NYUAD

Archive

September 3, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

First Day of Class

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be teaching my first class at NYU Abu Dhabi, in the first time slot of the new academic year. Yes, that’s right: on a Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. For those of you who don’t know, the work week runs Sunday to Thursday here in Abu Dhabi, and Friday is the day of religious observance for Muslims.

The course I’m teaching is part of the “Pathways of World Literature” section of NYUAD’s Core Curriculum, and it’s called “The Cosmopolitan Imagination.” It’s an evolution of some of the ideas that I’ve been exploring for the past few years in NYU’s equivalent of the Core in a course that was called “Conversations of the West.”

Here’s the course description that appears on the syllabus:

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a perspective that regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. Does this perspective lie behind all “great” literature, which asks its readers to experience otherness by opening themselves up to another person’s words and thoughts? This course uses novels, poems, plays, and films to explore the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination.

The major texts are: Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, which will set the terms of debate for the course; Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in a superb translation by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (and we’ll be lucky enough to have Meineck visiting later in the term); the Lebanese Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s powerful play Scorched (French title: Incendies), which draws on Sophocles’ play; Shakespeare’s Othello; selections from the 1001 Nights; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; the Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih’s  Season of Migration to the North; Tagore’s The Home and the World; E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime; and Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. We’ll also be watching the film adaptations of Tagore’s novel and Mouawad’s play.

I’ve taught some of these texts before, but many of them appear on one of my syllabi for the first-time. But to me that’s part of the fun of NYU Abu Dhabi: the ability to stretch the boundaries of my pedagogy with an emphasis on globalizing my approach to literature. To help me: fourteen students from a variety of nations. I’m looking forward to the morning. (Click here for a copy of the syllabus.)

[Photo: The Liwa Desert near the Qasr al Sarab.]

Archive

July 12, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

Next Month Abu Dhabi

A month from today we’ll be touching down in Abu Dhabi — many bags in tow but hopefully not much baggage from New York — to begin a sojourn of at least a year. It’s hard to believe that three years of accelerating involvement with the NYUAD project are finally leading my family and me to an apartment in Sama Tower. As I spent today suggesting a few final emendations for the next edition of the NYUAD Course Bulletin, I read through the book  and found my enthusiasm for the project once again renewed.

I was reminded of one of my favorite passages in Thoreau’s Walden, which comes from the chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”:

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will seethe sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

When I teach Walden, I try to point out how it is a work that situates itself within many genres: it’s settlement narrative, a natural science treatise, an economic treatise, an autobiography, and a work of Transcendentalist philosophy. In part it’s about stripping life down to its essentials, searching for that “hard bottom,” that “point d’appui,” as he puts it in the passage above. He’s looking for “a place where you might found a wall or a state,” a phrase that indicates that he’s not only building a house in the woods as part of a personal experiment, but undertaking a philosophical though experiment about how we might best reconstitute society so that it can enable more of us to live life more fully.

There’s something of that idealistic spirit behind the NYU Abu Dhabi venture. We’re building walls — a few in downtown Abu Dhabi, a lot more on Saaidyat Island — with the ultimate goals of remaking the state of global education and helping the Emirati remake Abu Dhabi into an idea capital, where knowledge and culture are created. I was pleased to see that a lot of that spirit has made its way into the Bulletin.

By the way, if you’re interested in my take on that passage from Thoreau, you can look at this lecture from my contribution to NYU’s Open Ed project.

Archive

January 5, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

J-Term, Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of my January Term class for NYU Abu Dhabi on the subject of “New York and Modernity.” For the next three weeks, I’ll be exploring this subject with students — five from NYUAD and one from NYUNYU — who hail from a variety of places: Australia, Canada, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, and the U.S., the last a native New Yorker. We’ll be blogging our way through the course, with the posts all collected at this site: http://jterm.patell.org.

Given the compressed nature of the course, we’ll be reading fewer pages than I’d normally assign over a 14-week span, but we’ll be making up for that with a rich set of co-curricular outings: the MTA Transit Museum, the Hopper exhibition at the Whitney, the Abstract Expressionist show at MOMA, an evening of Mozart, Mahler, and Ades at the Philharmonic, La Fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera, theater outings to American Idiot and an off-Broadway production of Langdon Mitchell’s 1907 play The New York Idea, and generally tramping about the city. The goal is immersion, and we’ll be hunting for “exemplary” objects, moments, and experiences that are suggestive of the larger dynamics of New York City life and the relation between the urban and the modern in the 21st century.

