Features May 27, 2010, 5:00PM EST

John Sexton's Global Campus Plans for NYU

Never mind the Ivy League. Sexton, president of New York University, is set to open a new campus in Abu Dhabi, expand aggressively at home, and turn his school into a global franchise. Next stop: China

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Michael Edwards

By John Hechinger

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John Sexton, the president of New York University, typically greets students, faculty, and even strangers with a bear hug, and word has spread. When he taught a class in Abu Dhabi, where NYU is about to open a campus, three male students from the United Arab Emirates opened their arms to him. Knowing that Middle East convention barred him from touching female students, Sexton decided he needed a technique to cover both genders. So the 67-year-old, white-bearded president gave each student a fist bump.

"I told them I will not give them a hug until they have an NYU degree," Sexton says. "I just didn't want to be too violative of social norms."

Sexton is part scholar, part showman, and his plans for NYU are as audacious as his personality. While Harvard University shelves construction projects because of endowment losses, Sexton is barreling ahead with a massive expansion, both at home and abroad. The NYU branch in Abu Dhabi, set to open in September, is bankrolled entirely by the oil-rich emirate, and in the midst of a weak economy, Sexton plans to raise more than $3 billion to beef up the university's New York campus. His goal: to transform NYU, already the largest nonprofit university in the U.S., with 43,000 students, into one of the world's best.

"The time is right," Sexton says in his office in Greenwich Village. "New York is the anchor, thus the expansion. We're building Abu Dhabi as part of a circulatory system on six continents. You choose a continent for your next semester as easily as you choose a course. If you're an Indian economist who has an aging mother in Bombay, we can have you in Abu Dhabi where you can go home for a weekend."

Sexton's use of foreign money to raise NYU's academic sights may become a model for other ambitious leaders, says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice-president of the Washington-based American Council on Education, which represents 1,600 college presidents. "If he succeeds, John Sexton will have transformed not only NYU but American higher education," Hartle says. The pitfalls are everywhere. While Sexton has charmed donors and Middle East royalty, his diplomatic skills are being tested at home. Financial aid students complain about stingy scholarships, Greenwich Village neighbors protest that NYU is ruining their quirky community, and critics on his own faculty worry he is risking NYU's reputation for the sake of petrodollars.

Sexton's goals would have been unimaginable in the 1970s, when NYU, then a commuter college, sold its Bronx campus to survive. Under Sexton's predecessors, including former Indiana Representative John Brademas, NYU transformed itself from a school with largely open admissions to one that rejects two out of three applicants.

Still, even now, finances challenge Sexton's ambitions. The university has a $2.2 billion endowment. Though its stash dropped almost a third in the financial crisis, Harvard University still has $26 billion, the richest in the world. Its investment pool amounts to $1.3 million per student, Yale University has $1.4 million, and Princeton University, $1.7 million. NYU: about $50,000.

Sexton shares NYU's modest roots and high aspirations. He grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Queens' Rockaway Beach, worshipping the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers. Sexton had second baseman Jackie Robinson's number sewn onto the sleeve of his academic gown and still makes a spitting sound at the mention of the team's late owner, Walter O'Malley, who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. As a major influence on his life, Sexton cites his English teacher, Charlie Winans, who taught him to stretch intellectually. "Think strange," Winans would tell his students at Jesuit Brooklyn Prep.

That didn't make young Sexton a model student. He graduated from Fordham College in the Bronx with a 2.1 grade point average, focusing more on a volunteer job he held for 15 years: coaching a Catholic girls' high school debate team that won five national championships. He became a better student and went on to earn his PhD from Fordham University in the history of American religion, and to teach religion at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.