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The New York Times has published a brief letter that I wrote in response to an op-ed piece entitled “The War in Washington Square” by my NYU colleague Jeff Goodwin, who is a professor of sociology.

Here’s the text of my letter as they published it:

I have been working on the N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi project with N.Y.U. colleagues from different disciplines since 2008. I continue to be impressed by these colleagues’ idealistic purpose; they are dedicated to the belief that education is our best means for fostering a constructive dialogue between the United States and the Arab and Islamic worlds, which is crucial in the century ahead. That dialogue may not be easy, but dialogue between parties who don’t entirely share one another’s views never is.

I am grateful to John Sexton for making N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi happen. My colleague Jeff Goodwin is correct that “it is doubtful that faculty members would have chosen to build” the Abu Dhabi campus. Refusing this chance to engage in dialogue would have been a profound mistake.

CYRUS R. K. PATELL
Abu Dhabi, March 21, 2013

The writer is associate dean of humanities at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.

The letter appears with three other letters under the headline “N.Y.U.’s President: Visionary or Autocrat“? The other letters are by Martin Lipton, the chairman of NYU’s board of trustees (reiterating the board’s support of President Sexton and his initiatives for NYU’s growth); by a 1970 alumna (opposed to the creation of a campus in the UAE because the country doesn’t recognize the state of Israel); and by a more recent grad (thanking Sexton for “improving [his] alma mater”).

The published text of my letter is an edited version of what I sent to them. I did approve their changes. Here’s the original version (omitted phrases in bold):

To the Editor:

Re: “The War in Washington Square” (opinion, 20 March 2013)

I have been working on the NYU Abu Dhabi project since 2008. Collaborating with NYU colleagues from different disciplines to put together this new liberal arts college has been the most rewarding service work I have ever done.

I continue to be impressed by these colleagues’ sense of idealistic purpose; they are dedicated to the belief that education is our best means for fostering a constructive dialogue between the US and the Arab and Islamic worlds, which is a crucial task in the century ahead. That dialogue may not be easy, but dialogue between parties who don’t entirely share one another’s views never is.

I am grateful to President Sexton for making NYU Abu Dhabi happen. My colleague Jeff Goodwin is correct to assert that “it is doubtful that faculty members would have chosen to build” the Abu Dhabi campus. Refusing this chance to engage in dialogue would have been a profound mistake.

Reasonably similar, though I regret the loss of the sentence “Collaborating with NYU colleagues from different disciplines to put together this new liberal arts college has been the most rewarding service work I have ever done.” Because it has been.

The Times generally imposes a limit of 150 words on letters to the editor. That’s no easy task for an academic in the humanities: we sneeze and 150 words come out. Here’s my first draft, twice the required length:

I am in my twentieth year as a faculty member at NYU and have been working on the NYU Abu Dhabi project since 2008, when I joined  the “Humanities Coordinating Group” that was putting together the initial Humanities curriculum and hiring the first group of Humanities faculty. I was invited to serve because of my interest in undergraduate education and my ongoing scholarly and pedagogical work on cosmopolitanism. Most professors hate serving on university committees, but working with my colleagues from different disciplines to put together a new liberal arts college for the twenty-first century was the most rewarding service work I had ever done at NYU. I was impressed then — and continue to be impressed now — by the sense of idealistic purpose motivating those involved with the project. NYU Abu Dhabi has given me the chance to work with some very, very smart people, all dedicated to the belief that constructive dialogue between the US and the Arab and Islamic worlds is a crucial task for the twenty-first century and that education is our best means for fostering that dialogue. That dialogue isn’t easy, but then dialogue between parties who don’t entirely share one another’s views never is. And those are the kind of dialogues that are the most crucial to have.

Those of us who have helped to build NYU Abu Dhabi, whether presently based in New York or in Abu Dhabi, are grateful to President Sexton for making the NYU Abu Dhabi initiative happen. My New York colleague Jeff Goodwin, with whom I once served on an undergraduate curriculum committee for the College of Arts and Science, is no doubt correct to assert that  “it is doubtful that faculty members would have chosen to build campuses in countries where academic freedom, and free speech generally, are so parlous.” And that would have been a truly regrettable missed opportunity, not only for NYU, but for the United States.

Cyrus R. K. Patell;
Associate Professor of English, NYU
Associate Dean of Humanities, NYU Abu Dhabi

In the end, though, I think I like the unedited short version the best. Special thanks to my in-house editor, who helped me trim the first draft to the required length.

[The graphic above is by Alex Nabaum and appeared online with the four letters.]

I’m a little less confused than I’ve been.

