The Emir of NYU

NY Mag ^ | Apr 13, 2008 | Zvika Krieger

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NYU president John Sexton has been promised a blank check to duplicate his university on a desert island in Abu Dhabi. The expansion will leave both campuses flush with petrodollars. But to many faculty, the deal amounts to a sellout.

John Sexton’s office, which sits on the top floor of NYU’s Bobst Library and boasts an impressive view north to Washington Square Park, has recently begun to resemble a shrine to Abu Dhabi. The university president has installed a massive Oriental rug, a gift from the crown prince, on one entire wall. On another hangs a framed portrait of the sunglasses-clad founder of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. In the center of the room is a large framed photograph of an Emirati woman, hand covered in a henna tattoo, gazing provocatively from behind a sequined veil.

When we start to talk about NYU’s expansion plans in Abu Dhabi, Sexton props his sneakers up on the coffee table, then folds them beneath his chair, kindergarten style. He looks uncomfortable, as if he’d rather play the schlumpy college professor—unkempt hair, rumpled clothes, rotund paunch—than a global tycoon. And over the next two hours, Sexton tries to downplay his own role in the university’s Abu Dhabi plans. But he just can’t help himself.

Within less than three years, NYU plans to more or less clone itself in Abu Dhabi, thereby becoming the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. It is a wildly ambitious project, far more grandiose than simply opening up a foreign branch or study-abroad program. Unlike any other major American university, NYU will treat its offshore campus as virtually equal to its New York campus.

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[Nathan Zachary]

NYU is now a madrassa, brainwashing American minds into thinking Islam is a religion of peace rather than the cult of blood and gore history proves it to be.
Rather than teach history, they teach how Islam is always the victim instead. The only “victim” in history that always seems to end up expanding it territory while the culture that existed in the region simply vanishes without a trace (besides those rivers of blood).

[ikka]

Is NYU considered a good school?

I laugh at thinking about the Arabs pouring their money into what they think is a good education but instead getting indoctrinated into being smug, wine cooler sipping, metrosexuals with a degree in art history.

[PGalt]

Sexton props his sneakers up on the coffee table, then folds them beneath his chair, kindergarten style.

LOL! Appropriate. You can learn other lessons about life even before public school kindergarten, John.

[Katya]

I can actually see a lot of beneficial things coming out of this. American students who will be able to study arabic and immerse themselves in the culture, and arab students will be exposed to an American system of schooling.