The New Abu Dhabi Campus

Doubtless I will be posting about the new Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University all year, so I won't spend too much time on it now. I think I'll just post a few pictures to break the ice (and what I wouldn't give for some ice - it was around 108 today with whithering humidity). When I agreed to spend a year teaching at Zayed I made it clear that I didn't want to go to Dubai, not simply because Dubai is just a bit too crazy for my taste, but also because their own new campus is out in the middle of the desert. Of course, now that Abu Dhabi has a new campus it is also out in the desert. With that in mind, I came prepared to not like it. Actually, I like it a lot, although everything is still being madly thrown together. My brother, who watched the video, said it looked like something somewhere between a remarkably posh mall and the mother ship, and that I definitely had to go there. My office is in the male wing - there are two equal wings with classrooms and faculty offices and shopts on both side. Simply because you're in the male wing it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll only be teaching the male students and vice-versa. It makes it a bit complicated because if you're in the female section and are teaching a male class you can't really ask your students to come visit you in your office hours, so you end up having "branch" office hours in separate adjunct offices in the corresponding wing. Thye library and fitness building will have certain hours reserved for the different sexes. It's a delicate mix, and one that you would expect with a country that is struggling with modernity like the UAE is. I guess some people get frustrated by this, but maybe it's because I'm an historian (or maybe it's because I've read so much Marcus Aurelius), but I take a more flexible view of the pace of change (and, yes, I know how strange that sounds coming from anyone who has seen me blow up at a faculty senate meeting because people are being slothful - and by that I mean everyone I've ever met; I guess the difference is that we have a million natural advantages so I have trouble accepting our sometimes glacial rate of change, and am more forgiving of other parts of the world).