As a testament of their commitment to the liberal arts tradition in their new satellite campus, NYU has named Alfred H. Bloom, former president of Swarthmore, the head of its new Abu Dhabi campus.
This is interesting because I am pretty sure the Swarthmore version of a liberal arts tradition looks totally different than the NYU version. Which brand are they really trying to duplicate? I take issue with the way that “liberal arts education” is used at many major American universities, including my own alma mater Northwestern, so I’m curious to see whether NYU Abu Dhabi will prove any more traditional in its approach to delivering a liberal arts education than NYU New York is. (Which, based on my admittedly imprecise research, is ‘not very traditional’). This exporting of campuses seems to give American universities an oppportunity to re-brand themselves in a foreign market as much as it allows for cultural exchange.
The NYT explains this decision thus:
By naming Mr. Bloom, who has been the president of Swarthmore College since 1991, N.Y.U. officials said they hoped to signal their commitment to creating a traditional liberal arts school in a part of the world where academic freedom is a relatively new concept.
I think that this sentence says it all. Is Swarthmore any more academically free than, say, UCLA? It would be tough to design a compelling argument that either institution is more free, but if you were really set on doing so you could say that research universities are MORE academically free than small liberal arts institutions because, well, they produce more new material. Why is it more difficult to have academic freedom in “a traditional liberal arts school” (which, with respect to undergraduate curricula, is sufficiently nebulous as to be, in my opinion, practically meaningless anyway) than in a less traditional liberal arts school, of which NYU is a great example? But “liberal arts” and “academic freedom” have been rolled into one tight little package of “American” and, necessarily, “not Middle Eastern”.
NYU seems to be capitalizing not just on its own brand but on the brand of the American university and the American education system. Is this a good or bad sign for the Emiratis and other Arabs who will be educated and who will do research and teach there?