On the basis of some of the things that I’ve written here and elsewhere, I’ve been accused of being a Sexton “loyalist.”

Those who make that accusation don’t know me very well.

In particular, they fail to see just how a great a test of my cosmopolitan principles it is each time that I engage in conversation with Sexton.

Cosmopolitanism, as I repeatedly argue to anyone who will listen, is all about conversations across cultural and ideological boundaries, conversations that are often difficult because they require you to confront principles and beliefs that are sometimes radically different from your own.

That’s the way it is with Sexton and me. There’s a vast ideological gap that separates us.

I’m not talking about social status or the great difference between our places in the general scheme of things at NYU.

I’m not talking about the fact that he’s a deeply religious person, and I’m not.

I’m talking about two simple facts.

He’s a Yankees fan. A diehard Yankees fan.

And I’m a Mets fan.  A diehard Mets fan.

Moreover, from my perspective Sexton is the worst kind of apostate, a childhood fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers who turned his back on the pure faith of the National League to embrace the enemy — the Yankees — and their heretic league with its designated hitter rule.

Now that is an ideological gulf.

To be continued …

[John Sexton speaking at NYU's 2009 Commencement ceremony at Yankee Stadium. Courtesy of nyu.edu]

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

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.”

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.

From my perspective, the piece makes overly broad generalizations about the ways in which a number of US universities and colleges have tried to globalize their programs and makes little to no attempt to understand the ways in which effort is unique. This habit of thought led her to claim in a private correspondence and (I’m sure) in completely good faith that the following paragraph is not misleading:

The 15th of March is over in Abu Dhabi as I write; it has about an hour left to go back in New York, where (the weather Channel website tells me) it’s presently 46 F with freezing rain and snow showers predicted for Saturday afternoon. Here in Abu Dhabi the sun is rising on what promises to be another beautiful day, though at the moment there’s a bit of haze on the horizon all around me.

I awake to an email inbox full of interesting news. There are several messages from NYU FASP indicating the results of the FAS vote of no confidence in the presidency of John Sexton. Apparently 44% (298) of my 682 tenured and tenure-track colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Science voted to agree with the proposition that “the Faculty of Arts and Science has no confidence in John Sexton’s leadership.” The resolution passed because 113 of my colleagues (17% of eligible voters) either chose not to vote (most likely) or experienced technical difficulties of one kind or another (probably a scattered few), while 47 of my colleagues (7% of eligible voters) chose to register their ambivalence or indecision by voting to abstain. Those numbers leave 223 of my colleagues (33% of eligible voters) disagreeing with the proposition and thereby affirming their overall confidence in President Sexton’s leadership. Add in my vote, and the final number in the last category is 224.

Elsewhere in the inbox there is an email from one of the editors of The Gazelle, NYU Abu Dhabi’s new student newspaper, telling me that an article about the VNC has been posted to their site.  There’s a statement from the Board of Trustees “strongly affirming [its] support of John and NYU’s current course” and citing the many achievements of his presidency. There’s a statement from Sexton himself, affirming that “in the university setting, we believe in debate and criticism,” because “it helps us improve.” There’s an email indicating that there’s a comment on my “Confused” post accusing me of “drinking the the kool aid” and insisting that “2031 isn’t about classroom space or faculty housing” because “NYU owns buildings that are currently empty and unused. NYU owns housing that currently is empty and unused. If classroom space and/ or housing is needed they can simply use what they’ve already.”

What to make of it all? I’m hoping that the vote can serve as a catalyst that can shift all the talking and shouting into a more constructive direction.

Let’s get rid of the posturing, the hyperbole, the name-calling, the uninformed pontificating, and the attitude of saying whatever it takes to score points in the media.

Let’s try this radical thought experiment: that each side is actually acting in good conscience and has taken its position on the question at hand (whatever it is) as a result of sound, rational thinking. Let’s try to understand how the question looks from the point of view that isn’t our own.

In the draft of its press release, the FAS Faculty Senate Council Caucus writes, “We are encouraged by the fact that this vote occurred without problems after much thoughtful and respectful discussion among the faculty. In the coming days and weeks, we anticipate that the NYU community, along with the FAS Senators, will be discussing the ramifications of this vote, the circumstances that gave rise to it, and the next appropriate course of decisions and actions.” For his part, President Sexton writes that he “look[s] forward to working with the faculty to maintain NYU’s academic trajectory and prepare for the challenges ahead.”