In my post “Disagreeing with the Vote of No Confidence,” I was struck by the number 682 — the number of voters eligible to participate in last week’s FAS vote of no confidence in President Sexton. I noted that “my wife, who is a member of the faculty of the Liberal Studies Program — a program that is a part of the Faculty of Arts Science — did not receive a ballot” and that she was “disenfranchised because she belongs to a program that consists of non-tenure-track faculty.” In a comment left on a Village Voice article about the vote, I noted that the article “is misleading on at least this one point: it states that FAS is a faculty numbering approximately 2,600. But that number includes the 1,900 ‘non-tenure teaching staff,’ who have been disenfranchised by the organizers of this vote.”

To be honest, I didn’t understand the rationale for the exclusion. If (as one of the loudest proponents of the VNC has been claiming) one of the major grievances against John Sexton was the rise in the number of non-tenure-track faculty during his years as president, surely it would be in the interest of the organizers of the VNC to include that group, which presumably would be strongly in favor of the measure.

I’m a little less confused now, because I’ve read this article by Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The New Faculty Minority: Tenured professors fight to retain control as their numbers shrink” (March 18, 2013).

Here’s how it begins:

The first order of business when arts-and-science professors at New York University gather each year is to decide whether their full-time colleagues who work off the tenure track should be granted voting privileges in faculty meetings. This academic year, for the first time, the professors decided no.

Extending the vote to full-time contingent faculty members was deemed too “dangerous.” As on most campuses, professors at NYU who have tenure or are on the tenure track are a dwindling minority, and some worry that their power would be weakened and their voice muffled if shared governance were shared more broadly.

While tenured professors often express concern about the working conditions of contingent faculty members, they also are moving to draw ever sharper distinctions between those workers and themselves as they seek to retain power and influence. Non-tenure-track instructors have a narrower focus, lack institutional memory, and are subject to pressure from administrators who hire them, say those at NYU who opposed extending voting privileges. Their fear is that the rapidly growing number of those working off the tenure track could overwhelm the shrinking proportion of the tenured.

It is instructive to compare the list of NYU names quoted in this piece to a list of the organizers of the VNC and those frequently quoted by the media in support of the vote.

I now begin to understand what these critics of the Sexton regime mean when they talk about “faculty democracy” and “shared governance.”

For what it’s worth, I note that in the last meeting of the NYUAD Faculty Council, we voted to continue to extend voting rights not only to the tenured and tenure-track faculty, but also to contract faculty, affiliates from the Square, and — gasp — senior NYUAD administrators.

[Photo credit: The photo above is from the Chronicle article and was taken by Mark Abramson. The caption that accompanies it on the Chronicle site reads: "Christine Harrington and James Uleman, two tenured faculty leaders at NYU, say non-tenure-track professors' limited purview justifies keeping them out of governance roles.']

Inside Higher Ed published a piece about last week’s vote of no confidence this morning. The piece’s title, “‘No Confidence’ in the System,” captures its overall approach, which shifts attention away from the focus (and the ad hominem attacks) on President Sexton and sets the vote in the context not only of similar votes at other research universities, but also of the challenges facing universities that seek to globalize their programs. The article quotes me about halfway through, and I reiterate two strongly held belifes: 1) that NYU’s attempt to build a “global network university” potentially represents a great leap forward for US universities and that 2) the opportunity to build a campus in Abu Dhabi was a unique opportunity that John Sexton was right to seize.

Toward the end of the article, the author, Kevin Kiley, includes a paragraph that I want to highlight here, because it is one of the lessons that I believe we must learn from this episode:

University administrators are also under increased pressure to move quickly because of financial challenges facing the sector. For example, in less than a year more than 60 colleges and universities signed on to partner with Coursera. NYU faces even greater pressure on this front, higher education officials say, because its roughly $2.8 billion endowment is relatively modest given its size, academic profile and ambitions. And quick action is something traditional governance models, which emphasize deliberate decision-making, are ill-equipped to do.

I said something similar — albeit more bluntly — in my post “Who’s Confused?” for which I’ve taken a fair amount of flak. But I stand by what I wrote: “We don’t have NYU Abu Dhabi without John Sexton. We don’t have a GNU. As someone who’s had a little bit of hands-on experience with each of those entities, I’m glad we didn’t leave the call about whether to establish them to my faculty colleagues. We’d still be arguing about it.”

The best recent piece that I’ve seen about NYU’s Global Network University is “Global Ambitions” by Elizabeth Redden, which was published on the Inside Higher Ed website on March 11.

It’s well researched: Redden spoke with both proponents and critics of the GNU and describes different aspects of the GNU initiative with accuracy.

I think she presents a balanced view of the opportunities and pitfalls that we face as we develop the portal campuses and the study-away sites. I urge both friends and foes of the GNU to read it.