NYUAD VICE CHANCELLOR STEPS DOWN AFTER ‘PHENOMENAL PERIOD’ IN HIS LIFE
Two days after retiring in 2008, Dr Alfred Bloom was recruited to shape the Abu Dhabi campus. As he prepares to bow out, he talks to Roberta Pennington about a decade of achievement
Alfred Bloom was retired for two days when he received the call. It was the chance to be among the leadership of New York University – not in his native New York, but 11,000 kilometres away in Abu Dhabi.
That was the beginning of a remarkable journey for him and the seat of learning that today attracts students of more than 115 nationalities.
Now the inaugural vice chancellor of the campus has told The National that he is stepping down as its administrator next year.
“I feel it important to let you know now, so that the community has ample time to mount a comprehensive global search for the next vice chancellor and to offer him or her a comfortable timeframe for transition here,” said Dr Bloom, 72.
He was recruited in 2008 to lead the new Abu Dhabi campus after announcing his retirement from Swarthmore College, the private liberal arts college in suburban Philadelphia where he served as president for 18 years.
“I was unemployed basically for about two days,” Dr Bloom said.
He was contacted by John Sexton, who was then president of New York University and who presented a vision for the new university.
“He said, ‘I want you to establish a liberal arts college at the same level of intellectual seriousness and with the same commitment to social responsibility and with the same type of world recognition as Swarthmore had, but I want you to do something beyond that’,” Dr Bloom said.
“‘I want you to place it in Abu Dhabi, in partnership with the Abu Dhabi government. I want you to make it a totally global institution, which has the ability to stretch itself and students and the faculty across differences in the world, and come to be able to bridge those differences and understand those differences in an important way for the future’.” The pitch worked.
“It caught my imagination as something really exciting and important,” Dr Bloom said.
At the time, the campus on Saadiyat Island was in the conceptual stage and construction work would not begin until 2010.
“We had no idea of where we would house students or faculty,” Dr Bloom said. “Then an apartment building grew called Sama Tower, and we said to the government, ‘Can we have that?’ And a miracle, they said yes.”
Sama Tower, in the heart of Abu Dhabi, would serve as the residence for students and faculty until 2014, when the Saadiyat campus and residences were completed.
Most classes and campus activities in those early years were held in a provisional downtown campus. Laboratories were set up in a building in Mussaffah.
With the temporary facilities in place, Dr Bloom faced another challenge: how to convince the best and brightest students from around the world to join the campus for its inaugural year.
The university had originally set a target of recruiting 100 students for its first freshman class. It received more than 9,000 applications and admitted 150 students from 39 countries for its introductory academic year in 2010.
“Al took on one of the most daunting and yet one of the most exciting tasks in higher education – the leadership of a campus that is being created where none existed before,” New York University president Andrew Hamilton said.
“Most of us, when we step into a campus leadership position, can rely on established practices, traditions and history to guide us. Not so with Al and NYU Abu Dhabi.
“He not only had to lead the school, he had to be ever conscious that the decisions he, his team and other colleagues back in New York made would begin to form the traditions, define its character and help to establish its place in the Abu Dhabi community.
“And his success was extraordinary.” The student body has since grown to more than 1,200 undergraduate students. Emiratis now make up 15 per cent of the student population, compared with less than 1 per cent during the school’s first year of operation.
The university has produced 10 UAE Rhodes Scholars, including six Emiratis.
“Even in its infancy, NYU Abu Dhabi attracted excellent faculty and remarkable students who turned down some of the world’s most prominent universities because they were drawn to the idea of a genuinely global education,” Dr Hamilton said.
“And those students went on to win Rhodes scholarships, appointments to the top graduate and professional schools, and positions at leading companies and organisations.” The Abu Dhabi government continues to fully finance the university.
“There is tremendous and very generous funding by the Abu Dhabi government,” Dr Bloom said. “I don’t know any government in the world that would even envision or implement a funding policy for a student body made up of so many students that aren’t from their own country.
“It is a vision of international outreach, of global unity, of longterm understanding that every one of those kids is going to become an ambassador for the UAE and is going to take the learning and the vision that comes from the UAE with them when they go around the world.
“That model is just amazing and unprecedented.”
The university is also establishing its own development office “so that we can share in that cost”, Dr Bloom said. “The more we can contribute, the more we’ll feel that there is a more just distribution of responsibility.”
Plans are also under way to double the number of faculty as the campus boosts its research and prepares to launch graduate programmes within the next five to eight years.
Last year, the university employed 196 standing faculty, 37 affiliated and 40 visiting. Last year, the faculty published 95 research articles in the top academic journals tracked by the Nature Index.
By comparison, the UAE University published seven, the second-highest amount in the country. The UAE now ranks among the top 50 countries for high-quality research output.
“It’s quite amazing what they have been able to do,” Dr Bloom said of the staff.
“What has happened is not only has the undergraduate student body lived up to every expectation in terms of every dimension that one would use to judge undergraduate programme results, but the research of the faculty is totally impressive on world standards.”
Dr Bloom, 72, said the past 10 years had been a “phenomenal period in my life” but that “it is really the right time” for him to step aside.
“I think what we have accomplished as a university is really historic, but I think it’s very good to set an amount of time for any given leader of an institution so that they are always ready to bring in fresh perspectives and new richness to the leadership of the institution,” he said.
“I’m going to miss the project immensely. What our students are accomplishing, how they are being transformed into these agents of global change and co-operation, to see this faculty producing research that’s really going to make a difference in health, in environment, in peace – it’s totally energising.”
Symone Gamble, a 2014 social research and public policy graduate, said Dr Bloom was a pioneer who believed in not only the potential of the university, but also its students.
“I think the campus will miss Dr. Bloom’s warmth and joyful energy,” said Ms Gamble, 26, who works at Google in California. “Dr Bloom’s legacy reminds us that we can envision and build any dream we have.”