I’m back in Abu Dhabi for another Candidate Weekend. As I did during the November Candidate Weekend, I gave a 75-minute class on “Cosmopolitanism Now,” which resulted in a very lively discussion about the nature of cosmopolitanism and both opportunities and problems that a cosmopolitan perspective presents. The group I had was every bit as impressive as the one I had in November (ten of whom will be attending NYUAD come fall).

The candidates spent their afternoon looking at sample rooms in the Sama Tower, where NYUAD students and faculty will live,  before visiting the Marina Mall. Having seen the mall during my last visit, I opted instead for a walk back to the hotel along the corniche, conversing with a colleague and enjoying the lovely weather.

The highlight of the day, once again, was the trip to the desert, where we stopped at a camp outside the town of Al Khatim. Upon arrival there was the now obligatory run up to the top of the sand dune (I let one of the students beat me to the top) …

followed by some bonding in front of the fire and over dinner.

And making the acquaintance of a mother camel and her baby. [Click on the continuation link below for more camel pictures.]

If you were there on the desert trip, leave a comment and let us know what you thought of the evening — or any aspect of your visit to Abu Dhabi.

9:30 a.m. — First up, a Writing New York lecture on on E. B. White’s Here is New York, introducing the week’s theme of “History, Modernity, and Nostalgia.” In fact, the interplay among these three ideas will turn out to be a major area of exploration as the course unfolds, and Monday’s lecture serves as a kind of second overture for the course after the introductory lecture last week. I’ve described the lecture over at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York, and I did last year, I introduced the discussion by telling an anecdote about Hillary Rodham Clinton invocation of White’s book during her debate with Rick Lazio during the 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from New York.

2:00 p.m. — American Literature I, Lecture Two. Luckily, this lecture belongs to my comfort zone, because I decided this year to frame the course with Moby-Dick. So this lecture was an introduction to Melville’s life and writing and the opening sections of Moby-Dick. The students had been asked to read the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections that open the book and the land chapters (1-22) to get their feet wet as it were. Lecturing about Moby-Dick has become a little bit like playing in my band used to be back in the day: I look forward to certain solos and riffs, but also to varying them in event.

6:30 p.m. — A panel on “Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism” for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute as part of a year-long series on “The Cosmopolitan Idea.” Sharing the stage with two of your intellectual heroes –  this case the intellectual historian David Hollinger (UC Berkeley) and the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago) is bound to be a little bit … disconcerting. The two of them, in their different ways, hover over my recent work on emergent literatures in a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. (Guess which is which.) I offered a preview of the event PWHNY over the weekend, and later this week I’ll write about each of their talks individually (and maybe my own). Some video excerpts will eventually appear on the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute website. (You can see the entire first session in the series there now.)

Needless to say, my brain felt more than a little bruised come Tuesday morning.

Eid Mubarak! Back home it’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but here, in Abu Dhabi, it’s the Eid Holiday, which commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his son Ismail for God”s sake. Despite the fact that I hate traveling over Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself here in the new downtown campus building of NYU Abu Dhabi, awaiting a group of applicants who have been flown here from all parts of the globe as part of the “November Candidate Weekend.”

Outside, it’s summer weather: a lovely 85 Farenheit, though rain is predicted for Sunday night! As we walked into the building, we passed a group of men who were finishing up the ritual sacrifice of what looked like a lamb (which is one way that Eid is celebrated here). That was upsetting one of my colleagues, who’s an animal rights activist, and I suspect the candidates will be taken around the other side of the building, in case any of them are not quite ready for that aspect of Islamic culture.

I’m thrilled to be here. After my last visit I was trying to figure out a way to get myself invited back sometime next term, so when the invitation came to take part in the Candidate Weekend, it seemed like too good an offer to pass up. (Luckily, my wife agreed!) The past year’s work has been about building a curriculum and a faculty, but my colleagues on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group haven’t had a chance to get a sense of what the students are actually going to be like. I’ve observed them, last night and at breakfast this morning, and they are indeed an amazing bunch. So I’m looking forward to watching them think like cultural critics from 75 minutes. Our subject? What else, but cosmopolitanism!