So let the conversations begin and let them be the kind of deep conversations that Kwame Anthony Appiah describes in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers: conversations in which participants really listen to one another in good faith because they really believe that those to whom they are speaking might have a better idea or account of the truth than they do; conversations in which participants are willing to put cherish ideas on the table for scrutiny; conversations in which the participants go in willing to have their minds changed.

I’m ready. Who else is in?

I take the things that I wrote in my “Fallibilism” post seriously. In fairness to Mr. Burt, I don’t think he’d read that post before responding to “Who’s Confused?” The original title of Mr. Burt’s post on his own blog — http://burthurts.blogspot.ae/2013/03/what-post-i-cant-wait-to-read-part-2.html — suggests that he might get around to reading it. I can’t wait to read his response to that one.

I thought that I was doing my best in the “Fallibilism” post to offer the kind of constructive criticism to my “employers” that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not. (You’ll see later why the Bard reference here is appropriate.)

I’m not perfect though, so maybe I didn’t get my point across sufficiently. I’ll keep trying.

Mr. Burt seems to think that I’m a complete idiot — or worse (think of a a 7-letter epithet beginning with the letter “A”). I’m willing to entertain those notions seriously. I’ll let my readers be the judge of what Homeric epithets should be attached to my name for all time.

Given the self- and other-directed ambivalence to which the title of his blog, Mr. Burt would probably think of me as a self-hating administrator. He’d probably be right, though I think of myself instead as a “reluctant administrator.” I used that phrase with the NYUAD Dean of Arts & Humanities who offered me the job of “Associate Dean of the Humanities” back in 2010. He told me that in his view that made me perfect for the job. I took the job because of my devotion to the NYUAD project, and I’ve done it for three years, the standard length of a departmental administrative job back on the Square.

Now I look forward to handing the portfolio over to another colleague and turning my attention to other projects, both personal and collaborative. Those projects include turning in my almost-done manuscript on US emergent literatures to NYU Press (yes, dear editor, it really is going to be turned in this spring); finishing the book on “Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination,” which is under contract to Palgrave and has changed dramatically as a result of my teaching here in Abu Dhabi; co-editing the Oxford History of the Novel, Volume 8: US Fiction after 1940 ; co-directing NYU Abu Dhabi’s Global Shakespeare Project with Rubén Polendo; and serving as publisher for our nascent Arts & Humanities journal Electra Street.

Mr. Burt seems to think that I’m a career administrator, an also-ran as a scholar. He writes, “You might very well think that Patell is a time-server, a lackey, a sycophant, a failed academic who didn’t publish enough to be promoted to full professor, a courtier who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, makes love to his employment.  You might very well think that.  Patell should be congratulated for showing us the contempt in which self-servicing university administrators so richly deserve to be held.” Again, I’ll let others look at my list of accomplishments and decide whether “time-server, a lackey, a sycophant, [and] a failed academic” are good descriptions of the trajectory of my career. I, for one, have always thought that one’s fifties were the golden time for scholarship for humanists, so I don’t think I’m done yet.

Mr. Burt is absolutely right, however, that I haven’t published enough yet to be promoted to full professor at NYU. And he is also right that the delay is due to the fact that I’ve done administrative service. What he doesn’t know — how could he, I suppose — is that I actually find administrative service frustrating because every minute I spend doing it is a minute that I could be spending on my own scholarship and teaching.

That’s not entirely true. There are some things I like about administrative service. These involve being able to collaborate with others on forward-thinking initiatives and being able to bring together imaginative individuals to work on projects like the “Global Shakespeare Student Festival,” which we’re holding here at NYUAD right now. (More on that to come, but for now you can look at this post from Electra Street and this Facebook page.)

I’ve always made sure that my administrative duties had fixed ending dates. I’m happy to pitch in as an administrator, but administration is not why I got a doctorate in literature.

I reluctantly agreed to be the Director of Graduate Placement in 1999, immediately after submitting my tenure materials. I won’t go into how much fun that was, but it at least it was only a one-year job.

Even more reluctantly, I agreed, after receiving tenure, to serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English major (which meant overseeing the academic careers of about 650 English and Dramatic Literature majors at that time). My wife will tell you that the years 2001-2004, during which I held that post, were among the most trying of our lives, because I was trying to remake the job of DUS into something that could be passed along from one faculty member to another. My predecessor had held the job for 20+ years at a time when the faculty in English taught 2 undergraduate and 2 graduate courses a year, and the department culture was such that even faculty members of good conscience would immediately start talking about the graduate program if asked to describe the work of the department. The undergraduate program was an after-thought, and most of my colleagues couldn’t have told you what the requirements for the undergraduate major were. Department faculty never did undergraduate advising, except for the few people on the undergraduate curriculum committee who were drafted once a semester to serve as pre-registration advisors. Advising happened emergency-room style in those days.

