Here in Abu Dhabi (as in many parts of the world aside from the US) we write today’s date this way:

11-9-11

I like the symmetry of that, which won’t be repeated for another hundred years. It makes today special among anniversaries of 9/11.

The next 11-9-11 will be even more special, because it’ll be the 110th anniversary of the date that those two towers — each 110 stories tall — came to earth.

Early this morning, indeed in the very minutes after the day began, I lived through a symmetry that was (to quote the poet William Blake) “fearful.”

Just a few minutes into 11-9-11, my family and I found ourselves descending down a concrete staircase in a very tall building, smelling smoke. I was told later that some of the machinery on the 34th floor of the Sama Tower where we live overheated, causing wires to melt, burn, and smoke. Luckily, it didn’t turn into a major fire. The boys had experienced a couple of fire drills in our old building on 14th Street in New York, but in Abu Dhabi our apartment is on the 37th floor instead of the 15th, and in New York we’d never actually smelled smoke.

It was a visitation of the uncanny that give me, ever so briefly, just the barest glimpse into what it must have been like for those people on that day who walked down almost three times as many flights as we did. The lucky ones, who got down and got out.

Periodically, as we walked down with other members of the NYU Abu Dhabi community, the lights went out, but I had the comfort of knowing that it was simply because the switches were on timers, turned again on with the press of switch — not due to a catastrophic power failure. Walking down those stairs, I felt urgency, but never fear. Outside we discovered that some of the NYUAD students had thought to bring necessities that we hadn’t occurred to us: a guitar, a soccer ball. Thoughtful souls purchased bottles of water and gave them out to those in need.

The National, Abu Dhabi’s English-language newspaper, ran a brief piece today about the morning’s events:

Fire forces evacuation of NYU Abu Dhabi students and staff
Erin Conroy
Sep 11, 2011

A fire and smoke at a student housing building for New York University Abu Dhabi has forced the evacuation of hundreds of students and staff in the middle of the night.

Students were transferred from their dorms at the 46-storey Sama Tower to the university’s classroom building just after midnight, while some staff were forced to check into nearby hotels.

They were able to return to the building around 4am.

Classes today have been cancelled. The university’s second batch of students started classes last week.

We were among those who checked into the nearby Cristal Hotel. My 8:30 class was cancelled, along with all the others today, but my older son made it to school in time to take a first-period middle-school exam. Resilient like so many New Yorkers, my kids were mostly calm last night and only a little freaked out at the prospect of going to bed tonight. Mostly they were just tired.

Meanwhile, the National has been running feature articles for the past week about 9/11. The most moving was probably the first in the series, “The Day Our World Ended” (September 3), about a Muslim family from Bangladesh that was devastated when husband and father Mohammed Chowdhury died at the World Trade Center, where he worked as a waiter. Two days later, his son Farqad was born. You can watch a video based on interviews conducted for the article here.

Looking around the parking lot around Sama Tower early this morning and seeing students from all over the world gathered together, I was reminded of a moment from the documentary film 9/11 that my colleague Bryan Waterman and I have been showing on the first day of our Writing New York class since we began teaching it in 2003. It’s part of a montage of scenes from films about New York that begins with a clip from the documentary New York by Ric Burns. The clip describes New York as city devoted to “the exhilarating, often harrowing experiment whether all the peoples of the world could live together in a single place.” The montage concludes with a brief scene from 9/11, after the second plane has hit, when the filmmakers notice how many people of different races and ethnicities are standing in the street, aghast, sharing information and impressions, sharing shock and fear. We use it as an example of New York’s cosmopolitanism — and implicitly as an argument for the necessity of a pursuing a cosmopolitanism that can allow you to embrace rather than reject cultural difference.

In that spirit of cosmopolitanism, I’m pleased to say that one class wasn’t cancelled today at NYU Abu Dhabi: Elementary Arabic I for Faculty and Staff had its first meeting at 7:00 p.m. in Sama Tower as scheduled.

I was proud to be there.

[Photos taken earlier today behind Sama Tower in Abu Dhabi.]

… many observers say growth in overseas campuses will continue. The Middle East and Asia have lots of young people clamoring for higher education. Western schools, for their part, want the prestige of an overseas presence.

New York University is banking on that as it opens a highly selective honors campus in the UAE in September.

Oddly, this statement was followed by a talking head not from NYUAD but from SUNY Albany. (I wonder how many listeners didn’t realize that there was a difference?)

In any case, what Abramson fails to note is that NYUAD is not catering to students from the Middle East and Asia in particular. As NYUAD’s press release about its inaugural class indicates, our “150 students” hail “from 39 countries on six continents.”