As a way of preparing for the session, I dug out a “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” that I had occasion to write five years ago and then revise two years ago. I was pleased to see that I still agreed with most of what I wrote. Here’s how it began:

My goals as a teacher have always been to make my students understand why I feel passionate about literary study and scholarship, to help them explore the contours of the discipline and its modes of thinking, and to awaken within them a sense of the pleasures and rewards of intellectual life.

What I want my undergraduate students to take away from my courses is not so much the memory of any particular text or piece of analysis, but rather a fuller appreciation for the value and, indeed, the joys of the life of the mind. I want them to realize why reading and thinking about literature should become an abiding part of their lives, and I want to give them the tools that will make their future reading experiences rich and rewarding, in college and beyond.

In my graduate teaching, I have sought to instill a professional approach to literary study, while also making my students understand that their training should help them engage more fully with the world, rather than remove them from it. Above all, I want my graduate students to understand the power and responsibilities that they themselves will have as teachers.

[If you're so inclined, you can download a PDF (98KB) of the entire statement here.] I realized, however, that one word that has become crucial both to my scholarship and my pedagogy was nowhere to be found in the statement: cosmopolitanism.

So I’m planning to update that statement in the near future. It’ll address the pedagogical implications of recent theories of cosmopolitanism. I’m interested in the ways that cosmopolitanism has emerged as an alternative not simply to nationalism but also to the kind of universalism that reduces all people to some common denominator in order make generalizations about humanity. As I keep saying to whatever audiences are willing to listen: for the universalist, difference is a problem to be overcome; for the cosmopolitan thinker, however, difference is an opportunity to be embraced. Cosmopolitan theory stresses the importance of being willing to engage in meaningful conversations across boundaries of identity and of disciplinary thinking. One concept from recent cosmopolitan theory has provento be particularly useful in a classroom setting: “fallibilism,” the idea that we need to listen to others and to be willing to have our minds changed because we are all fallible.

Announcing at the outset of the class that you subscribe to a doctrine of fallibilism at once establishes your authority and sets productive limits on it — and helps you save face if you happen to make a gaffe during lecture!

Thursday morning, we headed out to the oasis city of Al Ain, about two hours east of Abu Dhabi, near the border with Oman. There we were met by Brian, an ex-pat who heads up the Emirates Natural History Group, which is interested in both the archeology and ecology of the Emirates. Brian was an incredibly knowledgeable guide to  these aspects  of the region, and he had suggested that, rather than take the typical museum and oasis tour of the city, we focus on the Al Mezyad Fort and the Hafit tombs, which (as he’d written to us in advance) “may be inaccessible soon as development plans for the area proceed.” Our time was limited, because we had a 2:00 meeting with Deans and faculty from the United Arab Emirates University. Looking at those two sites proved to be an ideal excursion, because they were satisfyingly off-the-beaten track and got us out into the desert, away from tall, ultra-modern buildings.

To get to the Mezyad fort, we turned off the main road and drove up to a closed gate. Visiting the site, while not exactly discouraged, is apparently not exactly encouraged. The fort itself is an early 19th-century structure in the Portuguese style (blocky, with three round towers and one square one) that has been extensively restored — it’ll be torn down and redone at some point, if they can get the Afghan builders who know how to do mud brick properly and if the site isn’t turned into a luxury bed-and-breakfast.

Meanwhile, some pieces of the restoration were carried and used to finish the restoration of the larger Al Jahili fort, built in 1898 by Sheikh Zayed the First (“the Great”) and the venue this weekend for the New York Philharmonic’s concert. We walked into the small living quarters, similar to the one in which the founding president of the UAE, King Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, lived as a child. Not exactly the lap of luxury. Brian stressed for us how recently it was that the population of Abu Dhabi lived in conditions that were primitive and how historically the population was always in danger of starvation due to the scarcity of food and water. Standing on the ramparts we could see the distant hills that made the location of the fort a chokepoint: the old  camel route had to come between these two sets of mountains meaning that those who possessed the fort could levy taxes on trade.

