NYU’s John Sexton sells out to Abu Dhabi:
Sexton argues that the plan will vault the university into the top echelons of global academia. The scale of Abu Dhabi’s support, he says, will help NYU to expand its student body by 4,000 over the next 25 years, to boost its meager endowment (currently about one-fourteenth the size of Harvard’s), and to transform itself into a “glocal” university. He knows such dramatic changes will make some faculty anxious, but he believes that when they consider the opportunity as much as he has, they’ll come around. To Sexton, growth is by definition virtuous, and international engagement a matter of moral courage.
Speaking as a longtime neighbor, I can state without equivocation that there is nothing virtuous about NYU’s growth. NYU is the nastiest local corporate citizen this side of its ugly uptown cousin Columbia—utterly disgraceful to its NoHo and East Village neighbors.
And I haven’t even begun to outline the serious issues at stake in terms of an American university now being beholden to “benefactors” from an alien—and I do mean alien—source.
