In February 2008, I attended an New York University faculty meeting about the school’s plans to open a new campus in the tiny desert emirate of Abu Dhabi. I was there reporting for a New York magazine article about the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. Hoping to be a fly on the wall, I instead found myself seated at the head of the table, bombarded with rapid-fire questions by exasperated professors looking for any kernel of information about the new project:<\/p>\n
“Who will do the hiring?” one professor asks.<\/p>\n
“Will there be tenure? You can’t have academic freedom without tenure, right?”<\/p>\n
“Where will the students come from?”<\/p>\n
“Why Abu Dhabi?”<\/p>\n
“What exactly is the status of Abu Dhabi’s relationship with Israel?”<\/p>\n
“Will we become the next Guggenheim franchise?” <\/p>\n
I quickly learned that the new initiative was being personally driven by NYU’s larger-than-life president, John Sexton — and that many faculty felt completely left out of a decision that had the potential to dramatically impact the university. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In February 2008, I attended an New York University faculty meeting about the school’s plans to open a new campus in the tiny desert emirate of Abu Dhabi. I was there reporting for a New York magazine article about the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. Hoping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34480,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34479\/revisions\/34480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}