students and professors away from the old, established Ivies – to the UAE.

…

Sexton tells the story as if it were an origin myth, one that he still consults for its meaning, almost as if it were about somebody else. One of the meanings, he figures, is this: “Because this oblivious, immature, overly confident young man set unreasonable expectations, the students met them. There was strength in my obliviousness.”

…

One sentence on the brochure’s cover described Abu Dhabi’s relationship to “NYU’s anchor campus in New York City”. With a few strokes of his red pen, Sexton performed minor surgery with drastic results. Now the sentence referred to NYU Abu Dhabi and “NYU’s other anchor campus in New York City”.

…

The school’s financial aid policies, meanwhile, will take their cues straight from the highly endowed Ivy League – according to NYU, “qualified students will not have to incur any debt to support their education”.

…

“It’ll be the most selective school at NYU,” he says. He has taken to calling it an “honours college”.

…

Indeed, Sexton expects the new campus to inaugurate a transformation of the entire university. He envisions both Abu Dhabi and Washington Square as “portal” campuses in what he calls a “global network university”. Students will enrol at either the Emirati or the American NYU, the idea goes, and then circulate among the university’s academic outposts on four continents, while faculty will move within the network to teach and do research.

…

An even more common view is that Sexton, the fundraising impresario, is merely in thrall to the promise of petrodollars. Sexton’s main argument against these suspicions is essentially that they mistake the global network university for a little plan. “The notion that Abu Dhabi is somehow some one-off operation that has special motives, I reject that completely,” he says. “You can’t build a great university on a business plan.”

…

In the revised, expanded and somewhat idiosyncratic notion of ecumenism Sexton now preaches, the word implies a kind of pluralist dialogue among cultures that studiously remains true to the important differences between worldviews. Sexton even likes to refer to NYU as “the ecumenical university”.

…

NYU Abu Dhabi will operate outside the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education. But it seems almost inevitable that similar flare-ups will arise at the new campus – in a context, moreover, where free speech groups do not rule the media terrain. “We’re going to come in here and do what we do,” says Sexton, “which will over time obviously test the bona fides of our partners. We’re not going to do provocative things just for the sake of testing. It’s a call for a certain amount of maturity.”

…

For all his exuberance and dishevelled naturalness – the hugs, the rumpled clothes – Sexton is a highly strategic figure. He often seems perfectly aware of how and when his “Who, me?” persona works to his advantage. Occasionally, he will speak self-consciously about his eccentricities. “That’s what I’m doing with the hugs,” he might say.

…

Al Bloom, who will head the Abu Dhabi campus, was for 17 years president of Swarthmore, a small Pennsylvania school perennially ranked among America’s top three liberal arts colleges. “Four hours after I announced publicly that I would step down from the presidency at Swarthmore,” Bloom says, “I got a call from John Sexton at my office.” The two men had never met. By the end of the phone call, says Bloom, “I was about ready to say yes.”

…

“He’s interested in running a very top-down model of a university, and that’s not a model a lot of people agree with,” says Rana Jaleel, a graduate student who is both an organiser for the graduate student union and a member of a group called the Coalition for Fair Labor, which has advocated for worker protections in Abu Dhabi. “You can’t go around hugging people,” she added.

…

Around that same time, Sexton boarded a plane for his class in Abu Dhabi, leaving one of his deputies to monitor the campus disturbance back in New York. Holding true to his theme of healthy disrespect for authority – including his own – Sexton told the Sheikh Mohammed Scholars all about the sit-in. The students laughed. “We’ve always wanted to do that,” one of them said.

Image from NYUAD