The President of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, Ms. LOU ANNA SIMON (President, Michigan State University) noted that MSU failed to get the 100-15o students per year that it needed to be “financial viable”: “We were running about a third of that.” In contrast, NYUAD’s first admissions season has been more successful than anyone could have foreseen, thanks to its crackerjack admissions team working in tandem with officers from the IIE:

Overall, 189 students were accepted out of 9,048 applicants worldwide (an acceptance rate of 2.1 percent). NYUAD had initially sought an entering class of 100 students, however the combination of a remarkable candidate pool, with a 79.4 percent yield — the percentage of those admitted who have committed to attending this fall — produced a class 50 percent larger than anticipated.

NPR conveyed a more complete sense of NYUAD’s mission in a piece from All Things Considered that ran in May and featured NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom: “Life On An American Campus In The UAE.” Last summer, NPR interviewed John Sexton about the idea of the global university and NYU’s plans in Abu Dhabi.

You can read transcripts of those stories on NPR’s site and also listen to the audio on your browser or by downloading mp3 files.

http://nyuad.nyu.edu/academics/faculty.html

The bio is currently the brief one that will appear in the initial NYUAD Course Bulletin. I’ll provide one that’s longer — and maybe even a picture — before too long.

I’m pleased to announce here that I have accepted the position of Associate Dean for Humanities for NYU Abu Dhabi. An official announcement from NYUAD is forthcoming later this week. My mission is to help NYUAD Dean of Arts and Humanities Reindert Falkenburg and the newly appointed Associate Dean for the Arts, Mo Ogrodnik, ensure that the arts and humanities thrive at the new campus. I’ll be based in New York through August 2011, though I imagine I’ll be traveling to Abu Dhabi next year even more often than I have been this year. My portfolio will include playing a role in the hiring of new standing faculty in the Arts and Humanities, building bridges between departments at NYUNY and programs at NYUAD, and working to encourage the creation of collaborative teaching and research efforts between the two sites.

We’re currently engaged in curriculum planning for the coming year and in formulating the Arts and Humanities portions of the first NYUAD Course Bulletin. I’m also at work on the early stages of what I hope will be two signature initiatives within the Humanities at NYUAD. The first is research-oriented and will be a set of projects devoted to the idea of “Comparative Modernities.” The goal is to bring the perspectives created by the link between  Abu Dhabi and New York to bear on some of the research projects currently underway in the humanities at NYU. In particular, I hope to forge collaborative links to the English Department’s Re:Englightenment Project, Postcolonial Studies Project, and Project on New York Writing, as well as to the various translation studies projects underway at the Department of Comparative Literature and to the work on the production of knowledge pioneered by Mary Poovey and Troy Duster at the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge.

The second initiative is pedagogically oriented and centered around the idea of excellence in the use of language. It aims to bring together pedagogical enterprises that are often kept separate on college campuses: foreign language acquisition and training, expository writing, debating and public speaking, and new media.

Part of what has drawn me to the NYUAD project has been the opportunity to think outside of the disciplinary boxes into which we professional scholars often put ourselves. These initiatives will, I hope, be the start of productive conversations about the future of teaching and research in the humanities — in New York, Abu Dhabi, and beyond. Stay tuned!

[Photo credit: Erin Callihan for NYUAD]

Park near the Corniche, Abu Dhabi

This morning I gave my sample class on “Cosmopolitanism Now” to a group of prospective candidates for NYU Abu Dhabi. Once again I began with the anecdote that I used to open the lecture on cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism that I gave at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute last fall. I told the students that, as a I thought experiment, I was asking them to listen to a little bit of personal narrative as if they were “cultural critics” (whatever they thought that might mean). The narrative went something like this:

When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, “Where are you from?” and I’d say, “New York” or “the upper West Side.” They’d look vaguely disappointed and then say, “No, I meant what’s your background.” I wasn’t really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It’s just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents’ cultural traditions. My father is a Parsee, born in Karachi, when Karachi was a part of India, and my late mother was a Filipino. They had met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in their mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsee relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked “bumbai”; and to my classmates—well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.

We weren’t particularly religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas Eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian like my father. As my mother explained it, so that I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn’t accept converts. But, when the time came during third grade for my navjote ceremony to be performed, we couldn’t find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of, “I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned.” The problem was that my mother was a Christian — oddly enough a Protestant, unlike most Filipinos, because my grandmother had converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother’s birth.

Finally, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Mumbai who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister’s ceremony done. It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it.

With that bit of oral “text” on the table, I then asked the students what lessons about the dynamics of culture they thought might be gleaned from it. One student immediately began to speak about “first impressions,” and we were off to the races, thinking together about what one could and couldn’t control when one sought to make a first impression.

