Earlier this semester, The Gazelle reported on the inadequacy of NYU Abu Dhabi academic programs in building a global institution, due to the lack of diversity in the faculty and the Eurocentrism of the curriculum. The piece made me reflect on the diversity within my own beloved department: Interactive Media. As with many other departments at NYUAD, the IM faculty are predominantly white and from the West. Beyond that, many of our faculty come from one particular graduate program: the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the NYU Tisch School of Arts. The IM program draws on the ITP curricula and style of teaching, showing me how to think critically about what I produce and how to collaborate. The program and faculty have helped me become a better maker, thinker and person, but I sometimes wonder what the program would be like if we had more faculty from other graduate programs.

Given the impact of faculty diversity on the IM curriculum, our team decided to explore faculty diversity across NYUAD. In an ideal world, we would examine data on various metrics of diversity: race, gender, nationality and so on. However, this data is not yet collected or made accessible. Thus, we decided to focus on an aspect of diversity we are able to reflect on: faculty education.

Though this information may not include various intersections of identity, the geographic and sociopolitical environments in which faculty pursue their degrees influences their understanding of the world. Thus, analyzing the geographic distribution of faculty educational backgrounds can reveal insight into an underexamined measure of diversity.

Using the public NYUAD website, we scraped data on where NYUAD faculty in all divisions received their degrees at various levels of their education. We used U.S. centric terms for degrees, such as bachelor’s and Ph.D., because that is how the information was recorded on the website.

The world map shows that a clear plurality of degrees were attained in the U.S. with a centralizing trend: the more advanced the degree is, the more likely that it was acquired in the U.S. Only about 39 percent of NYUAD faculty bachelor’s degrees are from the U.S., while that number rises to 46 percent at the master’s level and to a majority of 62 percent for doctorate degrees. This shows that many faculty members started their education elsewhere, perhaps in their home countries, and then moved to the U.S. to earn their advanced degrees, reflecting the traditional global model where centers of power and knowledge are distributed.

A decrease in country variety is also evident on the map as the degree level gets higher. NYUAD faculty earned Bachelor’s degrees from institutions in 47 different countries. This number drops by almost half to 25 for doctorates. 86% of doctorates were attained in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and France.

Through this visualization, we can see the geographic flow between different educational levels. The ratio of Bachelor’s degrees to doctorate degrees earned in the US is about 1:1 for Arts and Humanities, 1:2 for Science and Social Sciences and 1:7 for Engineering.

Given that many of our faculty members come from traditional centers of knowledge and power, what is NYUAD doing to recruit more diverse faculty? This academic year, each division has been tasked with broadening its recruitment strategy.

“There are some well-known places where you post jobs,” Marta Losada, Dean of Science and Co-Chair of the Implementation Committee, explained. “You can be more proactive and try to reach out in various different ways to ensure a broader pool of applicants. That's what almost all of us are focusing on this year.”

Through this treemap, we can see the makeup of universities represented by NYUAD faculty through a country metric. Within the U.S., New York University, Columbia, Harvard and University of California at Berkeley are the most represented universities overall. Within Great Britain, the most represented universities include Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

For some students, the prospect of having professors coming from traditionally elite institutions is part of their decision to come to NYUAD. Matthew Varona, Class of 2023, reflected on his decision to attend NYUAD over a university in his home country.

“One of the biggest factors in my decision was that most professors in Philippine universities were also educated in Philippine universities,” explained Varona. “I felt like coming to NYUAD would have gotten me closer to my goal of graduate school in the U.S. or Europe.”

Although attending NYUAD has been helpful for his postgraduate goals, Varona contemplated the classroom experience.

“NYUAD can definitely feel like a Western university. Especially in my non-STEM classes, most of the examples and readings we cover are from the U.S. or Europe,” said Varona. “I've had some U.S. educated professors make conscious efforts to include non-Western readings in class — sometimes it's genuinely enriching, but other times it's just one or two papers shoehorned into a syllabus full of Western material.”

Varona’s experience provides insight into the complexity of some students’ attitudes toward the Western-educated faculty: having faculty from these places helps propel students to their post-graduate goals, while simultaneously limiting the curricula they study.

Tatyana Brown, Class of 2022, expressed a similar opinion toward the impact of faculty education on her classroom experience.

“The education of my professors absolutely does play a role in my classroom education. Oftentimes a professor's exposure or inexposure to issues of injustice fuses into theories and academia that affect how they teach, and in turn what communities and systems they honor while teaching,” said Brown.

Yesmine Abida, Class of 2022 and Arab Crossroads Studies major, states that she doesn't see faculty education as an issue as long as they speak the language, have done research in the Arab world and reflect on their positionality through their teaching material. She suggests that faculty can be mindful of their backgrounds by facilitating class discussions in a way that does not make native students uncomfortable and including more native voices in their syllabi.

This treemap also reveals the range of institutions present within a country and the importance of not collectivizing Western institutions. There is immense variability in teaching styles and methodologies between universities in a given country; what might we lose as an institution when we are not drawing knowledge from spaces outside of these centers within a country? Within the U.S. context, for example, what do we lose out on when we don’t have faculty who have attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities or Hispanic Serving Institutions?

Being able to obtain insight into our faculty’s educational backgrounds besides the country metric is essential for understanding our institutional progress in our commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. To understand this work, we reached out to the Data Subcommittee of the Implementation Committee on Race, Diversity and Belonging. The goal of the Data Subcommittee is to work with the Office of Inclusion and Equity and Institutional Research to create a new model for collecting data on the demographics of the whole NYUAD community.

“We cannot assume most identities by visual cues, and many of the ones that really matter to our experiences on campus are not accounted for. This leaves a lack of information when we think about which groups of people are not represented or supported as well as they could be in the institution,” explained Brown, a member of the Data Subcommittee.

Collecting such data will allow us to be honest and upfront about how inclusive we are as an institution. However, given the range and intersection of identities at NYUAD, how do we create a global data model that doesn’t rely on the language used at U.S. institutions?

Waseem Chaudry, Class of 2020, Dean’s Fellow and Co-Chair of the Implementation Committee, highlighted some of the challenges for the language used in the data model. “People define themselves in different ways; identity is not uniform across different nations and cultures. So for us, even identifying what race means to some people [and] what ethnicity means to others is very complex,” explained Chaudry.

Additionally, how do we create a data model that allows for a range of inputs paralleling the range of identities at NYUAD, while simultaneously allowing the data to be in a form that can be analyzed?

“We want to make sure everyone feels represented, included and that they belong through our data,” said Zach Troia, Assistant Director of Institutional Research. “Collecting data on diversity and identity requires breaking these concepts down into categories. Ultimately, it is putting people into [self-selected] boxes. The challenge is making sure those boxes represent a multitude of identities and allow for flexibility in how individuals respond.”

NYUAD faculty’s educational backgrounds reflect the global system where power and knowledge are distributed. To decolonize its model of education, NYUAD must create its own system that synthesizes from multiple regions of knowledge and values backgrounds away from elite centers.

The Data Subcommittee's efforts show promise in more systematically tackling the issue of measuring our diversity institutionally. We still have a long road ahead, but if we get this right, we can become the model for a truly global university.