I was asked by the Dean of the College of Arts and Science to help change the culture of the department to one in which undergraduate education became not just a priority but a defining aspect of the department’s work. The timing was actually pretty good: at that time, rising undergraduate enrollments and declining graduate enrollments necessitated a change in the standard faculty load to 3 undergraduate courses and 1 graduate course a year.

My first job task at DUS was to get all of the faculty members to start advising undergraduates. I asked a few faculty members to become more high-powered advisors, getting training in the Byzantine computer system of student records so that we could streamline some advising and not continue to burden the overworked administrative staff. One colleague — now a full professor in the department — balked, offended at being asked to attend a training session “full of secretaries.”

If we had put these changes to a departmental vote, I imagine that they’d have been voted down, but the changes were imperative and so, no, the faculty didn’t get a vote. I think the department culture vastly improved after that, and my “regime” (as Mr. Burt would no doubt call it) was widely viewed as a success.

One of the legacies that I most cherish (in addition to laying the foundation for our current honors program) was being able to establish a prize, for the most outstanding senior English major, in the name of my predecessor, honoring his years of service.

When my initial term of service was up, the Dean of the College assumed that I would renew the appointment for a second term.

I refused.

He pleaded.

I refused again. The only way that success could be judged, I told him, was if the job as reconfigured could be handed over to someone else. It was.

I did agree to help out in a diminished capacity as “Director of Undergraduate Honors,” reporting to my successor as DUS, and I did agree to serve on a two-year-long hiring committee that overlapped with a sabbatical because I wanted the perspective of the undergraduate program to be represented. It was an open-field, multiple-position committee, part of the “Partners’ Plan” that John Sexton had convinced the trustees to create, which was designed to enable some departments — including English — to make a great leap forward.

During the end of my term as Director of Honors, I held the simultaneous position of “Acting Director of Graduate Studies,”  after my colleague John Archer found himself unable to continue in that position. In the spirit of collegiality, I agreed to take over his unfinished term of service.  That reminds me that I never did thank John for enabling me to spend most of the summer of 2007 in the DGS office.

Mr. Burt quotes with disapproval my citation from Stanley Fish’s book Save the World on Your Own Time (2008). I’ll quote a part of it again:

At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able to still remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and self-regarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.”

Despite the fact that he teaches literature, Mr. Burt seems to me to misread the last sentence when he writes, “Ah, yes, the days when I was just another narcissistic faculty member, the days before I could ‘make things happen for other people.’  The ‘other people’ who administrators obviously do not include faculty. No, ‘advancing the institution,’ means working to help administrators leave NYU with huge retirement packages, packages so huge that the NY Times ran a story about it.   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/nyregion/nyu-gives-lavish-parting-gifts-to-some-star-officials.html. The NY Times interview Patell spends his blog attacking” [sic].

It’s quite clear to me that the administrator whom Fish quotes means “the faculty” when she refers to “other people.” I fully sympathize with her when she talks about “not advancing your own profile but advancing the institution.”

Mr. Burt’s next sentence, the one that begins with “No,” is an example of what my students would call “reading in.” Burt’s comment has nothing to do with the quote he presented. If his post were a student paper, I’d point out the lack of fit between evidence and conclusion.

But let’s conclude this long-winded post with a consideration of Burt’s last “point.” Maybe I have, in fact, been working to fatten the pockets of evil administrators, but, sadly, I’m not one of them. In fact, before I assumed my present position, I had an offer from a research university in the Midwest that entailed a big raise in salary and immediate promotion to full professor. I’d been underpaid for years at NYU because I had not been one of the faculty members who solicited outside offers in order to get lucrative counter-offers from NYU. The Midwestern offer was tempting, not only because of the additional salary in an area with much lower cost of living than Manhattan, but also because it represented a fresh challenge. NYU countered by offering a fresh challenge (more involvement with NYUAD) and a staged raise, some at first, much more once I’d gone through the promotion process to full professor. Ultimately, the NYU offer top the other offer by about $1000.

