16 June 2014, Pacific Standard
When migrant laborers at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus raised their voices, striking over pay and working conditions, they were treated to arrests, beaten, or in some cases deported—flung back home in despair and in often debt. Within 24 hours after the New York Times reported on this modern form of indentured servitude, NYU issued an apology to the workers, many of whom hail from Nepal. While NYU president John Sexton might tout this Abu Dhabi project as “an opportunity to transform the university and, frankly, the world” one should ask: Whose world? Transformation on whose terms?
The NYU story is positive inasmuch as the institution has attempted to take responsibility for the conditions of life its expansion visions have produced. But this is only one example in a sea of similar stories. READ MORE…