Reaching the Hafit tombs at the foot of Jawal Hafit took a little bit of off-roading (we borrowed the 4×4 that belonged to the Associate Dean for Humanities at UAEU, who would be our host later in the afternoon). A the foot of the mountain, we saw three reconstructed tombs — the ones you see in brochures and guidebooks. Also, apparently, incorrectly reconstructed.

Reconstructed Hafit Tombs

Brian showed us what an unexcavated tomb looks like: basically a pile of rocks, due to the fact that the tombs had been looted in antiquity and subjected to the sands of time (literally). No wonder then that so many were bulldozed during the search for oil in the area. Nevertheless, at other similar sites, there are apparently a multitude of unexcavated tombs — and they’re likely to remain so until someone is willing to spend the money to excavate a past that doesn’t produce golden treasures.

Unreconstructed Hafit Tomb

Standing amidst these tombs, probably 3,500 to 4,000 years old, we were vividly struck by a  sense of the region’s past. These are the kinds of experiences we hope that NYUAD students will be able to have — indeed, we’re hoping that some of the will actually be able to work on archeological sites and help the region recover its ancient history.

We saw some camels too. Our guide had a lot to say about the state of the camel farming industry: apparently, unless your a fast, and therefore prized, racing camel, it’s not much fun to be a camel. The ones we saw weren’t the most regal specimens, and their feet were bound to prevent them from taking long strides and running away. My French Department colleague tried to make friends, but since we weren’t giving them food or water, the camels weren’t much interested in us.

We had lunch with colleagues from United Arab Emirates University, which is funded by the federal government and is a research institution. One of the things that we realized in the course of meeting with faculty from  American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and UAEU is that these institutions have something that will be in relatively short supply at NYUAD: Emirati students. It’s our hope that we’ll be able to partner with these institutions so that their students and ours can interact in educational settings, thereby providing the students at NYUAD a chance to make local, as well as “global,” connections.

We didn’t make it to the famous Al Ain Oasis. Next trip.

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of building community by embracing rather than avoiding difference. This lecture will explore the ways in which a cosmopolitan perspective responds to problems posed by contemporary Western multiculturalism. It will also suggest that literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.

In the lecture, which owes much to the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hollinger, I tried to tie together a number of elements from my recent scholarship and thinking: the problems posed by overly pluralist conceptions of multiculturalism; the problems posed by the desire for “cultural purity,” the power of “emergent writing,” Zoroastrianism, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. In addition to serving as a way of tying together these strands, Moby-Dick was intended to offer a case study in the ways that a text can mobilize cosmopolitan perspectives and finally as an entree to the idea that “literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.”

That idea is the least developed in my current work, but potentially the most intriguing. I wanted to get at the idea that great literature promotes a cosmopolitan embrace of difference because it often asks you to do precisely that: embrace a different consciousness than your own. In the case, for example, of reading a novel, what you do if you become immersed in it is to let the consciousness of another take over your own.

If you’re interested, you can download the script that formed the basis of the lecture here.

The talk was also accompanied by PowerPoint that I hoped would make the lecture a little more vivid by presenting images and also the block quotes that I was using. I confess that I was worried that I had included too much material about Moby-Dick, a text that I’d assumed my audience had heard of but not read. I tried to solve the problem by telling stories about the text and anecdotes related to the text (in particular, the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the South Seas and Melville’s reaction to reading Owen Chase’s account of it). I tried to survey the audience: only one or two seemed to be asleep, and I really couldn’t complain about that since I myself had succumbed to jet lag during my colleague Joanna’s talk: apparently at precisely the moment that she made a reference to Zoroastrianism! (Whoops!)

The question and answer session was gratifyingly lively and gave me many things to think about. Indeed, I expect to be meditating on some of these questions more here in the days to come.

