Leah Reynolds is the kind of student New York University and the government of Abu Dhabi hoped for five years ago, when they began an ambitious partnership to create a model of academic excellence in the Persian Gulf emirate. Smart, articulate and thoughtful, Ms. Reynolds, a sophomore, is editor of the online campus newspaper. Yet she is keenly aware of the limits of her position, both as a student and as a representative of the institution.
“We’re not here to cause trouble,” says Ms. Reynolds, who is studying social research and public policy at NYU-Abu Dhabi. “Students want to be in this part of the world. And we’re not repressed.”
Many people on this campus, from the chancellor on down, describe themselves as guests of the United Arab Emirates, and like guests they are mindful of staying in their host’s good graces.
But critics say this mindfulness turns foreign branch campuses in the region into exceptional enclaves, fearful of engaging with contentious local issues. In interviews with over a dozen current and former educators in the Emirates, the insularity of foreign branch campuses was a recurrent theme. Several of NYU-Abu Dhabi’s own staff and students describe the campus as “a bubble.” Some critics complain that it and other foreign universities have stood by in silence as authorities in the UAE have cracked down on freedom of speech in the wake of the Arab Spring.
“Any academic, any university—you have to be connected to the reality of the country you’re in,” says Christopher Davidson, a former professor of political science at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, and author of several books about the UAE. “You can’t say your academics are protected but the ones at the university down the road aren’t. You can’t enter a situation where you admit there isn’t academic freedom in the country, there isn’t academic solidarity.”
New York University’s leaders insist that public, and sometimes critical, engagement with one’s host country is not part of their mission abroad, In fact, they argue, it could be taken as a sign of hubris.
“What is inherent in the very notion of the global network university is that we often are going to take ourselves outside our comfort zones,” says John Sexton, NYU’s president, who is the architect of the Abu Dhabi venture, in a written response to The Chronicle. “Many of us will find ourselves living in new cities, new countries, new parts of the world, and it would be downright presumptuous to pretend that we have some inherent understanding from day one that would allow us to think that we have all of the answers for society, much less the questions.”
“It’s not that we’re not concerned” with off-campus events, says Ms. Reynolds. “We’re learning what’s the best way to engage with the context we’re in. It doesn’t have to be the same way as in New York.”
But is treading cautiously a long-term strategy for success, particularly for a university that hopes to shape the region’s cultural and intellectual landscape?
An Academic Capital
In operation for close to two years, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus is a high-profile experiment for both the leadership of the federation of small, oil-rich emirates and the American institution.
The NYU campus was invited in, and is fully subsidized by, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. (The exact amount of money invested remains undisclosed.) The operation enjoys the support of that family’s leader, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the country’s president-for-life. His brother and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, worked closely with Mr. Sexton to hammer out the deal that brought the university to the Emirates.
By 2014 the campus will move to splendid new digs on an exclusive island, alongside branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim museums. For now its 300 students and 125 faculty members, recruited from around the world, work in a modest complex in downtown Abu Dhabi.
NYU-Abu Dhabi’s goal is to be both a premier research university and a highly selective liberal-arts-and-sciences college. In both respects, it is a new venture in the Emirates, functioning as a model for other universities there. The pursuit of academic excellence, say both NYU and the UAE’s leadership, is how the new university will affect and benefit its host country.
So far the campus seems to be having its greatest impact through research and collaborations with local universities and government institutions.
“Part of our role here is to build capacity indirectly, to import scientific expertise and share equipment through collaborations.” says David McGlennon, vice provost for research administration and university partnerships.
The linguistics departments of NYU-Abu Dhabi and United Arab Emirates University, for example, are jointly studying the differences in cognitive processing of Arabic and English.
“It’s benefiting us and our students—there is more expertise coming from overseas, more money for research, more opportunities.” says Steve Bird, dean of the linguistics department at UAE University.
Through the government’s largess, NYU-Abu Dhabi has allotted $36-million to finance work at five research centers dedicated to fields such as Arabic literature, communication networks, and climate modeling. The university plans to create about a dozen such centers, generally supervised by senior faculty from the New York campus.
The establishment of NYU-AD, as it’s known, has raised “great expectations on all levels: economic, social, and on a policy level,” says Sunil Kumar, dean of engineering, who has helped form a consortium of engineering faculty in the Emirates. They plan to share curricula and equipment and to coordinate course offerings.