My hope is that the students will come away with a set of concepts that they can use to think about the history and culture of any city that they visit.

So on Day 1, we talked about the idea of “exemplarity,” a concept that I hope will become clearer as we make use of it as the course proceeds. We set up blogs, and I asked the students each to write an opening post about what they’re expecting from New York.

And then — as an exemplum of the dynamics of the relation between the urban and the modern in the history of New York — we watched the documentary New York Underground, which tells the story of the building of the New York’s first subway line — the IRT — which opened to great fanfare in 1904. New York’s subway wasn’t the first: indeed, its chief engineer, William Barclay Parsons, visited other cities and issued a report about the technologies that they employed. New York’s innovation was to be the largest completely electrified underground rail system in the world, and it quickly became the standard against which others would be judged. That strikes me as exemplary of the role that New York itself has played in defining the modern, and watching the documentary again, I was struck by the ways in which our ideas of the modern in New York were shaped by the exigencies of politics, economics, technology, and culture. New York’s subway, for example was built largely with trenches (with tunnels used only when necessary) in contrast to London’s underground, so that it would be more accessible and inviting to the public. It was a technological marvel — and suggests the powerful impact that “technology” has on our conceptions of what’s “modern.”

Today, we’ll ride the subway and visit the MTA Museum. Meanwhile, here’s a video of the IRT’s opening in 1904. And if that piques your interest, there’s a treasure trove of information and documents about the IRT at nycsubway.org.

Archive

November 5, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Steely Affability

Marhaba Week flashback: “Yet as the dinner wore on and jetlag took its toll, Cyrus Patell, a star literature professor from NYU New York, did just that, gliding between the tables armed with microphone and steely, talk-show affability.” I guess this picture captures what he meant. I noticed the picture today on some of the slideshows playing on the computers in the lobby of 19 Washington Square North today. I’m still getting grief at home for the quote.

Previously. And.

Archive

November 3, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Now Playing: Summer Colloquium Video

In an earlier post, I described the video that I had recorded as part of NYUAD’s Summer Colloquium on Cosmopolitanism. Incoming NYUAD students were invited to read Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and to pose questions to one another and to me via online discussion groups. The lecture that I recorded responded to many of these questions. I noted in the earlier post that”just been made available to NYUAD faculty and staff as a Flash video on the NYUAD Intranet.”

I’m pleased now to be able to offer it to readers of this blog. It lasts 35 minutes, and if you do take a look at it, I’d love to read your responses and questions.

Archive

October 10, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

NYUAD Update

The fifth week of classes at NYUAD has begun, and the “Student Weekly Update” that has just arrived in my inbox conveys a sense of the richness of the school’s emerging academic culture.

There’s a reminder about the upcoming deadline for applications for the January Term courses that students are required to take, with courses offered in Abu Dhabi, London, New York, and Shanghai. There are volunteering opportunities on campus (helping out with the upcoming Candidate Weekends) and off (the Pinkathon Breast Cancer Awareness Walk, which needs 100 volunteers on Friday, October 15, at Yas Island; the Swimming Festival on the Corniche on Saturday, October 16; “Strays of Abu Dhabi [SAD] Dog Day” on Saturday, October 30; and the Future Centre for Special Needs Children). The “academic coaches” (recent college graduates, most from  NYU but one from Zayed University, who are assisting in courses and at the ARC) are leading discussions of Michael Gazzaniga’s The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas in preparation for Prof. Gazzaniga’s visit next week as part of the Campus Forum series. There’s the first meeting of the Arabic Literature Society, and showings of the films Gaav/The Cow (Iran 1969; 100 minutes; dir. Dariush Mehju’i), Everything is Fine (Egypt 1958; dir. Niazi Mustafa), and District 9 (USA-New Zealand-Canada-South Africa 2009; 112 minutes; dir. Neill Blomkamp). The last is being presented by “Reel Deal Productions,” NYUAD’s first official student organization — the first of what look to be many.

I spent the first half of last week at NYUAD. Here are a few observations about what things are like after the first third of the first semester.

Read More »

Archive

October 7, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Provost’s Message

This e-mail, from NYUAD provost Fabio Piano, arrived in our inboxes this morning. The title was “NYUAD’s First Month.”

