Testimony of jeffrey s. Lehman vice chancellor of nyu shanghai

 

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roommate, and vice versa. Every day is therefore an intense education in what it means to 

be part of a multicultural world. 

 

NYU Shanghai delivers an undergraduate liberal education in the humanities, 

social sciences, and natural sciences, promoting the skills of critical and creative 

thinking. All of our undergraduate students pursue a core curriculum in Shanghai for two 

years, spend their junior year studying at other NYU

 sites – the campuses in New York 

and Abu Dhabi or global academic centers in eleven other cities around the world. The 

students then return to Shanghai to complete their degrees. In addition to the rich 

experiences it provides undergraduates, NYU Shanghai is a research university with 

graduate programs and research institutes in domains ranging from social development to 

neural science to financial risk. 

 

Our faculty includes tenured and tenure-track faculty whose appointments are at 

NYU Shanghai, as well as tenured and tenure-track faculty whose appointments are at 

other NYU campuses.  In addition to being approved by our provost, Joanna Waley-

Cohen, and by me, all of these appointments must also be approved by the Provost of 

New York University.  We also have exceptionally talented faculty who are hired to 

fixed-term contracts, and visiting professors from other NYU campuses and from other 

top universities around the world.  (I have attached to this testimony, as Appendix 1, a list 

of faculty who are teaching and who have taught at NYU Shanghai, so that you might 

have a sense of the extraordinary quality of our professors.) 

 

III.    Having  a  Campus  in  Shanghai  Is  Important  to  NYU’s  Mission  

 

Let me quickly lay to rest one misconception about NYU Shanghai. NYU does 

not profit financially from its activities in Shanghai.  It is designed to operate as a 

“tub on 

its own bottom,

” neither subsidizing the rest of NYU nor being subsidized by the rest of 

NYU.   

 

Why, then, has NYU undertaken such a complex endeavor?  Two reasons stand 

out.

 

 

First, NYU Shanghai advances NYU’s bold redefinition of how a university can 

be structured.  Traditionally, higher education was experienced by attending a university 

that was located in a single place.  Sometimes a university would operate several 

campuses, but they would be distinct institutions.  Sometimes a university would operate 

a “study abroad site,”

 but those would exist only as satellites to receive students from the 

mother ship for a semester or two. 

 

 

In the twenty-first century, however, the phenomena of globalization and 

technological advancement have created new challenges and new opportunities for 

humanity.  We in America are much more directly affected by developments in other 

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parts of the world than ever before.  The world

’s challenges are our challenges.  We have 

a greater stake than ever before in how the rest of the world develops. 

 

In order to more effectively fulfill its academic mission in the twenty-first 

century, NYU has created an impressive global network of campuses and academic 

centers located in important cities around the world. NYU expanded globally with the 

understandings (a) that students could enter its network through more than one degree-

granting doorway, and (b) that a key part of students’

 education would involve spending a 

semester or two studying in countries other than their degree-granting base.  Currently, 

students can enter NYU through its degree-granting campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, 

and Shanghai.  In addition to these locations, NYU students can study in Accra, Berlin, 

Buenos Aires, Florence, Madrid, London, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and here in 

Washington, D.C.

 

 

That idea of a truly global education is attractive to students who want to prepare 

themselves to be effective in an increasingly global world, as well as the faculty who will 

help them acquire that preparation. And Shanghai is a superb location in which to locate a 

degree-granting campus within NYU’s global network.  China is an extraordinarily 

important, rapidly changing country, and as China

’s commercial capital Shanghai is New 

York

’s natural counterpart. It is vitally important that the next generation of America’s 

best and brightest students have an opportunity to learn how to work effectively there. 

 

 

Second, NYU Shanghai provides NYU with an essential opportunity to reflect 

deeply about what knowledge, skills, and virtues this generation of students requires in 

order to lead lives of satisfaction and contribution.  NYU Shanghai is a place where NYU 

can experiment with new ways of developing those qualities, such as having every 

student live with a roommate from another country, and making use of new forms of 

teaching technology.

 

 

Through our core curriculum, we push our students hard along these dimensions.  

We force every student to stretch, to think of the world from different perspectives, to see 

how different intellectual tools can help us to understand it differently.  They carry those 

lessons with them throughout NYU

’s global network, when they travel abroad from 

Shanghai to study at NYU

’s other global sites with other NYU students.  

 

I personally have the opportunity to see the success of these efforts because I 

teach the course that all students are required to take during freshman year, a course 

called “Global Perspectives on Society.”

   This is an intellectual history course in which 

students engage a set of great books from western civilization, as well as a set of great 

books from eastern civilization.  In this course I have helped the students to engage the 

writings of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, 

Mill, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Woodrow 

Wilson, Gandhi, Hayek, Martin Luther King, Robert Nozick, Rachel Carson, Thomas 

Piketty, Anthony Appiah, as well as the first nine chapters of the Book of Genesis.  We 

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