I had a question from a colleague at Zayed University about language differences, translation, and whether cosmopolitan conversation was predicated on a shared language. I tried to suggest that language was yet another gulf that the cosmopolitan tried to cross by whatever means he or she could and that one of the opportunities presented by the present moment is the fact that texts were so quickly translated and disseminated. And I suggested that one of the goals of the NYUAD literature program would be to make students aware of both the limitations and opportunities accompany the translation of any text.

Another colleague from Zayed asked whether my suggestion that literature offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan experience was limited to texts that don’t themselves adopt a counter-cosmopolitan or fundamentalist attitude. I tried to suggest that in fact it would have been much more challenging to use exactly such a text as my case study, because I would like to be able to argue that even a counter-cosmopolitan text, insofar as it forces the reader to confront difference of perspective and consciousness, can encourage cosmopolitan thinking. And I talked a little about the way in which learning from the fundamentalist or from the provincial is the hardest thing for cosmopolitans to do today.

NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom gave me the opportunity to talk a little more about the interplay of sameness and difference, and I had the chance to talk a little about Anthony Appiah’s slogan version of cosmopolitanism — “universality plus difference” — which I’d chosen to omit from the lecture and about my take on the recent history of cosmopolitan theory, including ideas about “rooted cosmopolitanism.” I suggested that what can save  cosmopolitanism from being simply another Western idea imposed on everyone else is the idea that it is a “weak” conception of the good from a philosophical point of view. (Actually, in the event I didn’t use the phrase “W of the good” when responding; I wish I had.) It’s a structure, a container into which different ideas can be poured, so long as the ideas are compatible with the ideas of embracing difference and being willing to engage in dialogue across boundaries. A cosmopolitanism rooted in Abu Dhabi will have structural affinities with  cosmopolitanism rooted in New York, but also salient differences that enhance the cosmopolitan experience!

They put out a nice spread afterward, but I only had one nibble of it because so many people from the audience came up to ask questions and offer insights. I was particularly gratified to meet Alia Yunis, a novelist whose first book, The Night Counter, has been on my list of texts to add to read as part of my final revisions on the NYU Press book on emergent literatures. Now that I’ve met her, I’ve moved it to the top of my list. (She’ll be reading at the conference on the 1001 Nights that Philip Kennedy has organized for the NYUAD Institute this December. Check out her website and you’ll see why.)

With any luck, a number of  the people who said that they would e-mail me with further thoughts actually will! Meanwhile, i recorded the entire session and hopefully will have the courage to listen to the Q & A again soon. (You’re never quite as good as you thought you were when you listen to the actual tape!) I’d like to keep the conversation that I started at Al Mamoura going, even if only (for now) here in the ether.

Wednesday morning began with a visit to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, which is open to non-Muslim visitors in the morning from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. Gleaming white and dominating its surroundings, it’s meant, I think, to evoke both the grand mosques of the world and the Taj Mahal : in addition to being a house of worship that will be able to accommodate 10,000 people for prayers, it is also the burial place of the revered Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, the man who ruled Abu Dhabi from 1966 until his death in 2004 and who was the first president of the United Arab Emirates.

Visiting the mosque filled me with a sense of nostalgia, bringing me back to my visit to the Middle East twenty-five years ago, and memories of a visit to the Dome of the Rock, followed by my first visit to Istanbul. I expected then that I would return to the Middle East before very long, particularly since one of my best friends from college moved to Tel Aviv. But it hasn’t happened, though I did make it back to Istanbul i 1989. But that’s 20 years ago now!

Compared to the grand mosques in Jerusalem and Istanbul, the Sheikh Zayed mosque feels “new” but not “modern,” and I think it’s a find translation of the ancient traditional grand mosque into a contemporary idiom. The materials used in its construction are exquisite, and the interior of the mosque–which boasts the largest hand-made “Oriental” carpet in the world–is stunning. The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi presented NYU’s president John Sexton with a (much, much smaller) reproduction of the carpet as a memento of the agreement between Abu Dhabi and NYU, and it now adorns Sexton’s office.

