American higher education has earned the respect of the world for its quality and constant innovation. Today it must respond to the energy and reach of globalization by establishing the foundation, and articulating the mandate, for a world of shared understanding and cooperative purpose.
To that end, undergraduate programs must equip students intellectually to embrace a global world. They must develop in their students the habit of listening fairly and sensitively to the voices of those whose circumstances and perspectives differ from their own, and the habit of questioning their own assumptions in light of what they hear. They must prepare students to learn from difference, and to see beyond it, to recognize and build upon the common structures of thought, language, emotion, and humor, and the common concerns for security, affection, opportunity, and justice that we, as human beings, share.
Campuses Abroad: Promise and Perils
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Higher education’s centers of research, scholarship, and artistic activity must lead in synthesizing and galvanizing the world’s intellectual productivity, erasing historic biases about where formative ideas are likely to be found. And higher education must come to be identified not only as responsible for preparing citizens for societal roles and for fostering the pursuit of knowledge, but also as responsible through its structure and mission for elevating perspective above parochial, national, and ideological concerns toward the common pursuit of a more informed, accountable, just, and peaceful world.
The establishment of campuses abroad is a key step toward satisfying this mandate. But to do so, these campuses must be more than cultural replicas of the home campus and do more than offer enrichment opportunities. They must induce reflection on difference, invite interrogation of social, political, and ethical assumptions, and develop capacity to find and build on common ground.
The more these campuses abroad act as centers of transnational and cross-cultural discourse and connection, the more powerfully they will contribute to the establishment of a global vision. The more actively they connect to their home campus, through circulation of people and ideas, the more transformative their impact. And to the extent they engage with political and cultural contexts that differ considerably from that of the home campus, the greater the responsibility and the opportunity to model the building of shared understanding and purpose. To retreat from such interactions is to renege on higher education’s responsibility to a global society.
As NYU Abu Dhabi develops an exceptional liberal-arts and science program; builds, in connection with it, a leading center of research, scholarship, and artistic activity; and nurtures robust connections to NYU in New York and NYU’s range of world sites within the first truly globally networked university, I am persuaded that what will emerge will be a remarkable multilayered model of how higher education can advance a global vision.
Some 300 of the world’s most extraordinary young men and women have come to NYU Abu Dhabi from 70 nations as members of our first two classes. Each brings his or her own story and his and her own sense of how to contribute to a global world. But they are united in their commitment to make such a contribution. An Ethiopian student in our inaugural class recently expressed to three of his classmates (who were from the United States, Kenya, and India) his own answer to “Why NYU Abu Dhabi?":
“If I work in my government, and if you work in your country’s government, and we have grown up together here, and we understand one another’s culture and customs, economic, political, and social problems, imagine how we will work together. It starts right here.”
