It’s come to this: our friends are angling for jobs at NYU-Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which admitted its first 200 undergraduates last fall on the way to opening a larger campus on Saadiyat Island in 2012. According to
Inside Higher Ed, the new campus will eventually have 9,000 students and branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. It isn’t very hard to be ironic about global citizenship as taught through the liberal arts in the United Arab Emirates. Homosexuality is illegal in the UAE; according to
Human Rights Watch, “only 6,600 UAE citizens, chosen by the rulers of the emirates out of a population of roughly 900,000 citizens (and 4.7 million foreigners), can vote” or stand for election; “a 1980 law still in force provides for the imprisonment of journalists and suspension of publication for publishing ‘materials that cause confusion among the public’”; and the migrants who “account for up to 85 percent of UAE residents” labor without a minimum wage or right to organize, vulnerable to abuses, nonpayment, and dangerous working conditions. Given these circumstances, it’s worth asking why the main question for academic critics of NYUAD seems to be whether academic freedom will be upheld on campus. What is “academic freedom” and why does it provide the terms for thinking about NYUAD?
Andrew Ross offers comprehensive criticisms of NYUAD and like projects in his excellent article
“Global U” (
Inside Higher Ed, February 15, 2008). “There is not even a pretense of academic exchange involved in this arrangement,” Ross points out, “in which education is little different from a manufacturing product designed at home, produced and assembled by cheaper labor abroad, and sold to consumers in emerging markets.” The logic of the academic freedom debate, as paraphrased in
The New York Times, suggests that academics involved in the project (including, disappointingly, Immanuel Wallerstein) view it through the rationale of the cultural and economic engagement strategies the U.S. professes to use in regimes such as China and Russia. Courses in “Cosmopolitanism and Popular Culture” and “Tolerance and Relativism” address the student elites of the 39 countries represented in the freshman class (most heavily, the U.S., China, the UAE, and Hungary) from a perspective of hopeful transnational neoliberalism. In this context, the assumption seems to be that academic freedom is a worry because restrictions on access and speech would contradict the diplomatic content of the courses. So, NYUAD offers reassurance that financial aid is available to many of the 200 (culled from 9,000 applicants); and its Vice-Chancellor, Alfred Bloom, announces that as a Jew he is “emblematic of the diversity to which [NYUAD] is committed” (
Inside Higher Ed, September 30, 2008). The
New York Times reports that “the emirate has embraced N.Y.U.’s vision of a liberal arts institution with full access to ideas, books and the Internet” (June 20, 2010), yet simultaneously quotes a student, Laith Aqel, who says that a “civil rights club” is “almost a challenge because we can’t hold protests.” In any case, the rubric of academic freedom keeps returning the conversation centripetally to the space within the campus and whether it can instantiate “collegial zones of free speech” (Ross) that would theoretically influence the UAE and the other 38 countries.
The problem, however, is not only that NYUAD isn’t free to do anything it wants; the problem is what it wants, and what it gets. As Ross observes, “it is not at all easy to distinguish some of the new offshore academic centers from free-trade industrial zones where outsourcing corporations are welcomed with a lavish package of tax holidays, virtually free land, and duty-free privileges.” The deals cemented through these packages cannot hypothetically shift discourse within the host countries without revealing the emptiness of human rights discourse within the guest countries. The courses look like careful introductions to multicultural neoliberalism; they avoid the parochialism of nation in favor of the transnational appeal of the regional, and leave the impression that art and inquiry are just more forms of global economic development. The impression is self-fulfillingly correct. But even if the curriculum were more, even if there were courses on communism and feminism and queer studies, we would still need to register the fact that the UAE is paying NYU up to $100 million to help position it as a cosmopolitan power. Censorship is acknowledged to be "almost a challenge" only so that its falling short of counting as a challenge can be taken to nearly-absolve the structural problem of receiving $100M from the UAE for this purpose while the unrepresented millions of people wait outside.