The mosque isn’t quite done: work was still being done on the area in front of the mosque (both landscaping and a little construction), and visitors enter from the side. Women visiting the mosque who are wearing western clothes are given black abayas and head scarves to wear when entering the interior courtyard of the mosque, and as in any mosque, you remove your shoes shoes before entering the interior. As a result, you can feel just how luxurious that carpet is!

At the Spice Souk in Dubai

After spending an hour-and-a-half at the Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah, we continued on our way back to Abu Dhabi via Dubai. We could see examples of  traditional wooden ships–the dhow–docked along the waterfront. Out of the window I caught a glimpse of a grassy area by the corniche in which red flowers had been planted to spell (in English) “Smile You’re in Sharjah” (Apparently, there’s also one in Arabic on the other side.)

We stopped at the Spice Souk in Dubai, with its low tin roofs and winding alleys. One of my colleagues expressed relief at being in a place that felt a little bit more connected to everyday life than the aggressively modern urbanity we’d experienced so far. It wasn’t, of course, like the souk in Cairo which has the feeling of being really old. But it did convey a sense of being older than much of the city around it, a sense of not having been built just yesterday. And it was full of wonderful scents, emanating from the bags of spices lying open in front of small shops. We ventured into one of the shops, where the merchant was pleased to offer us smells and tastes: we ate two kinds of pistachios and some dates, as we looked at the variety of spices he had to offer. My French Department colleague jovially displayed her bargaining skills, and ended up with a small container of top-grade Iranian saffron at a much, much lower price than you’d find in New York.

Arcade in the Dubai Spice Souk

We wandered through some neighboring souks: my History Department colleague was in search of pashminas and some kind of traditional knife to give her son (who collects them): we  found the former, but didn’t have enough time to explore enough to find the latter.

Dubai Evening: From the Spice Souk with the Burj Dubai tower visible in the haze.

Burj al Dubai

As evening fell and the light mellowed, we heard the call to prayer. And then we drove to the Jumeirah Mall. On the way we passed some of Dubai’s famous buildings: the almost-completed Burj al Dubai, now the tallest building in the world; the infamous ski slope (no, we didn’t stop); and the line of towers that have created a virtual cliff facing the sea and apparently significantly altered wind patterns in the city. Our NYUAD liaison told us that as we entered the mall we’d have a fabulous of what is arguably the most beautiful building on the Dubai skyline, the Burj al Arab, a self-styled “seven-star” hotel that only guests are permitted to enter. He was right about the view.

We were told that Jumeirah was one of the first self-contained swanky
ex-pat districts: it offered rich ex-pats so many services (entertainment, recreation, and shopping) that they would never have to venture into the rest of the city if they didn’t want to. The conceit of the Jumeirah mall was to offer fancy modern shops in a souk-like atmosphere. The contrast between the Spice Souk and the Jumeirah Mall sums up one of the challenges that faces NYU Abu Dhabi: how to give our students a sense of connection to the history and traditional culture of the region in which they’ll be studying, even as we promote the site as a gateway to the new  global culture of the twenty-first century? Will it be enough for NYUAD students to feel that they have had some new-fangled “global” experience? Won’t they also expect an experience that is also authentically “Arabic” or “Islamic,” steeped in the rich history of the region?

And that’s something that Abu Dhabi is struggling with as well. How to preserve a sense of the past as the emirate rushes forward into the future. On our first day, we met with representatives from ADACH (the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and
Heritage), which sponsors both presentations of Western culture (the New York Philharmonic’s visit to Abu Dhabi and Al Ain this weekend, for example) and seeks to preserve and promote “heritage.” The idea of “heritage” itself seems to be inflected by a nostalgia for the relatively recent past, dating back to the beginning of the ninetieth century at the earliest. There’s a nostalgia for the pre-oil days of pearl fishing and nomadic desert culture, but seemingly much less interest in the very ancient past of the region.