The new university also hopes to attract more Emirati students; currently it enrolls only 16. It runs summer academic camps for local high-school students and offers tutoring to Emirati applicants who don’t meet its admission requirements.
Within the country, spending on the university is a sensitive—and closely guarded—subject. Some local academics ask why, if the government wishes to improve higher education, it doesn’t simply invest more in its own institutions, which are struggling with recent budget cuts.
Al Bloom, NYU-Abu Dhabi’s vice chancellor, counters that the university “will inspire more students to seek the highest level of education and help other universities to argue for and obtain the kind of resources and faculty they most need in terms of their own development.”
Shifting ‘Red Lines’
Most afternoons, Abu Dhabi’s higher-education minister, Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan (also a member of the ruling family) meets visitors and petitioners at his diwan, a traditional open audience chamber in his house. NYU-Abu Dhabi, he says, will help the emirate become “a major global center of excellence for higher education.”
That’s a tall order for a new institution that is still learning to navigate a country where public debate is tightly monitored, policy decisions are made in an opaque manner by the members of the ruling family, and repressive laws are sometimes suddenly, arbitrarily enforced.
Nearly 90 percent of the residents here are foreign, lured by the Emirates’ economic opportunities and relatively tolerant atmosphere, but mindful that they can be swiftly expelled if they challenge cultural or political restrictions. None of NYU-Abu Dhabi’s faculty is Emirati.
Under Emirati law, remarks that are deemed insulting to the seven emirates’ ruling families and government officials, or to Islam—or that are seen as causing social unrest—can lead to prosecution. Demonstrations are illegal. Swearing in public and engaging in homosexual relations are also crimes.
All universities must obtain security clearances for faculty members. (NYU declined to comment on reports that it was recently unable to hire a local professor for that reason.) Publications and the media are censored, although universities are generally able to obtain any books they want. Researchers and other academics who work in the Emirates say they use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution; the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption. Any critical discussion of the Emirates’ ruling families is an obvious no-go zone.
A former research associate at the Dubai School of Government who requested anonymity says the graduate school and research center—set up in consultation with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government—had lofty ambitions to be “a proper, international, renowned think tank.” But even before the Arab Spring, researchers and administrators at the Dubai school were “walking on eggshells,” the researcher says. There was pressure “not to make the government look bad” and disagreements over suitable areas of research and how widely it should be disseminated.
Some academics say, though, that these so-called red lines don’t impede solid academic work.
“Academic freedom has been usually better than overall freedom in the UAE,” says Abdel Khalek Abdullah, a political-science professor who recently retired from UAE University. “You are not intimidated, you can talk to your students and give them lectures. Nobody tampers with your research. But it could be better. One knows there are some red lines here and there. It’s really a mixed bag.”
Jane Bristol-Rhys, an associate professor of anthropology at Zayed University, maintains that even supposedly “taboo” subjects—religion, domestic politics—can be taught if one has the necessary context and confidence. “We suffer more from self-censorship than anything else,” she says.
Self-censorship can be a powerful force, though. A foreign academic working at a national university in the Emirates who requested anonymity says most of the foreign professors there work under “an overarching fear of being booted out of the country. The system as it is encourages people not to push the boundaries.”
Why Rock the Boat?
Nasser bin Ghaith learned that lesson the hard way. An Emirati expert on international economic law who has lectured at Paris-Sorbonne-Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, he and four others were charged in 2011 with insulting top government officials and inciting other people to break the law on the basis of posts in an online forum criticizing the government and calling for reform. He spent nine months in jail before being convicted and then pardoned.
“I thought foreign universities would bring the culture of freedom of expression,” says Mr. bin Ghaith. “Academia is all about thinking and speaking freely. I thought they would raise the ceiling as high as this ceiling,” he says, pointing toward a skylight in the lobby of a club on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. “But unfortunately it was just a showcase.”
After his arrest, the board of the Sorbonne voted down a motion to express support for Mr. bin Ghaith. Sorbonne-Abu Dhabi administrators said the fact that he had delivered “a few lectures” did not make him a professor there. (He says he lectured there for two years.)
“We don’t want to comment on anything that is not academic,” says Jean-Yves da Cara, executive director of the branch campus, when asked about Mr. bin Ghaith. “As a university we have nothing to do with this case and we cannot comment on decisions made by judiciary. It is outside our mission.”
NYU-Abu Dhabi administrators, too, have declined to comment on Mr. bin Ghaith’s case, arguing that he had not been arrested in his capacity as an academic. The administration draws a distinction between academic freedom—which it says is guaranteed by its agreement with the Emirati authorities— and freedom of expression in the country at large.
