To the Editor:

The Chronicle Review's December 9 issue devoted considerable space to debate over branch campuses abroad, but the coverage was superficial. The editors cited Yale University faculty's argument that "an authoritarian regime cannot respect American academic values" and asked scholars to comment on the ethics and finances of American branch campuses abroad.

I would have liked The Chronicle to have asked more specific questions. What exactly is being exported—a university or a brand name? What is the quality control for the overseas branch campus? Will it be a home for advanced research and education in the liberal arts and basic sciences, or will it be merely a vocational institution? Will it have a real library (by which I mean a building full of books, not computers)? Will it bear more resemblance to the parent university in the United States or to American for-profit colleges of much lower quality?

Suppose you are an ambitious high-school student in India. You can study intensely for the grueling university entrance exams, and, if you succeed, you can attend one of the world-renowned Indian Institutes of Technology. Your peers will be among the best-prepared high-school graduates in the world, and you will be expected to study hard.

Alternatively, if your parents are sufficiently wealthy, they will be able to enroll you in one of the new American branch campuses. You won't have to prepare for the Indian entrance exams, nor will you have to study hard once you enroll (especially if you're in a field like business, where American students put little effort into their studies, as was recently reported in The Chronicle). You can go to parties and spend a lot of time on Facebook, just like an American student. Best of all, you'll graduate with an American degree, which in India, as in most Third World countries, enjoys exaggerated prestige and puts the best jobs within reach.

Some would say that this is a win-win situation. American universities get a new revenue source, and affluent Indian parents are satisfied with the return on their investment. But is this good for India? I don't think so, and neither do most of my Indian colleagues, who believe that India should strive for more meritocracy and less class privilege.

Neal Koblitz
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
Seattle

From chronicle.com:

Bard College's president, Leon Botstein, said about three years ago that the rush of large universities to set up camp in the fabulously wealthy Persian Gulf states was "like investing in Monte Carlo or Liechtenstein to develop Europe." Al Bloom, vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, conveniently sidesteps the fact that NYU was lured to Abu Dhabi not by the excitement of intellectual exchange—for that it could have gone to Palestine, like Bard did, or to some other poor nation—but rather by the complete funding of that campus by Abu Dhabi and the huge subsidies it gives to NYU's Washington Square campus.

Branch campuses "must induce reflection on difference, invite interrogation of social, political, and ethical assumptions, and develop capacity to find and build on common ground," says Bloom. A nice thought, but it will be interesting to see how that plays out. It didn't work so well for me doing research in Dubai—I got deported. Perhaps NYU Abu Dhabi faculty and students will have freer rein to think and act if they push the boundaries. (I didn't really push anything and still got in trouble.) A more likely scenario is that such interrogation will be more theoretical and not of anything in their immediate vicinity, such as criticism of the rulers, local institutions/citizens, discrimination, and so forth.

Syed Ali
Associate Professor of Sociology
Long Island University
Brooklyn, N.Y.

The United States lags behind internationally in test results in math, foreign languages, and the social sciences. Why in the world would other countries want an educational presence that seemingly does not do a first-class job in educating its young?

library09

Going out requires going in, Joseph Campbell said, correctly, in my opinion. It will be rich to see august elite-institution faculty come to troubles of various nefarious and dire sorts, doing what comes naturally in New Haven or Berkeley or Cambridge.

I wish them well, but it is very, very clear that the administrations thinking this stuff up have not the slightest idea what they are getting themselves into. It is really computer science: For decades we have watched people and vendors insert new devices into workplaces and observed gross, distorted, unintended uses proliferate, till the device does nothing we wanted and expected of it.

richardtaborgreene