Dear Members of the NYU Community,

New York University Abu Dhabi has now opened its doors to our first class of students and is in full swing. As so many of you played an essential role in our launch — from student and faculty recruitment, to innovative curriculum development, to serving as NYU Abu Dhabi Affiliated Faculty, to your guidance as members of the University Leadership Team — I wanted to provide you with a brief update.

With great anticipation, our faculty — both standing and the first group of Affiliated Faculty — arrived in the second half of August. In a synchronized wave, the faculty population expanded from fewer than five to more than 60 in little more than a week. Families relocated and final preparation for the arrival of the students ensued. Offices began to overflow with books and the corridors were filled with a new energy to prepare for the start of classes.

We began with a two-day faculty orientation, which was met with such enthusiasm we quickly expanded it and organized follow-up workshops on topics from Teaching in a Global Classroom to Student Support and Mentoring. As I write this, the faculty are already not only delighting students with their first weeks of classes, but are also connecting with community organizations in Abu Dhabi, organizing field trips, and commencing their research.

The NYUAD Institute, which has been one of the most visible presences of NYU in Abu Dhabi, kicked off its third year of life to a packed Al Mamoura Auditorium with an exhilarating lecture by Ingo Walter, vice dean of Stern School of Business and Finance at NYU. This was especially momentous as, for the first time, we had our NYUAD students in the audience. As soon as it was over, several students came to me to make sure Professor Walter was coming to teach — which I assured them he was. This was followed a few days later by an Inaugural address by David Levering Lewis, Julius Silver University professor, Professor of History at NYU, and Affiliated Faculty at NYUAD. Professor Lewis placed NYUAD in the context of over 2,000 years of intellectual activities. His keen insights are generously available on Salaam, the NYU Abu Dhabi blog.

Our students, the extraordinary Class of 2014, began to arrive in full force on September 6, coming from some 39 countries around the world. While many knew one another from their Candidate Weekends — and of course, they all knew one another virtually thanks to Facebook — it was truly a sight to behold to watch as they came together in their new home, Sama Tower. After students checked in, they migrated to the student lounge, where hours of conversation, ping pong, billiards, and even some video games (Rock Band was a favorite) ensued. The following morning they were fully immersed in Marhaba (Welcome) Week activities, with sessions on academics, meeting with their mentors, introductions to the rich campus life offerings, getting to know about local customs, and of course, getting to know Abu Dhabi itself.

Because Marhaba Week coincided with the final days of Ramadan, highlights of the week included two Iftar dinners held under an enormous tent in the NYUAD parking lot. The dinners featured a lecture by Cyrus Patell on cosmopolitanism, a talk by Philip Kennedy on Arabian poetry, a group Arabic lesson, and a welcome address from Al Bloom, who told the students:

“We will demonstrate, here, together, how a truly global institution of higher learning can lift consciousness beyond parochial, national, and ideological concerns to leverage the enormous, positive potential of a global world.”

As a long-time member of the NYU community, it has been wonderful to witness so many from around the world so quickly embrace their place in this ever-growing NYU family. We are extraordinarily grateful that many of you have helped and continue to help this historic project with your wisdom and open spirit of collaboration.

The future will continue to demand the same level of connection and collaboration for NYUAD to propel itself to the heights it can and will reach.

Archive

September 24, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Call Me Cyrus

Here’s how the opening Iftar dinner was described in the cover article of The Review, the Abu Dhabi National‘s Friday magazine:

Besides, if the students seemed slightly starry-eyed during the introductory portion of that Iftar welcome banquet, they got the chance to demonstrate their analytical grit later in the evening. Before their arrival they were asked to read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, an essay on the complexities of life between cultures. The book recommends a conversational attitude of openness to persuasion, a recognition of one’s own fallibility, and a willingness to keep improving one’s ideas about the world. This all makes sense as a regulatory ideal for a university which takes students from all over the globe and asks them to live together in a single building. It’s perhaps more surprising that practically tile first thing NYU Abu Dhabi should have done with its new arrivals was ask them to take that ideal to pieces. Yet as the dinner wore on and jetlag took its toll, Cyrus Patel [sic], a star literature professor from NYU New York, did just that, gliding between the tables armed with microphone and steely, talk-show affability.

