We Sat Down With Andrew Ross. Here’s What He Had To Say.
By Ryan McNamara
NYU Local sat down with Andrew Ross, our faculty’s most vocal critic of labor abuses at the construction site of NYU Abu Dhabi. The Social and Cultural Analysis professor recently made headlines when he was prevented from boarding a plane on his way to the Abu Dhabi campus by United Arab Emirates authorities because of unspecified “security reasons.” In recent days, it has also been reported that an unknown person has hired a private investigator to snoop around for information on Ross.
We sat down in his office and spoke about his work on labor abuses at the Abu Dhabi Campus, and some of his other fields of research; debt and university politics.
Why have you taken the initiative to look into the labor abuses at NYU Abu Dhabi? The administration has repeatedly stated its commitment to worker’s rights. Why not just trust them and let them take care of it?
Well, to properly answer that, I’ll have to go back a little bit in time. When the plans for NYU Abu Dhabi were announced — and they were unilaterally decided, the faculty were not consulted in any meaningful way about this initiative — we were aware that there would be huge issues involving academic freedom, and we were also aware of this pattern of labor abuse in the UAE. We thought it would be effective if we had a campaign from within the community, and that’s when we started our work. We formed the Coalition for Fair Labor, we had dialogue with the administration, and pushed for the Statement of Labor Values that was finally adopted. It would not have happened without pressure from within. Administrators might say differently, but that’s a matter of record.
What about academic freedom at NYU Abu Dhabi?
There is still a lack of clarity around what academic freedom protections there are in Abu Dhabi. Faculty I know have been told when they join the faculty over there, there are two things that are off limits. One is criticism of the royal family, the other is criticism of Islam. Everything else is fair game. But it’s not, as we all know. Public engagement of labor rights, democracy, and sexuality are off limits, and these are big areas of civic and public life. So I think there has been a high level of self-censorship under those circumstances.
What is the role of an NYU student in all this seeing as the school that we fund has been a part of severe labor abuses?
Students have a right to make the administration accountable, which they can act on or not. Especially if the abuses that happened on the administration’s watch have an adverse effect on the reputation of the university, as I think they do in this case. If NYU’s name is associated with labor abuse, human rights abuse, then all of us are impacted in some way. Your degree, the ethical value of your degree is impacted negatively.
You mentioned that the faculty did not have a say in the decision around expanding to Abu Dhabi. To what extent do you think the top-down management style at NYU played a role in the decision to build in Abu Dhabi?
The erosion of shared governance is a big issue, and it has been very visible here at NYU. The faculty are supposed to be in charge of academic affairs. Does the setting up of another campus fall under the rubric of academic affairs? You would think so! And people often ask me and my colleagues, “What did you think about the idea behind the Abu Dhabi campus?” And it astonishes them to find out that we had no say whatsoever. And really I don’t know how many people in the administration had much of a say; it really was our president’s initiative.
I should say, this pattern of unilateral decision-making when it comes to going off shore is not unusual. It’s a pattern we have seen across the country in the last 10 or 15 years or so, especially around a decision to go to places like China or Gulf states where there has been a proliferation of offshore campuses. But none of them in such a high-profile way as NYU. At NYU we seem to be on the cutting edge of so many of these things. So life is never dull here.
This pattern is all in contrast to the 50-year history of international education that preceded it in the form of study abroad programs. These were all faculty-driven initiatives. A French department would decide that it’d be a good thing to have a study abroad program in Paris. Our Middle Eastern Studies program did not decide, “Oh it would be good to have a branch campus in Abu Dhabi.” In fact the Middle Eastern Studies department was not really consulted at all. So it’s a different paradigm, it’s driven by revenue chasing.
That’s not to say that this genre of university can’t have an impact that produces some good. In fact the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo are probably good examples. They were set up by Christian missionaries and they were intended to have a Christian mission, but they became crucibles of secular Arab nationalism in the 20th century. They became very progressive. So you can’t pre-judge what these institutions will turn into. We’re really just talking about the origins of them.
In your time at NYU have you noticed a change in university governance?
My first decade here at NYU was very benign. I saw a lot of faculty-driven initiatives being taken up and responded to by the administration. When John Sexton took office there was a distinct shift, it was a different paradigm entirely. A lot of power was distributed upwards, centralized, and what you felt was you were being asked to respond to administration driven initiatives. So it was almost the exact opposite. It wasn’t administrators responding to faculty ideas, it was faculty being asked to follow initiatives that were set in motion from above. So with Abu Dhabi we were told, “the train has left the station and you can either get on the train or not.” And the implication was there would be rewards for those that would get on the train. We have seen the outcome of those rewards. A very unequal impact of the oil money from Abu Dhabi which comes sloshing over here and is distributed unevenly between departments. So there are some departments sitting on over a million dollars of cash because they participate in sending faculty over there.
Switching gears a little into another interest of yours, do you think the change in university governance have anything to do with the rise in student debt?
In many ways we see administrations across the country acting more like an executive class, rather than benign managers and fiscal stewards of the university. There is a certain kind of mentality that goes along with that and it involves the assumption that you can make decisions unilaterally. What impact does that have on the debt burden assumed by students? For one thing there is a phenomenon of administrative bloat, which is a little different than what you find in corporations. I feel that “corporate university” is a very lazy term, because there are significant differences between universities and corporations. One of the big differences is that corporations have been going in the opposite direction from universities by thinning down their management workforce, cutting out a lot of middle managers and becoming lean and mean. Exactly the opposite has been happening in universities, they’ve been amassing administrators. So there are more administrators now then there are full-time faculty nation wide, which is astonishing! And the salaries of administrators, depending on your perspective, are quite inflated.
The average salary increase for faculty since I’ve been at NYU has never been more than 3 percent, and it’s sometimes been below 2 percent. In most years, it doesn’t keep up with cost of living increases in New York City. So it’s certainly not faculty salaries that have been the major factor in the increasing cost of institutions. In fact, instructional cost have been sliced in half almost in the last 30 years because of the casualization of the academic work force. We now have less than 25 percent of our teachers on the tenure track here at NYU. And it used to be exactly the opposite ratio 30 years ago.
So high administrative salaries I think is certainly one factor. And that’s one of the very few pieces of data that are available. The expansion of universities is another big factor which is debt financed, and students generally bear the brunt of that growth in tuition hikes.
UPDATED (April 5, 5:48 p.m.): This story has been updated to clarify Andrew Ross’s stance on academic freedom at NYU Abu Dhabi and student debt.
Image via Claire Heaps
