When Universities Go Abroad: NYU in Abu Dhabi

Scores of American universities have opened campuses abroad, New York University, where I teach, among them. (Others include Georgetown in Qatar, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in Jordan, and Duke in China.) Criticism and debate surround these developments, but have been limited mainly to financial and enrollment viability and to abstract questions of ethical and political correctness. I think the issues need to be contextualized with specifics. I taught at NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, for seven weeks in September-October 2011, and the experience revealed that, while each foreign campus has unique characteristics, NYU's in Abu Dhabi is an outlier among them.