The implication that it is inevitable and downright good to make the exchange is the content of the positive appeal the University makes to its location in Abu Dhabi. According to NYUAD, Abu Dhabi helps the University as it “prepares [students] for the challenges and opportunities of our interconnected world.” How could it do that without teaching, not only that no one can withdraw from the circulation of finance and thus from the influence of the post-totalitarian governments with whom U.S. corporations do business, but that
no one should want to? NYUAD assimilates its willingness to accept "opportunities" from the UAE, despite its many "challenges," to the value of “interaction with new ideas and people who are different.” If more of the money was NYU’s own, and some of the “people who are different” were the dissidents themselves, its presence might signify something else. As it is, a certain profit-driven notion of engagement substitutes for the whole of engagement. What can student Mate Bede-Fazekas mean when he says “I can’t imagine a better place for becoming a global citizen, that I believe is the way of the future” (
NYT, June 20, 2010)? He's descriptively right, it may be. But if Abu Dhabi figures the future “better” than São Paulo, Los Angeles, or Taipei, it does so by means of its position on the cutting edge of unfreedom. Bede-Fazekas seems not to be missing this point, but getting it.
Part of the shiny novelty of the edge is the luxury that separates the NYUAD global education from the brands available in Romania or Manila. One of its 200 incredibly highly-qualified freshmen, Stephen Underwood, writes in
NYU Local that “NYU culture here in Abu Dhabi,” unlike in New York he assumes, “for now . . . is anything but cynical.” The reason he believes the NYUAD students aren't cynical, however, is that “as many of us are here for free, it’s kind of hard not to be” “in the honeymoon phase.” Underwood appreciates getting paid too earnestly to notice that that condition
is what cynicism is, or would be if he were conscious of it. For the entirety of his dispatch—almost 500 words—he describes the physical amenities of the apartments: “the desks are accompanied by surprisingly comfortable swivel chairs . . . . Hard wood door frames are accompanied by marble window sills . . . . Every floor has a common area that is decorated as some non-American place yet still has a decently sized flat screen.” Underwood's tactic is another way of showing why--for the same reason finally, i.e., payment--Abu Dhabi is the premium place for learning global citizenship. His account of the "common area[s]"--"non-American" in decor, but fed much of the same mass media by Dubai One and Showtime--winds up being as "emblematic" as the convenient Judaism of the Vice-Chancellor. He doesn’t say anything about the city or the “people who are different.”
But, finally (dusting off Baudrillard) isn’t the ideological fantasy of NYU-Abu Dhabi that
NYU itself is not NYU-Abu Dhabi? No one at NYU writes in to contest Underwood’s focus on the furniture. (Au contraire, they suggest that the Gramercy Green residence hall is as good or better.) NYU has 4,000+ students, and, as with almost all the private universities, the problem is far less that there is anything wrong with the education on offer than that accepting 4,000 of the highest-testing students does nothing for the millions of young people who need and merit a similar education, and instead leaves the entire dilemma to an increasingly abandoned public sector whose working-class inhabitants increasingly approach the condition of the non-voters in Abu Dhabi. Every large public university could make its problems disappear overnight if it accepted only its "top" 4,000 applicants, many of them able to pay high tuition without aid. Of course, making a significant dent in the U.S. education problem was never the responsibility of schools like NYU, private nonprofit institutions; it is and has been the responsibility of the state legislatures and the people who elect them. But the academic freedom that exists at NYU to discuss the politics of the crisis is, as much as it stands to be at Abu Dhabi, a way of keeping up the conversation while pocketing the change.
image: Louvre Abu Dhabi, Atelier Jean Nouvel
One of the things that Dipesh Chakrabarty does not capture in his essay, "The Climate of History" (Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009) 197-222), is the tone of scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, coiners of the term "Anthropocene" (to describe the epoch in which the human has become an agent of geological change (following the Holocene--the "wholly recent" last 12,000 years); later notes say that Stoermer named it, while Crutzen popularized it?). It's possible that the tone of the more recent paper, "Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos," authored by Crutzen and Christian Schwagerl, does not reach back to these earlier papers. Of course, there is some intended irony in the triumphant invocation of "We humans," but there also remains an excessive amount of the unintended. They argue that accepting the "reality" of "high speed" anthropomorphization of the world will help us change the world for good, as well as bad--laws governed by an economics of cost/benefit. In addition to several other suggestions for developing technology, they write:
