Features May 27, 2010, 5:00PM EST

John Sexton's Global Campus Plans for NYU

(page 4 of 4)

Sexton's desert adventure is part of a push by U.S. universities to create international franchises. Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Michigan State universities have opened Middle East branch campuses. Cornell University has a medical school in Qatar. Sexton says NYU is planning what it says are broader offerings than any of its peers: a full-scale research university in Abu Dhabi, with a liberal arts college and graduate and professional schools that award the same degrees as at the Manhattan campus.

Columbia University, NYU's New York rival, turned down an offer to open a law school in Qatar, President Lee C. Bollinger says. A degree-granting campus abroad may generate excitement initially but over time may struggle to attract the same quality of students and faculty, he says: "The biggest concern is you dilute your reputation. You lower the quality of what your institution is offering."

NYU will raise its standards in Abu Dhabi, not diminish them, Sexton says. NYU Abu Dhabi will be so choosy that students accepted there will be "clearly admissible to any college or university in the world," and its faculty will include Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, he says. "We are very confident we can sustain the quality, not just for this year or the next five years but literally for the generations," Sexton says.

Sexton took a leading role in steering 275 of this year's strongest applicants to NYU Abu Dhabi. With money from the emirate, he hosted them on all-expense-paid trips to Abu Dhabi, featuring a five-star beachfront hotel, a desert picnic, and dancers with swords.

In November, NYU flew in Adam Pivirotto, a senior from Norfolk, Va. In one gathering of prospective students, Sexton used a metaphor from Taoism to describe the Abu Dhabi campus. He spoke of the limitless potential of the unformed block of wood, contrasting it with a polished antique table. Pivirotto, with a 4.6-point grade point average, saw Sexton's comments as a pitch for NYU Abu Dhabi over Princeton, his grandfather's alma mater.

"He was so passionate about the future of the school," says Pivirotto, who is considering majoring in international relations. "He was really selling it to us."

NYU admitted 188 students out of 9,048 applicants for the first class, from more than 35 countries. The university says it does not yet have median SAT scores calculated. By 2020, enrollment is projected to grow to 2,000. Pivirotto will attend on a full scholarship, courtesy of Abu Dhabi. "We're hoping to be the magnet for the flow of ideas and talent that we envision as characteristic of the 21st century," Sexton says. "There will be a flow of creativity among idea capitals in what will be a kind of 21st century version of the Renaissance."

Back at NYU, Sexton incorporates some of these expansive ideas into the classroom. His most recent course, "Baseball as a Road to God," mixed his love of high and low culture, theology and baseball, the down-to-earth and what he calls the "ineffable." He is a lively teacher. In one of the class's final meetings he threw a mock tantrum at the sight of a student's Red Sox cap, ripping it off his head, throwing it to the ground, and stomping on it. Then he expounded on writers Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Robert Caro, musician Louis Armstrong, philosopher Paul Tillich, and the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. "This course is predicated on the fact that we are going to ask this oxymoronic question—is baseball a road to God?—and see if anything comes out of it," he told the students. "It's what we said the first day. It's all about thinking strange."

With reporting from Vivian Salama in Abu Dhabi and Max Raskin in New York. Hechinger is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

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