There’s a docket sitting on the English Department Chair’s desk. It contains a full set of reviews of my work since tenure, including that of the manuscript mentioned above that’s (over)due to NYU Press. When it goes through, I’ll get a nice raise (though ironically I will then be radically underpaid if the average salaries for full professors posted by NYU Local are to believed). But NYU Press  asked me to think about a question pertaining to the manuscript that I found interesting and led me to revise the manuscript. Sadly for me, I couldn’t get the revisions done before moving to Abu Dhabi in 2011. And my administrative work and full load of teaching since then have prevented me from completing the revisions

Thus I’ve been leaving a significant amount of money on the table for the past two years, while I go about the business of “working to to help administrators leave NYU with huge retirement packages.”

I did, however, manage to complete my book on the Rolling Stones’ album Some Girls for Continuum Press’s 33 1/3, a labor of love that wasn’t about career advancement and can’t be counted toward academic promotion.

You know, maybe Mr. Burt is right.

I am an idiot.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

I find it sadly ironic that with all the talk back in the US about the infringement of free speech that’s ostensibly going on in Abu Dhabi, the institution that is supposed to protect free speech in the United States — the media — has been abusing that right in its coverage of the vote of no confidence this week at NYU.

Sloppy, error-filled, non-fact-checked journalism has seemingly become the rule — at least in the coverage of this story. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a reasonably balanced piece called “Behind No-Confidence Vote at New York U., a Torn Faculty,” but, for every piece like that one, there seem to be three or four that show clear bias.

Among the most disappointing is this brief column from The Atlantic, a publication I have admired over the years. It’s called “The Emir of NYU: John Sexton’s Abu Dhabi Debacle,” and it’s by Zvika Krieger, “a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior vice president at the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. He was previously an editor and writer at The New Republic and a correspondent for Newsweek based in Egypt and Lebanon, covering most of the Arab world.”

Given Mr. Krieger’s credentials, I’m hoping that he was on deadline and phoned this one in. Most of it is just a rehash of research conducted four years ago for his New York Magazine piece, “The Emir of NYU.” In case you’d forgotten that this article was the one in which my NYU colleague Andrew Ross compared Abu Dhabi to “Siberia,” Mr. Krieger sees fit to give us the quote once again.

The “new” piece quotes only Ross, one other nay-sayer, and one anonymous source, none of whom has had first-hand knowledge of the Abu Dhabi project.

“Debacle” is a pretty strong word. You’d think Mr Krieger might investigate whether the project really has turned out to have been a debacle. You’d think he might actually talk to one of the many NYUNY faculty members who has spent time teaching at NYUAD about what the place is actually like.

Apparently, however, he could not be bothered to update his 2008 research or to consult anyone who’s been actually teaching or studying at NYU Abu Dhabi. That strikes me as biased, sloppy journalism. And not only does the piece cannibalize the earlier work, it simply repeats the old title. Lazy.

And, come on Atlantic, you couldn’t be bothered to find an actual photo of NYU Abu Dhabi? Reuters didn’t have one? Was the picture of Reem Island (shown above) the only thing you could find? Honestly, what does “A general view of the Customer Service Center for Sorouh real estate in Al Reem Island in Abu Dhabi on January 28, 2013. (Reuters)” have to do with NYU Abu Dhabi?

The choice of photo suggests that the publication believes that one picture of Abu Dhabi is as good as another. That nonchalance is troubling in its resemblance to the attitude that all Arab countries are fundamentally the same, an attitude that seems to underlie so many of the comments made by those who have made it a mission to criticize NYU Abu Dhabi without taking the time to learn much about it.

[This post is an expanded version of a comment on the article that I left on The Atlantic's website.]

I’ve been thinking a little bit more about the video interview with John Sexton that appeared on the New York Times website. Here it is if you haven’t seen it:

The video strikes me as clearly edited to make Sexton look bad, or at least to make him appear to be a deeply flawed human being.

It has him begin, for example, with the statement, “I am not perfect. I am not perfect in my service to NYU. I do the best I can.”

Some colleagues might find it troubling to hear their university’s president admit such things, but for me, those statements have an effect that is opposite from what I think the editors of that video intended. As far as I’m concerned, they make Sexton look good, because they suggest to me a sincere embrace of the cosmopolitanism that he invokes in his “Global Network University Reflection” from 2010.

