College and university boards are facing the challenges and promises of what some call the defining element of our time: globalization. How can we best prepare our students to thrive in a miniaturized world and shape it for the better?
A little over a decade ago, New York University offered a handful of study-away sites in Europe and had established exchange programs with a number of foreign universities. Today, with 16 sites on six continents, a comprehensive liberal-arts campus in Abu Dhabi, and a third campus set to open in Shanghai next year, NYU has moved beyond a constellation of programs to forge a new model of university: the global network university.
While each college and university will develop its own response to globalization, the story of the evolution of NYU as a global network university—our strategic thinking, discussions among our board and the broader university community, and the nuts and bolts of establishing NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)—may be helpful for other boards that aspire to expand international education at their institutions.
The Genesis of NYU Abu Dhabi
Like New York City, NYU is a complex, cacophonous place and a magnet for people from all sectors of the globe. It does not define itself by group-unifying activities such as big-time sports; rather, the common culture of our university is the challenge and opportunity it offers to those eager to prepare for—and experience—the multifaceted world that they will lead and shape. As we moved into this century defined by globalization, it was natural, therefore, to extend our students’ experiences to a worldwide platform that allowed them to move to an array of global sites with rich intellectual content, opportunities for research, and contact with scholars from NYU and other leading universities.
Over the first decade of this century, we gradually expanded our study-away programs beyond Europe and added sites in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Prague, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv, developing a distinct academic identity for each site. For example, Accra’s program emphasizes global public health and economic development; Prague’s music, as well as global media and transitional government; Shanghai’s business and East Asian studies. Each site attracts students interested in its specialty but also offers basic courses sufficient to allow students to complete core requirements. At the same time, we increased the number of programs in New York that require or facilitate study away, including programs and research opportunities for graduate students. The result: The number of NYU students who have had at least one study-away experience, just 7 percent a decade ago, has reached nearly 50 percent today.
As the decade progressed, our desire to fill the most glaring gap in our global portfolio—the Arab and Muslim world—grew. The question then became, was there an appropriate partner in the Middle East? Several possible sites were considered. From quarter after quarter, however, came the same advice: Both the leadership and the culture of Abu Dhabi made it the right choice. And the more NYU came to know Abu Dhabi, the more it came to appreciate it as an emerging cultural capital that shared many of New York’s core characteristics: a cosmopolitan ethos, a diverse and international populace, a welcoming society, and extraordinary ambition.
In the academic year 2005–06, as NYU was reviewing possible sites in the Middle East, government leaders in Abu Dhabi approached us about collaborating to achieve their vision for higher education by establishing a branch of NYU there. The campus would offer a full undergraduate liberal-arts education to students from across an extensive geographic region. After preliminary discussions with members of the board of trustees, faculty, and administration, NYU and the government of Abu Dhabi signed a confidential “Letter of Intent” to study the feasibility of creating the new campus. Immediately afterward, faculty and administrative groups began academic and financial due-diligence studies, with committees dedicated to investigating legal matters and academic planning. Several groups of faculty members, administrators, and board members took fact-finding trips to the region in late 2006 and early 2007.
Even as their excitement grew, the board and due-diligence groups identified several important concerns. Would the new campus result in a dilution of NYU’s academic mission? Could we ensure nondiscrimination with respect to religion, race, gender, and sexual preference? Would we be granted free control of the campus’s academic life, with an admissions process based exclusively on academic credentials and course content determined solely by NYU and its faculty? The answers to these three questions would decide whether or not we would proceed. We were also uncertain we could successfully recruit top quality students and faculty members, as well as concerned about competition in the region and the financial risks to the university.
We were fortunate that the government of Abu Dhabi shared our goals and objectives and worked with us to address our concerns. The groups conducting due-diligence studies recommended that NYU proceed with planning toward creation of NYUAD, and in October 2007, NYU and the Executive Authority of Abu Dhabi signed and announced an agreement stating the terms under which the new campus would be developed. NYUAD would be the flagship American-style degree-granting academic institution of Abu Dhabi. NYU would have absolute academic authority, implementing policies comparable to those at the New York campus. Students would be recruited from all over the world and admitted based on their academic qualifications. The Executive Authority would provide the land and financial support for the campus and its operation. We were ready to undertake the exhilarating first steps toward moving NYUAD from concept to reality.