“Call me Cyrus,” he insisted, before explaining that he would forego the advertised question and answer session in favour of an open discussion. A few hands shot up. One student suggested that cosmopolitanism was just American liberalism by another name. “I would like just to comment on the concept of truth,” another began ominously. Someone embarked on a learned but tangential piece of Quranic interpretation. Amid the wreckage of their meals , the students’ earlier keenness seemed dulled. Some rested their heads on the backs of their chairs. One diverted himself by throwing food and catching  it in his mouth. A girl at my table had just travelled from Oklahoma, a journey of 25 hours. How, an excitable young  man demanded, could cosmopolitanism be an adequate response when confronted with people who don’t want to talk, who don’t want to change their minds, who refuse to compromise? Wasn’t force ever justified? “That is a problem we are not going to solve tonight,” said call-me-Cyrus smoothly. The session was over.

Several of my NYUAD colleagues on the appropriately Melvillean nickname conferred on me by the author of the piece, Ed Lake, who is deputy editor of The Review. (And I’m only slightly bitter about the misspelling of my surname.)

The article as a whole is pleasingly quirky: Lake has a nose for the odd little incident that can give life to a feature piece, and he manages to capture the slightly giddy flavor of those first few days. [Click here to read the entire article.]

I wonder if the members of that budding a capella group, which Lake mentions in the final paragraph of the article, know that the opening number of the new season of Glee was “Empire State of Mind”?

Archive

September 22, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

From Athens to Abu Dhabi

I was very sorry to have to miss my colleague David Levering Lewis’s inaugural address last Sunday evening at the Armed Forces Officers Club in Abu Dhabi, so I was pleased to find the full text posted to NYUAD’s Salaam blog yesterday together with a brief description and pictures of the event.

David’s address offers an elegant brief history of the evolution of the modern university, from “an olive grove called Hekademia near Athens” to NYU Abu Dhabi, which he describes as “a liberal arts institution in service to the planet.” The address highlights the contributions made by the Islamic world to the preservation and development of the university ideal that had its germ in Plato’s teaching, while also singling out the contributions made by NYU, Harvard, Hopkins, Wisconsin, and Michigan to the US university model that is the foundation for NYUAD.

I was particularly pleased to see my friend Benjamin Franklin make a cameo appearance:

Philadelphia Quaker and self-taught polymath, Franklin founded the Academy and Charitable School of Pennsylvania in 1740 as the first truly secular institution of higher learning in the Western hemisphere. Open to male students regardless of religion and social status, though not of race, the University of Pennsylvania’s forerunner emphasized commerce and trade, and dispensed with Latin and metaphysics.

David’s address offers useful insights to anyone who has an interest in the past, present, and future of liberal education. Highly recommended. [Click here to go to the full text.]

Archive

September 18, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Fallibilism

One of the concepts that I deliberately left unaddressed in the lecture that I recorded for the NYAUD Summer Colloquium was fallibilism, which Appiah discusses in his chapter on counter-cosmopolitanism. Appiah describes falliblism as “the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence” (p. 144). In my reading of Appiah’s account of cosmopolitanism, fallibilism is a crucial part of the rationale for the kinds of conversations that he advocates, conversations in which we are willing to put our ideas to the test and to have our minds changed by those with whom we are conversing.

It is precisely because we are fallible — because we are imperfect, error-prone beings — that we really need to listen to other people. Why? Because they may have a better account of the truth than we have or simply a better idea. Talking to other people and keeping an open mind as we do it makes us more likely to be able to recognize when we are in error — and more likely to be willing to admit and correct our errors.

I withheld a discussion of fallibilism from the summer lecture because I wanted to talk about it to the NYUAD community in person at the first Iftar dinner ( you know, the one that required the bigger tent). I began my talk by reminding the students of some of the ways that we had begun thinking about cosmopolitanism during the summer colloquium: I quickly went through the roots of the idea of the “citizen of the world” in Greek thought and then its emergence as an alternative to conceptions of nationalism during the European Enlightenment.

And I reminded them of one of Appiah’s crucial philosophical (and rhetorical) strategies: taking terms that we think we understand — like “conversation” or “contamination” — and leading us rethink them, deepening our conceptions (as in the case of “conversation”) or even reversing the value-judgments that we customarily ascribe to them (as in the case of “contamination”).