In the course of the discussion, the following topics came up: labeling and stereotyping; differences of race, ethnicity, class, and religion; the creation of identity in the time of Facebook; nationality and ethnicity; urban enclaves; the importance of context to thinking; the relationship between the politics of inclusion and exclusion; cultural and social insecurity as a basis for a politics of exclusion and inclusion; the interplay of sameness and difference; immigration; cultural loss; cultural contradiction.

In the concluding minutes of the class, I mapped what we’d been discussing onto recent concepts from theories of cosmopolitanism including the evolution of cosmopolitanism from an alternative to nationalism to an alternative to both universalist and multiculturalist modes of thinking; the dynamics of cultural change (what Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination”); the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the local, including the idea of rooted cosmopolitanism; and, above all, fallibilism and the consequent need for deep conversations in which cherished ideals are held up to scrutiny and the participants are willing to have their minds changed.

Finally, I asked the students to help me with a project for this blog. I’m hoping that, as they are thinking about the events of their whirlwind visit to Abu Dhabi, they are also thinking about an anecdote that they might have presented as an opening text for our session. Their narratives will be appearing either in the comments on this post or as guest posts on the blog in the days to come.

I was pleased to see a memento of my first visit to Abu Dhabi framed and hanging on a wall near the office of the NYUAD Institute along with other posters from past Institute lectures.

I spent much of yesterday discussing the arts and humanities with colleagues from NYUAD; today I’ll be doing some more exploring of the city and meeting a couple of colleagues from Zayed University whom I met during my first visit.

And, this morning, I was “in the gulf” literally: a brief morning swim. It left me feeling buoyant — again, literally. I’m not a very good floater in general, but the water here is salty enough to buoy even me. Maybe that’s an allegory of something.

I often ask my students to look for what I call exemplary moments in the texts that they are reading, by which I mean a moment — it can be a word, a phrase, sentence, a passage, a stanza, a scene — that captures something crucial, whether it be formal or thematic, about the larger text from which it is drawn. But you can find such exempla not simply in texts but all around you.

Here is an exemplum that captures, for me, many of the paradoxes, difficulties, and opportunities that NYU Abu Dhabi presents.

It’s the physical address of NYUAD:

New York University Abu Dhabi
Behind the ADIA Building & Across Al Nasr Street from the Cultural Foundation
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

The building is so new that it doesn’t have a proper address yet (or maybe the address above is simply going to be the proper address). In any case, the city’s addressing system is in flux. Here’s an explanation of Abu Dhabi’s street addresses from wikitravel.org

Street addresses in Abu Dhabi are simultaneously very logical and hopelessly confusing. Many roads have traditional names, like “Airport Rd”, which may not correspond to the official names, like “Maktoum St”, and the city is divided into traditional districts like “Khalidiyya”. However, by recent decree, the city has been split up into numbered “zones” and “sectors”, with all roads in each sector numbered, First St, Second St, etc, and the vast majority of street signs only refer to these. The system of main streets is straight forward enough once you realize that the odd numbered streets run across the island and the even numbers run along it. So First St is in fact the Corniche, and the odd numbers continue out of town to 31st St which is near the new Khalifa Park. Airport Rd is Second St and the even numbers continue to the east through to 10th St by Abu Dhabi Mall. On the west side of Airport Rd, the numbers go from 22nd Street to 32nd St by the new Bateem Marina. Alas, confusion is caused by the local streets, which are on green signs (main streets are on blue signs) and are also called First, Second etc. Most locals opt to ignore the system entirely, and the best way to give instructions is thus navigating by landmarks, if taking a taxi, odds are you will get to “behind the Hilton Baynunah” much faster than “Fifth Street, Sector 2″.

In a recent e-mail sent to the NYU group Faculty Democracy with the subject heading “Breakthrough on NYU Abu Dhabi,” Ross wrote: “It’s rare to be able to applaud the administration’s effort to do the right thing, but there’s no doubt this is a promising development. These provisions, if they are enforced, will better the daily conditions of a lot of workers in a meaningful way.” He did add a warning of the need for monitoring and enforcement and wished that the university had been able to go even further on certain issues. At a press conference held by Human Rights Watch at NYU on Monday, Ross reiterated these views.

I’m not surprised to see Human Rights Watch admit that NYU has made a laudable contribution to the improvement of labor conditions in the UAE. I’ve always believed in my NYUAD colleagues’ commitment to building a campus of which we all can be proud.

You can read about the steps that the university has taken on the NYUAD site: Additional Information on the Construction and Operation of NYU Abu Dhabi.

Here are links to some of the press coverage:

Washington Square News (NYU’s student newspaper): “Rights Group Applauds NYUAD”

Reuters: “NYU imposes strict labor standards for UAE campus”

Associated Press (via washingtonpost.com): “NYU adds worker rights rules to Abu Dhabi contract“