The Global Network University as Strategic Plan
While the Abu Dhabi partnership was taking shape, the executive committee of the board asked that the university’s leadership develop a document that described the likely opportunities for and challenges to the university’s academic mission over the decades leading to the university’s bicentennial in 2031. They requested a template for making necessary choices for the university’s future, identifying guiding principles for strategic planning. The result, “NYU Framework 2031,” involved the entire NYU community throughout the 2008 academic year, engaging an unprecedented number of faculty members, students, administrators, staff members, and alumni from all sectors of the university. Two-dozen town hall meetings were held, and an online system was set up for collecting comments. Everything was shared with the board’s executive committee, along with a final draft crafted in response to the comments received.
The Framework embraced a strategy for NYU built in significant part on the notion of NYU as a global network university. It contained one of the first formal articulations of this new model of a research university: a global network anchored in New York City and Abu Dhabi, linked to smaller sites located throughout the world, each with its own defining characteristics, and all with academic programs of highest excellence. In this model, the faculty and students of NYU, regardless of where they pursued learning and research, would be members of the network, which would be structured to facilitate mobility throughout. The opportunity to live, study, teach, and conduct research throughout the system would support the university’s capacity to attract the world’s top faculty members and students, particularly those with cosmopolitan perspectives. An important tool in conceptualizing the shift in NYU’s approach to global education that had been under way for years, the Framework identified the global network as a defining element of NYU’s future as well.
The Role of the Board: Strategic Partners and Diligent Stewards
The creation of a new paradigm for higher education on the scale of the global network university depended on support and guidance from the board. NYU as an institution and I as president are fortunate to have a board that understands the fundamental and essential role of trustees, which is working in partnership with institutional leaders to set a strategic path-way and then calling for a series of “stress tests,” “gut-checks,” and other measures of due diligence to ensure that that pathway is sustainable.
The board mandated the development of “Framework 2031,” which set the strategic direction for the university for a quarter of a century. And one of the key themes of that document was a highly developed global posture for NYU. The board embraced that theme for a number of reasons.
First, the trustees—drawing on their own experience as leaders in business, finance, law, real estate, and insurance—realized that just as their industries were responding to the pressures and opportunities of a world where goods and services and ideas flowed freely beyond borders, so, too, was higher education. To ignore those forces was to risk losing out on “the brain race” for faculty members and students now happening on a global scale.
Second, the trustees recognized that NYU’s location in and close identity with New York City—an affinity shared by many of them as well—made us the natural choice to project out into the world from our home in one of the most cosmopolitan and worldly cities.
Another factor was at work: The chair of NYU’s board and several other trustees also had served as board members of the NYU School of Law when I was dean from 1988 to 2001. They were architects of what was then the first move by an American law school into the realm of global legal education. The global law school became the model for the global network university.
But for all the inclination toward expanding our global presence, the board raised a set of issues that had to be addressed before giving its approval: financial viability; ability to handle the inevitable controversies or political crosswinds; and finally, and most importantly, risk to NYU’s academic momentum. Of these, the last was most on the minds of our trustees, many of whom had lived through NYU’s nadir days of the 1970s when the university suffered severe financial difficulties to the point of having to sell our campus in the Bronx. These trustees had guided NYU from the brink of bankruptcy to a point three decades later when it was called the success story in American higher education. They would not allow that hard-won momentum to be lost.
Their conclusion was that the global network university, with NYU Abu Dhabi and soon Shanghai as portal campuses of that network, would empower, not imperil, that trajectory. As one board member put it: “Is there risk in setting up any enterprise in many places around the world? Of course, there is. But the greater risk is not to.”
In recognition that the global dimension of NYU will be an enduring, in fact, defining aspect of our university, we have established a special board committee called the Global Initiatives Committee, with the mandate to provide the board with advice and guidance relating to the development, oversight, and operation of the university’s global network. That includes the development of the global sites and campuses, the experience of students studying in the global network, the enhancement of the university’s standing and profile as a global network university, the recruitment of students from outside the United States, and the integration of the activities, students, faculty members, and administrators within and among the global network.
Planning for Success
Three elements of the planning process for NYUAD were vital to its success:
Opening the NYUAD Institute. Even before we had a physical home in Abu Dhabi, we founded the institute in an effort to establish an immediate presence on the ground and provide an open forum for the exchange of ideas within the Abu Dhabi community. Working from rented office space, the institute hosted a series of lectures, panel discussions, and conferences—often given by members of NYU’s New York faculty—that served simultaneously to build awareness in Abu Dhabi of NYUAD and as a vehicle for involving NYU faculty and significant world thinkers in NYUAD. The institute also funded awards for NYU faculty members to undertake research projects in Abu Dhabi. The institute—now a fully equipped center for advanced study and research and a forum for a wide spectrum of public cultural and educational events—was indispensable in its first years as a model for both the Abu Dhabi community and the global academic community of the potential of NYUAD.