I took the opportunity to perform a similar operation on a term that Appiah doesn’t use explicitly but that is implicit in his accounts of cosmopolitan epistemology: perfectionism. We often use the term, I suggested, to indicate something negative: the tendency not to let go of a piece of work until we consider it “perfect.” But in philosophical terms,”perfectionism” is not about producing a perfect product. After all, human beings aren’t capable of being perfect. Only God is capable of being perfect. Human beings exist in what scientists might think of an asymptotic relation to perfection: we can work every day toward perfection and through hard work and diligence make ourselves better and better at whatever it is we wish to do.

In other words, we should regard perfectionism as an approach to life in which we understand ourselves to be error-prone beings who can nonetheless learn from our mistakes. We can work to perfect ourselves and our endeavors each day, knowing that we can never fully succeed. The point of perfectionism isn’t product: it’s process.

As you’ve no doubt guessed from the picture above, I offered the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin as an example of a productive approach to the idea of perfectionism. He’s a good model for NYUAD students, I suggested, because he valued education so highly. But he was an autodidact: in contrast to men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Franklin could not expect a college education as his due. He had to apprentice himself to his brother, who was a printer. A liberal arts education was something he had to acquire for himself. And he did. He was a voracious reader, who established lending libraries. He was also a scientist, famous for his experiments with lightning and electricity, eventually becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the few 18th-century Americans to be so honored.

Franklin’s Autobiography is regarded by scholars of American literature as a text that plays a seminal role in the creation of the mythology of the self-made man. The ability to recognize and correct error proves to be a crucial part of Franklin’s approach to self-making. Throughout the Autobiography, Franklin uses a metaphor drawn from the printer’s trade to describe his approach to perfectionism, describing his mistakes as errata, or printer’s errors. In Franklin’s day, type was set by hand, with individual fonts of type laid down on a bed to form words and sentences. The printer would print a proof sheet, which would then be proofread. If you discovered an erratum, you could correct it by pulling out the incorrect or defective font and replacing it with the correct one.

Here is Franklin’s description of a youthful folly in which he borrowed from some money that he was supposed to be keeping safe for a friend of his brother:

“The breaking into this money of Vernon’s was one of the first great errata of my life; and this affair show’d that my father was not much out in his judgment when he suppos’d me too young to manage business of importance.”

Later on, however, he is able to correct his error:

“Mr. Vernon, about this time, put me in mind of the debt I ow’d him, but did not press me. I wrote him an ingenuous letter of acknowledgment, crav’d his forbearance a little longer, which he allow’d me, and as soon as I was able, I paid the principal with interest, and many thanks; so that erratum was in some degree corrected.”

Franklin describes several events in his life this way, including his broken courtship of the woman who would eventually become his wife. Some of the errata Franklin is unable to correct during his lifetime, but by pointing them out in his Autobiography as errors he wished he could have corrected, he is essentially able to correct them for posterity. Chalk one up for the power of narrative.

I suspect that Franklin’s aspirations might resonate with many of the students who are attending NYUAD: he’s an autodidact, a voracious reader, a successful businessman, a famous scientist, and ultimately a diplomat and citizen of the world. I find this paragraph from a pamphlet “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784) to be a good summary of Franklin’s perspective:

Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as Servants or Journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become Masters, establish themselves in Business, marry, raise Families, and become respectable Citizens.

Notice how this vision of the opportunity that America provides depends on the idea of toleration (“there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand”).

What I finally tried to suggest at the Iftar dinner was that the idea of fallibilism provides a link between the ways in which the students were thinking about cosmopolitanism during the summer colloquium — as an approach to cultural politics that stands in contradistinction to nationalism and universalism — and the experience that they were about to have in their classrooms.

Fallibilism means embracing the fact that we are all imperfect beings, whether we are students or teachers. Don’t expect your teachers to be perfect — or even to be authority figures who have all the answers. Think of them as guides whose job is to lead you (and themselves) not to final answers but rather to more complex questions based on the provisional answers that you discover. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes when speaking in class or in public, but be willing and able to recognize and admit when you’re in error. Then adjust your ideas to take into account the new truths that you’ve discovered. Franklin believed that something called “truth” exists, but he wasn’t willing simply to take it on faith: he believed in testing ideas for himself.

As one great sage of American educational television put it: “Take changes! Make mistakes! Get messy!”

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
← Older posts