New York University Abu Dhabi opened its doors last night with high hopes, high ambition and a group of students described as a “remarkable class of 2014.”

Read the entire article here. “Entrenched in the ideology of the founders of NYUAD” is not precisely how I would have described our relationship to cosmopolitanism, but the article does capture something essential about the ways in which we hope to encourage thinking about the interplay of sameness and difference.

The final touches were being put on the Ramadan tent this morning: carpets, chairs, stage, audiovisual system, and air conditioning all in place.

Meanwhile, back at the Sama tower, the Welcome Center was getting ready for the arrival of the students …

And tonight the students started arriving … Stay tuned.

“Marhaba” means “welcome” in Arabic. Our Marhaba Week at NYU Abu Dhabi begins on Monday when the students start arriving in earnest. As I mentioned earlier, I’m scheduled to speak over dessert at our Marhaba Iftar on Tuesday night, which follows the first gathering of the entire class of 2014. It will take place in the Ramadan Tent that is being erected in the parking lot behind the downtown campus building.

I’d thought that this would be an event that would include the entire community, faculty as well as students and student life staff. But apparently the tent was not going to be big enough to accommodate that number of people.

I (and a few others) mentioned to Vice Chancellor Al Bloom that faculty members were disappointed at not participating in this event: they were eager not only to be part of  a ceremonial occasion, but also to send a signal that they would be an integral part of the students’ lives here.

Al mulled it over. And he got us a bigger tent.

The faculty will now observe the first student event and then sit with students during the dinner. And (fingers crossed) both students and faculty will engage (after my little talk) in the first of what I hope will be many conversations about cosmopolitanism and scholarship here at NYU Abu Dhabi.

I take this as a wonderful omen on the eve of the students’ arrival, not only a sign of the responsiveness of the NYUAD leadership, but also an allegory of the possibilities that we have here if we all work together to achieve our common aims.

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.

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.]

Al Bloom Speaking at the NYUAD Faculty Orientation

As I flew into Abu Dhabi airport the other night to attend the opening of NYU Abu Dhabi, I thought a line from Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: “The Great Work Begins.” The line first occurs when an angel arrives at the end of the play’s first part, Millennium Approaches, and also serves as the final line of the second part, Perestroika, where it follows a blessing given by Prior, the play’s central protagonist: “And I bless you: More Life. / The Great Work Begins.” I’ve written about the play’s conclusion over at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York, where I described the ways in which I believe it embodies a commitment to a cosmopolitan approach to living.

I believe that this is great work in which we are all engaged here in Abu Dhabi. “The world only spins forward,” Kushner’s Prior tells us: “We will be citizens. The time has come.”

And now that the time has come to open the Abu Dhabi campus, I’ve been reflecting back on my involvement with NYUAD over the past two years, which I owe both to Senator John McCain and NYU CAS Dean Matthew Santirocco. I wrote about that connection during my first trip to Abu Dhabi last October, and while my account of the genesis of my involvement in the project may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, I was quite serious when I described having “the fervor of the convert.” That fervor continues, stronger than ever, now that I am serving NYUAD as its Associate Dean of Humanities.

Back in October, we visited the Downtown Campus building before NYUAD had formally taken possession of the site. One building was still closed to us. During my subsequent visits to Abu Dhabi to help out with the admissions process for our first class, I was delighted to see the building become a real workplace and to imagine what the place would be like when it opened in the fall. Watching the candidates spread themselves out in the library or on the lawn while writing personal essays as part of their weekend’s work, I could envision NYUAD as a place of learning and scholarship — as a college.

Now it’s about to happen for real. Yesterday morning, at the orientation program for our inaugural faculty, Vice Chancellor Al Bloom described NYU Abu Dhabi as a “historic undertaking.” Our new provost Fabio Piano described compared NYUAD with the human genome project, on which he worked, and predicted that of the two, it would be NYUAD that would prove to be the more significant. As the day progressed, the excitement of the faculty who had assembled here was palpable, and it was gratifying to start the first of what I hope will be many conversations with my colleagues here about pedagogy, scholarship, and educational innovation.

The Great Work has begun.

This morning, I was pleased to come across a blog co-written by Beth Lindsay, NYUAD’s Access and Public Services Librarian, and her husband Vic. The blog is called “Sight Unseen: Vic & Beth Move to Abu Dhabi,” and thus far it’s been full of delightful anecdotes about life in Abu Dhabi and about regional travel.

Finding their blog has prompted me to create an “NYUAD Blogs” section in my sidebar. In addition to their blog, and the official NYUAD blog, “Salaam,” I’ve included links to two blogs I’ve discovered  by incoming NYUAD students.

Leah Reynolds calls her blog, “BiH Bound: Living, Loving, and Learning in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina!” because she has been studying at United World College in Mostar.” In her post “New York University Abu Dhabi” from last April, Leah describes why she chose to attend NYUAD. Apparently, she’ll be giving her blog a new name come September.

Stephen Underwood’s blog is “The Unheard Sermon of a Lesser Scholar.” It aims to tell the stories of the challenges faced by the members of the inaugural class of of NYUAD. My favorite of his posts so far is, “Cosmopolitanism and Christianity,” his response to Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, which members of the Class of 2014 were invited to read over the summer. Stephen wonders how one can reconcile a belief in cosmopolitanism with his beliefs as “a devout Christian” that “there are universals” and that these universals are expressed in the Bible. I didn’t tackle this important question in my online lecture for the summer colloquium, but I’m hoping that Stephen, his classmates, and I will be able to start a conversation about that question next month in Abu Dhabi.

If you’re a member of the NYUAD community and have a blog, drop me a line so that I can include it in the sidebar.

I haven’t yet had a chance to explore the various blogs that are listed at “Blog Abu Dhabi,” which are written by expatriates living in the emirates, but it’s on my to-do list for the next few weeks.