Building faculty. A priority was establishing an organic connection between New York and Abu Dhabi, so that the New York faculty would feel invested in NYUAD and the Abu Dhabi faculty would feel part of the university overall. We devised a system composed of two main categories of faculty.
Standing faculty would be based full-time in Abu Dhabi but would have the option of spending an initial integration year teaching at NYU New York and working summers and every eighth semester in New York or one of the other NYU sites. They were chosen by New York-based search committees to promote connection to their academic department.
Affiliated faculty would be chosen from the New York faculty and would teach in Abu Dhabi for seven-week terms or for the university’s January term, as well as take part in research projects with the NYUAD Institute. We found that many of our most distinguished faculty from New York chose to be lead-off affiliated faculty members at NYUAD, attracted by its research opportunities and sense of community and mission. A cadre of visiting faculty from around the world rounded out NYUAD ’s faculty and added to the campus’s dynamic atmosphere.
Recruiting students. We aimed to create nothing less than “the world’s honors college”: an international student body made up of students admissible to any of the world’s most-selective higher education institutions. We identified the top 800 high schools in the world based on a variety of factors, including local and international reputation, test scores, and a record of sending students to top institutions; held events in more than a dozen locations to explain the concept of a global university to guidance counselors and principals; and then asked each school to nominate two students to apply. Beginning in late 2009, after narrowing the applications to 275, we hosted five intensive candidate weekends in Abu Dhabi, bringing groups of about 50 students to campus for sample classes, field trips, and group discussions. Those weekends helped enormously to ensure that both we and NYUAD’s prospective students made the best possible school-student match.
We had more than 9,000 applicants for the inaugural class and accepted fewer than 200. Of those, 79 percent chose to attend. For the class of 2016, the third class that will attend NYUAD, we received 15,000 applicants. Today, NYUAD’s 450 students—a third of whom earned perfect SAT scores—come from 89 countries, with the median student speaking four languages.
NYUAD has also attracted a stellar faculty, now numbering over 100 and including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, and leading educators who had been deans, department chairs, and chaired professors at other outstanding universities. Students and faculty members alike have said that they are drawn not only by NYUAD ’s intellectually exciting atmosphere and deep sense of mission but also by the chance to take part in NYU’s global network.
Lessons Learned
NYU’s version of the global network university continues to expand and evolve: We added two study-away sites this year in Sydney and Washington, D.C. (although located in our nation’s capital, the D.C. site will join our global network, attracting students, we anticipate, from the Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses as well as New York). In 2013, we will open our third comprehensive degree-granting campus, in Shanghai. As we move forward, we bring with us the following lessons learned from our experience in creating the global network university, which may help guide other colleges and universities as they develop their own international programs:
- Create a thoughtful strategy to engage the entire university community. We consulted the NYU board extensively from the earliest days of our discussions with our Abu Dhabi government partners. Through its commission of “Framework 2031,” it helped to ensure that the global network university evolved in harmony with NYU’s strategic planning. We sought input and feedback from the board, faculty members, administrators, and students at dozens of meetings on campus and informational trips to Abu Dhabi. Those trips continued throughout the planning process, including a major leadership conference in 2009 that allowed board members to witness NYUAD’s progression.
- Find the right international partners. In the government of Abu Dhabi, we knew we had a partner that shared our understanding of the essential roles and challenges of higher education in the 21st century, our belief in the fundamental value of a liberal-arts education and the benefits that a research university brings to the society that sustains it, and our conviction that engagement with new ideas and cultures is essential to successfully preparing a new generation for global leadership. Without this kinship of vision, we could not have achieved the success NYUAD enjoys today.
- Aim high. A common concern in the beginning stages of NYUAD was that it would dilute the NYU degree. Many people thought that we would never be able to attract the world’s top students and faculty members. More broadly, some critics of global higher education maintain that study-away programs represent mere “academic tourism.” Programs founded on a rigorous academic vision, a world-class faculty, and a selective student body not only refute such claims, but also offer compelling examples of global education’s promise.
None of this is to say that it is easy conceiving, let alone operating, a network of facilities, faculty members, students, and administrators on six continents, with contrasting if not clashing cultures, and across scores of differing regulatory environments. It takes steadfastness, a willingness to get some things wrong and try again, and a certain flexibility and adaptability in the face of the unanticipated.
To NYU, global higher education’s promise is no less than a generation of young people who will act from a spirit of ecumenism, who will create pathways of comprehension across traditional divisions, who will view the world not through a single window but through the many facets of a diamond. Each college and university will navigate its own response to globalization and the tectonic changes we are witnessing. It is NYU’s hope and experience that more truly global institutions of higher learning will not only flourish but also help build through understanding a more just and elevated civil society.
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