The nervous reaction of the UAE authorities to the Arab Spring has complicated matters further. The advocacy groups Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch have documented increased repression of freedom of assembly and expression there. Emirati authorities aggressively monitor online social forums and persecute government critics—either through arrests or campaigns of verbal and sometimes physical intimidation, the groups say.
Authorities recently revoked the citizenship of six naturalized Emiratis because of their ties with a local Islamist organization. One of them was fired from his job at a national university.
In March, Emirati officials closed the offices of the National Democratic Institute, a democracy-promotion organization backed by the U.S. government.
Today in the UAE “there’s less academic freedom, less freedom of expression, less freedom of assembly,” says a reformist Emirati writer who asked to remain anonymous. “There’s been a complete regression. And the worst thing is, nobody cares.”
On the Sidelines
Asked about the incidents of repression that have taken place over the last year, students, faculty, and administrators at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus plead ignorance, minimize the events, or choose their words diplomatically.
Whatever may be happening elsewhere in the Emirates, “there was a guarantee that we can enjoy academic freedom, and it has been implemented in every way,” says Mr. Bloom, the chancellor. “There is no interference, no sense of concern, fear, or anxiety.”
But “in the public realm,” he adds, “there is a sense of commitment to being a guest in a host country which may have different cultural and legal expectations. It’s important for us to respect them when those restrictions don’t erode the basic educational and intellectual mission of the college.”
University faculty argue that they teach the same classes they would in New York, and that restrictions on freedom of expression off-campus exist everywhere, including the United States.
What’s happened in the UAE in recent months is “an issue of concern because people are getting arrested,” says Nathalie Peutz, an assistant professor of Arab crossroads studies. “It’s not an issue of concern for my teaching.”
The case of Mr. bin Ghaith launched a lively debate on the NYU-Abu Dhabi campus, if one that didn’t travel much beyond its walls. And Ms. Peutz notes that she has assigned articles on the Holocaust to her students, although teaching the subject is banned in Emirati schools. “We talk about everything from religion to government to politics,” she says. “There is no need to self-censor in any way except to take into account the different assumptions students are coming with.”
A UAE researcher who asked to remain anonymous dismisses such freedom as the right to “let the elite speak about things in a controlled environment. You can always stop it.”
The Future
Emirati leaders and NYU administrators alike insist that they can’t envisage their experiment foundering. The relationship is built on “the basis of good will,” says Mr. Al Nahyan, the education minister. “The intentions are good on both sides. If you get married, you don’t want to talk about ‘What if it doesn’t work out?’ There’s no use speculating.”
NYU will not comment on what recourse it might seek if it felt that the agreement had been violated.
One student, April Xiong, expressed her mixed feelings about the university’s position in the New York campus’s student newspaper last year. Sometimes, she wrote, “it feels like we’re not actually accomplishing anything here, and that we were falsely promised the opportunity to create (although perhaps more incrementally than we would like) change in this country.”
But, she cautioned, “it would be foolish to jeopardize everything we could accomplish in the future ... by making brash comments right now. Remember, any critical comments made by a faculty member or a student of NYU-AD, although made individually, could cause the government to completely lose trust in NYU-AD as an institution.”
Emile Hokayem, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who worked in Abu Dhabi from 2008 to 2010 as a columnist at a national newspaper, agrees with such caution.
“These societies are young and developing, and change is going to take a long time,” he says. “There is a real risk that foreign institutions are going to be seen as patronizing and disloyal” if they voice criticism.
But Mr. Davidson, the former professor at Zayed University, says ruling governments count on such self-censorship. Foreign universities and other joint cultural ventures are a form of foreign policy, he says, “investments that will remind the West that these countries are our friends and we should protect them if need be.”
In the midst of this debate, Matthew Silverstein, an assistant professor of philosophy at NYU, struggles with the significance of his own presence in Abu Dhabi.
“If my reasons for being here were contingent on my belief that my presence will revolutionize the Emirates, I wouldn’t be here,” he says, sitting in the small, lush garden on the campus. “Similarly, if I was sure that NYU-AD would have no effect at all, I also wouldn’t be here.”
“It’s hard to see how being home to a world-class university couldn’t have an effect on the guiding norms for society about religion or politics or freedom of expression,” he says. It’s just soon to tell, he adds, what that effect will be.
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