The Emirates lack the kind of grand residue of the past that one finds in, say, Cairo or Istanbul. What the Emirates have is present grandeur. And that makes visiting and–I imagine, living in–Abu Dhabi or Dubai a very different kind of experience from visiting or living in one of the ancient cities of the Middle East.

At AUS we met with the Dean of Arts and Science, Williams Heidkamp, and with faculty from a variety of fields including literature, mass communication, history, and international relations. The overarching subject of our discussion was the challenge involved in teaching the humanities in an Islamic setting: where were certain intellectual and social lines drawn, what kinds of interaction between instructors and students were permissible outside the classroom, and where might the expectations of Western teachers and students from the Gulf region clash, what was it like to live in an emirate if you were an ex-pat? Instructors at  NYUAD will face many of the same challenges, though our student body is likely to be more demographically diverse than that of AUS. The AUS faculty members seemed skeptical both about our aspirations to import some of the residential education models that we use back at NYUNY and also more generally about the prospects for a liberal arts college in the Emirates. Their institution is dominated by its engineering school, apparently, which is the first-choice program for the majority of entering students. Arts and Science seems to get those who don’t find engineering congenial and who are able to convince their parents that a liberal arts curriculum is worthwhile. They wished us well, however, hoping that if NYUAD is successful, it will enhance the status of the liberal arts in the region generally and thereby help them. We expressed our hope that we would be able to establish scholarly ties with AUS and foster the creation of communities of scholars with mutual research interests.

After lunch at  the school cafeteria, we headed over to Sharjah’s Museum of Islamic Civilization, a domed building with two long wings. I spent most of my time in the hall devoted to the history of Islam and found myself reminded of the very central role that Hagar and Ismail play in Islamic belief and more specifically in the hajj pilgrimage. And it made me worry just a little about the lecture on cosmopolitanism that I’d be giving the next day. The lecture’s second half uses Moby-Dick as a case study in the dynamics of literary cosmopolitanism, and I wondered whether any in my audience might find my treatment of “Ishmael” disturbing or insensitive. Perhaps more significantly, I began to think about the significance of Melville’s treatment of Islam in the novel, which draws on stereotype far more than his treatment of Zoroastrianism. (I’m thinking particularly of the episode involving Queequeg’s “Ramadan’” but also about offhand references to Islamic and Near Eastern practices througout the book. I started thinking that I should write companion piece to my essay on cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick that would explore the novel’s appropriations of Islam as (I suspect) an example of the limits of its cosmopolitan aspirations.

I’m traveling with three colleagues from NYU and one from NYU Abu Dhabi. I owe my presence here in part to John McCain.

Last year, after McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the Republicans received their post-convention bounce, my wife and I decided we needed an exit strategy in case the unthinkable happened. We’d need to find a cosmopolitan space, since the United States would clearly be something other than cosmopolitan if McCain and Palin could be voted into the White House.

Canada? Switzerland. “What about Abu Dhabi?” my wife asked, remembering that NYU had announced plans the year before to  build a campus there on Saadiyat Island. Take a look at one of their official websites, and you’ll find that “cosmopolitan” is one of the words that Abu Dhabi uses to describe itself and its aspirations.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll mention it to Matthew,” referring to Matthew Santirocco, the Dean of the College of Arts and Science at NYU, whom I knew to be centrally involved in the Abu Dhabi effort. I  had to contact him by e-mail anyway about another matter, so I ended my message by saying that I’d love to chat with him at some point about ways to help with the Abu Dhabi effort. I had an e-mail back almost immediately: could he call me at 5:30 that day to talk about Abu Dhabi?
 
As it turned out, Matthew was the chair of the Humanities Coordinating Group for NYU Abu Dhabi, a committee charged with creating a portion of the NYU Abu Dhabi curriculum and then with hiring faculty members to teach there.  Apparently, the Abu Dhabi leadership had decided that the Group needed a representative from English, and my name had come up in part because of my work on cosmopolitanism.  Had someone in English mentioned this to me? No, I said. Kismet, then, said Matthew.

