Earlier this summer I wrote about the Summer Colloquium for NYUAD students. As part of the colloquium, I recorded a 35-minute lecture at NYU-TV that responded to questions generated by the students’ reading of Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. The video was made available to NYUAD students via a private iTunes link, and it’s just been made available to NYUAD faculty and staff as a Flash video on the NYUAD Intranet. Both sites are password-protected, but the video may eventually be made public on the NYUAD website.

As an act of penance, I forced myself to watch the video in its entirety while riding the stationary bicycle in the Sama Tower rooftop gym on my first morning in Abu Dhabi this week. (Penance for the fact that my sessions at the gym have been woefully few and far between this past spring and summer.) I’m glad to say that I didn’t discover any major gaffes and that I still agree with what I said in the lecture. A good thing, because I have to do a live-follow-up next Tuesday at our opening dinner for the students. The lecture begins with an account of my full name — Cyrus Rusi Kaikhusroo Patell — and its relation to the naming of my children in order to set out a model of cultural change that accords with the one that Appiah describes in his book. During the video, I discuss a little of the history of cosmopolitanism as an idea; explore the importance of “conversation” to current conceptions of cosmopolitanism; and then deal with such issues as Appiah’s description of “positivism” (focusing on  his account of the relationship between beliefs and desires), the dynamics of negative and positive liberty, and the relation between individualism and communitarianism. Most of these points were prompted by the questions that students posed online during the portion of the colloquium by philosopher Matty Silverstein, a member of the NYUAD standing faculty. It ends with the suggestion that the lecture itself, like Appiah’s book, has been less about providing answers than about starting a conversation.

The lecture was pitched primarily to those who had read Appiah’s book, but my talk next week will attempt to open up that conversation to those who didn’t manage to participate in the summer colloquium. I’m planning to keep it short: it’ll be an accompaniment to dessert. So, hopefullly, short and sweet.

Speaking of curriculum … the first NYUAD Course Bulletin was distributed to us at the start of the Faculty Orientation. I think it’s gorgeous, and it’s now available in PDF format at the NYUAD website. Click on the image to download it or go to the NYUAD Undergraduate Programs page. That document represents the culmination of a lot of hard work, not just in putting together the programs that it describes, but in putting the document itself together. Special kudos are due to Hilary Ballon and Kerry Barrett for the latter effort.

The past two days have been full of meetings, both formal and informal, about policies and practices that are in place or planned here at NYU Abu Dhabi. At the first-ever meeting of the NYUAD Arts & Humanities Faculty on Tuesday, which brought together members of the standing faculty and affiliates from New York, we had a full turnout, missing only a couple of faculty members who have not yet arrived in Abu Dhabi. Looking around at the twenty-three colleagues who had convened to talk about our plans for the semester, I felt a palpable sense of excitement at the potential just waiting to be realized.

It’s been particularly exciting to have the opportunity to start conversations about the curriculum. We who were on the coordinating groups that helped to build the current NYUAD curriculum have always imagined that we were handing off a template that enshrined some principles about making connections among disciplines and forging links between theory and practice. We hoped that the curriculum would evolve once the NYUAD faculty convened and began to implement it. That process of evolution has already begun, and I’m looking forward to working with the faculty this fall to think in both practical and theoretical terms about the curriculum we have — and that we’d like to have. I suspect that we will be able to the kind of discussions about pedagogy that we have all too rarely back in New York, and my hope is that the process of curricular innovation that began in New York some two years ago will continue and accelerate here in Abu Dhabi.

Meanwhile, we recognize the importance of making sure that life outside the classroom is rich and fulfilling for NYUAD students, and I’m hoping that we can apply some of the principles that animate the Faculty Fellows program at NYUNY: thinking of the residence hall and indeed the city around us as learning spaces. Yesterday, we started the process of putting together two extracurricular activities that can serve as extensions of classroom learning into the world beyond: a debate / model UN society and an arts & humanities journal.

In both cases, we’re going to encourage the students who participate to rethink the very enterprises that they’ve joined, asking what kind of debate society and what kind of journal should we have here and now — in Abu Dhabi and in the twenty-first century. What constitutes a cutting-edge approach to a debate society and to a publication? We’ll encourage the students to think of these as collaborative enterprises, in which they will collaborate with other members of the community — including faculty and staff — across disciplines. I’m pleased to say that my colleague Paulo Horta will be advising the debate society and that my colleague Sheetal Majithia will be advising the publication, which will likely be oriented around a website, but will also likely have some kind of finished product that is periodically produced — perhaps on a DVD or flash drive or in the form of an app for mobile devices and electronic readers.

It’ll be fun to watch these concepts evolve as the students get hold of them and apply their creativity. In both cases, I hope we’ll be able to look at what we’ve managed to produce and think, “Cool!”

[Photo: Al Maktoum Street at the corner of Al Nasr, facing the Marks and Spencer]

5:00 a.m. Wake up and call home to say good-night. (It’s 9:00 p.m. in NYC). Try and fail to go back to sleep. Nothing doing. Go to computer. Stream Emmy Awards via Slingbox from my dad’s apartment in NYC. Ain’t the internet amazing?

6:00 a.m. Look at the window of 19th-floor Sama Tower apartment at the sun coming up. (The picture in the linked page cracks me up: the tower is in fact surrounded by other buildings, and the sky these days is very hazy.) Do some e-mail and blogging.

7:00 a.m. Ride the stationary bike in the rooftop gym (46th floor).

8:30 a.m. Walk to the Downtown Campus Building.

9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Second day of the Faculty Orientation. Topics include the curriculum, programming at the NYUAD Institute, global education, community-based and service learning, athletic facilities and other physical plant issues, and an inspiring presentation by Vice Provost for International Education and Outreach Carol Brandt about the incoming class of 2014. I’ve heard some of the student testimonials in previous presentations but they never get old as far as I’m concerned.

1:00 p.m. Meeting with Arts & Humanities Dean Reindert Falkenburg and Associate Dean of Arts Mo Ogrodnik, followed by a meeting with Senior Vice Provost Ron Robin to talk about the year’s faculty searches and other hiring in the arts and humanities.

4:00 p.m. Reindert and I meet with Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Chuck Grim to talk about The ARC (Academic Resource Center). Despite what his surname suggests, Chuck isn’t grim at all — and he’s incredibly upbeat despite his ridiculous workload as we prepare for the start of the first term ever here. The ARC is one of our most exciting pedagogical initiatives, as far as I’m concerned.

5:15 p.m. Walk back to Sama Tower, via the Al Safa supermarket, where I pick up some Diet Pepsi, water, and and a/v cord. Yes, it’s hot and humid.

6:00 p.m. Get on a bus that takes us to the Emirates Palace, where we have an Iftar dinner in the Ramadan tent. An iftar is a community meal with which Muslims break their daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan. At the Emirates Palace, it’s a huge affair, and the NYUAD group has only a few of the many tables. Lots and lots of wonderful food. I stuff myself.

9:00 p.m. or so: Post-dinner socializing with Arts & Humanities colleagues at the Hemingway Bar at the Hilton. Part of the joy of this endeavor is having the chance to work with so many interesting people.

11:00 p.m. Back to Sama: e-mails and phone calls with New York to about logistics for the next day’s meetings.

[Photo: View from my 19th-floor Sama Tower apartment looking east. Early morning.]