What Sexton invokes is the idea of fallibilism, which I began thinking about seriously after my first reading of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Sexton doesn’t use this term, invoking instead the doctrine of original sin which, he says, means “that I could always be better.” I’ve written about fallibilism here once before, in the aftermath of the first summer reading program for entering NYUAD first-years, in which they were invited to read and discuss Appiah’s book.

Here’s what I wrote then, in September 2010:

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.

In the rest of the Times interview, Sexton invokes the necessity of listening to others, particularly (as university president) to the faculty. While some of the nay-sayers among my NYU colleagues will no doubt argue that that Sexton is speaking in bad faith, that hasn’t been my experience. There have been moments since I began working on the NYU Abu Dhabi project when I have asked him to listen to something that I had to say, and he has. Many others here have had that experience.

So I’m hoping that Sexton and his closest aides on the 12th Floor of Bobst Library will listen now, because these final paragraphs are for them.

I hope that, whatever the final tally is at the end of  the no-confidence vote, that NYU’s leadership will fully embrace the doctrine of fallibilism and admit that in its zeal to transform NYU into a great global university, its has made some mistakes.

I’ve seen Sexton rally faculty and students to the cause of NYU Abu Dhabi; indeed, one of the chief pleasures of being involved with NYUAD has been the opportunity to work with so many smart, committed colleagues from NYU who came together because they were inspired by his vision of what NYUAD could be. I’d never had the chance to work with most of these these colleagues during my first fifteen years at NYU, and so far it’s been the highlight of my NYU career. Who ever thought that one would look forward to a university committee? But that’s the way those of us who served on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group for NYUAD felt during the two years that we worked together.

We need some of that magic for the NYU expansion plan. The present NYU 2031 plan is a problem. I’d like to see the 12th Floor find a way to rally the faculty around a plan to give NYU the additional space that it so desperately needs on the Washington Square campus. To be honest, I’m no fan of many of NYU’s Washington Square building projects; indeed, my wife and I, after ending our decade-long appointments as Faculty Fellows in Residence at University Hall, elected not to take an apartment in Washington Square Village, preferring instead to have most of our belongings put in deep storage somewhere. We were frankly afraid of how the building project in Washington Square Village was likely to take shape.

I nevertheless do accept the argument that Robert Moses has already de-Villageified those superblocks around Washington Square Village and Silver Towers and that it makes sense for NYU to build there. I think it’s sad that NYU’s original plan to build on part of the landmarked (!) I.M. Pei site was blocked in what struck me then as a knee-jerk response by the neighborhood: the revised building plan strikes me as much worse. And, really, what Village denizen actually likes those towers, landmarked or not? Using their landmarked status to thwart NYU’s buildling plans strikes me as cynical and Machiavellian.

In any case, we need a plan for expansion,  but I think we can do better than we have done thus far in conceiving the plan and rallying support for it.

From my vantage point in Abu Dhabi, however, what’s most pressing is that NYU not blow the opportunity that the idea of the global network university represents. And we’ll do just that if we make the mistake of believing that our global network university is already fully established. Too often in my NYU career I’ve encountered this attitude: “We thought of it today. We wish we’d done it yesterday. Tomorrow we will claim it is done.” We need to resist thinking that way about the GNU. From what I can see at the moment, there’s too much “operationalizing” and not enough “conceptualizing” or just plain “thinking.”

The GNU is a brilliant idea, but I’m convinced that it will fail if we don’t admit that it is a work-in-progress that will take us time, maybe two decades, to realize fully. We need to find ways to encourage what I call “grassroots” collaboration between faculty members around the network — in New York, Abu Dhabi, and the study-away sites — on pedagogical and research initiatives. Those will be the lasting ties between our sites, not the kind of mandated connections at the departmental level that are presently creating resentment on the Square and in Abu Dhabi.

The GNU will not be worth anything if it doesn’t enable us — as faculty, students, and administrators — to have conceptual and practical breakthroughs that we couldn’t have had without it. And so, you ask, what is it that the GNU will enable us to think and do that we haven’t already thought and done?

I don’t know. And I like it that way for now. The GNU a work-in-progress, and it will succeed only when more of us become committed to its ideals and potential and work together to develop, explore, and realize them.

I think John Sexton is sincere in his embrace of fallibilism. I think he is committed to listening, and to becoming a better listener, and to creating the kinds of meaningful institutional conversations that we desperately need in order to make the GNU a success.

We’ve done a lot. We can do more. We can do better. I think we will.

Just one humble faculty member’s — I mean administrator’s … well, whatever I am, it’s just my opinion. And my fervent hope.