I liked to think that he and I had developed a good working relationship over the years, because of my service to the College over the years, particularly during my stint as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2001-2004, and also because I’d won some teaching awards and demonstrated a commitment to undergraduate education. So when he invited me to join the Group and started describing its work, I agreed even before he had finished. But I haven’t told you about the perks, yet, he said. Perks, I thought. Oh, oh. That means its going to be a lot of work.

And it has been, but it’s been the most rewarding  service work I’ve done at NYU. (We’re passing the city of Dubai now. You can see the Burj al Dubai, the tallest building in the world, in the distance. We’ll be stopping in Dubai this afternoon.)

It’s that rarest of committees: I actually look forward to the meetings. In part that’s because of the wonderful colleagues from different departments who are on it, but it’s also because of the challenge and opportunity that NYU Abu Dhabi represents. The idea is to create a small college on the Swarthmore model coupled with a robust and well-funded research institute, thereby drawing on the best aspects of both the small liberal arts college and the research-oriented university. NYU Abu Dhabi would be a fully-fledged unit of the university, equal in standing to the Faculty of Arts and Science, offering a degree that would be a real NYU degree and not some equivalent. Moreover, unlike many abroad programs that draw on relatively inexpensive local faculty, NYUAD would offer a standing faculty that would be tenured and tenure-track and whose members would be equal in qualification and distinction to their peers back in New York.
 
“Our partners in Abu Dhabi” (as we like to say) invited NYU to open this campus and are providing generous funding for the venture not because they want to “Westernize” but because they want to engage in a dialogue with the West, presumably both to understand and benefit from some of the insights of Western culture and pedagogy and to expose us to central insights from Islamic culture . For that reason, they have guaranteed us  academic freedom that is unprecedented for their cultures, because they understand that to have what they want – a liberal arts college and a research institution on the American model – we need to have the academic freedom that makes those enterprises possible. In other words, they want us to do what we do, and they’re committed to making that possible – despite the difficulties that our conception of academic freedom might pose for them.

It’s a bold move and a risky move, both for NYU and for our partners in Abu Dhabi. But I have become convinced that it is the most innovative and most important educational project with which I am likely to be involved during my career.

I know that some of my colleagues at NYU are skeptical: they worry about the NYU administration’s motives; they worry about dilution of the NYU “brand” or about the siphoning of resources and energies away from the New York campus; they worry about NYU’s labor practices and about labor practices in the Emirates and about some of the problems identified by Human Rights Watch.

I respect those views, but (I’m convinced that one of the great tasks of the 21st century is for the West and Islam to learn how to respect one another and to engage in mutually beneficial conversations. And if we want to help promote change abroad, we can’t do it from the relative comfort  of our offices in New York. We have to be abroad, on the ground, living and working with others, engaging in the give-and-take that characterizes real dialogue, which isn’t always easy and doesn’t have predetermined outcomes.
 
As I’ve worked on this project during the past year, I’ve been struck by the quality and commitment of the people involved at every level. Most of them have become involved in NYUAD for idealistic reasons like those I’ve mentioned.
 
Here’s an example: we talked at the beginning of last year about wanting to create a liberal arts college on the Swarthmore model. So what did NYU’s president John Sexton do? He offered the retiring president of Swarthmore, Al Bloom, the position of Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (the top position at the campus). Getting to know Al Bloom a little bit has been one of the unexpected benefits of working on the Abu Dhabi project: his intellectual acumen, seemingly boundless energy, and his deep commitment to undergraduate pedagogy make him the right man for the job. It struck me, when I heard about his appointment, that it boded very well for the future of the NYU Abu Dhabi project.
 
Do I have the fervor of the convert? I suppose I do.

Meanwhile, we’re arriving at Sharjah, where we are scheduled to meet with a dean from the American University there. Stay tuned for more from the Emirates as the week progresses.