By Tim Cheney
I recently returned from a visit to NYU’s new college campus in Abu Dhabi.
How did I get there? A direct flight from Chicago—mine took me up over Greenland and 
Iceland, over the North Atlantic. We traveled across Norway and Sweden, over the Black Sea and along the border of Iraq and Iran. The final approach was over the Gulf before we landed in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates.
While I was only in the country for a few days, I was able to experience much of what NYU’s President John Sexton has called “both a repository of a great culture and a symbol of that culture’s adaptation to modernity” during my visit.