Over the past few months, it has been difficult to reckon with the loss of our study aways. At the time of writing this, we would both be in London. But now, we sit at the Torch Club Terrace, basking in the March sun, listening to Moon Taxi’s “Good As Gold” and mulling over all that we have lost: meeting strangers, walking through the cobbled streets of a city unknown to us and fleeting moments we can only dare to imagine. Then there’s all that we don’t know we have lost, all that that escapes us, constrained by the limits of our imagination.

For us, and we suspect many others at NYU Abu Dhabi, study aways have always been synonymous with global education. This association is reinforced through Candidate Weekends and marketing materials. And as a final nail in the coffin, our upper class peers rarely fail to remind us of all that is to be experienced. From the get go, there’s something intrinsically insufficient about NYUAD, which often feels like a means to an end, a stepping stone. London, Berlin and Paris consume our imagination and hijack the definition of global education.

Now, amid a global pandemic, we face an almost inescapable reality: we will spend most — if not all — of our undergraduate academic careers in Abu Dhabi. Admittedly, there might be a few, fleeting weeks in Prague or Paris, perhaps even a spontaneous weekend away in Vienna, and, if we’re lucky, a semester in New York. But we feel cheated out of what we felt we were promised upon admission: an education that was almost revolutionary in its emphasis on global exposure.

And this begs the question: when the fate of study aways hangs in the balance, what does a global education constitute? Do we dismiss the notion of global education as an unkept promise, or do we choose to actively rethink our narrow conceptions of global education?

Oftentimes, conflating study aways and the concept of a global education allows us to escape the striking and pervasive flaws that affect our undergraduate academic careers during our time at the Abu Dhabi campus: the failure to include diverse voices and texts in our curricula, a homogeneous faculty, our collective failure to engage with “otherness” within the student body and finally, our inability to move beyond our superficial engagement with the complex city that is at our footsteps.

As the school completes its first decade and embarks upon an ambitious expansion plan which involves increasing enrollment and developing full-fledged graduate programs, our overreliance on the global network is in direct opposition to its goal of being a self sufficient, fully integrated liberal arts and sciences college. There’s a distinction between “drawing on the strengths of the NYU global network” and relying on said global network to compensate for the local inadequacies of our global education.

It is crucial, instead, to think of global education as a continuous process, marked by interactions with diverse manifestations of “otherness.” For most majors, the global network is essential to pursuing specializations in one’s field and conducting capstone research. For some, it is essential in meeting degree requirements in more niche fields. A Public Health minor requires one to study away at the New York campus. Furthermore, the Social Research and Public Policy program is only offering a grand total of one course focusing on public policy this semester.

In this instance, any student who wishes to pursue a career in public policy is left with no choice but to take classes from the global network. However, for many majors, course offerings across the global network are characteristically Eurocentric. Taking advanced electives should not be a self-Orientalizing act; this opportunity should not come at the expense of the ability to learn and engage with material that is decolonial, of local significance and of personal interest.

While study aways are essential and cross-campus collaborations are laudable, to outsource the responsibility of providing a global education is a disservice to students. To have to engage with traditional, Western hegemonic models of higher education in order to advance one’s “global education” is paradoxical to the school’s vision of being a model for international, intercultural and interdisciplinary higher education in the twenty-first century. It is also dismissive of the academic and personal aspirations of the diverse student body of NYUAD. The global network — in its current manifestation where only three out of fourteen global sites are not based in the U.S. and Europe — cannot hope to offer knowledge and skills that are of practical value and relevance in any region beyond the West.

NYUAD is, admittedly, a young institution. Over the years, new majors and courses have propped up, and there have been consistent conversations on decolonizing curricula and hiring diverse faculty. More often than not, students have been at the forefront of this advocacy in an effort to spark and mold substantive changes. For instance, student advocacy played a pivotal role in the creation of a new course — Modern Social Theory in Comparative Perspective — which satisfies the Social, Political and Economic Thought in History Perspective (SPET) requirement in the social sciences. Students now have the opportunity to engage with material that is not dismissive of intellectual thought and knowledge production in the East.

Such advocacy, however, can easily get lost in the background or become increasingly passive if one hinges on study aways to compensate for a lacking global education. At the moment, we have an open window. The school is relatively smaller, policies are not set in stone and the status quo is challengeable. Both from an academic and non-academic perspective, there’s a certain agency NYUAD students have to influence the trajectory of this institution. Given NYUAD’s bold vision and the fact that the institution is only 10 years old, we have an obligation to be stauncher advocates — there will come a time when students will no longer have this opportunity, when the faculty and administration would not be as flexible or receptive and when the student experience would be grounded in the status quo.

However, this isn’t enough. We must also move beyond our often tokenistic, curated and privilege-laden engagement with the city of Abu Dhabi itself. It houses different histories, hopes and dreams, and offers the complexities of a multicultural society that too many of us dismiss. To many of us, Abu Dhabi does not have the same allure as New York. We grew up listening to “Empire State of Mind” by Alicia Keys. The name “New York” carries with itself a sense of fascination, it captivates our imagination, and in doing so, it has now, unfortunately, positioned itself in opposition to Abu Dhabi. The spirit of Abu Dhabi, its contradictions and blurred lines don’t feature in movies, songs and stories — at least not those of popular Western culture.

But, when you walk down Hamdan Street on the hunt for a good cup of chai or wander through the endless maze of the Mina Port Plant Souq, you realize that the city has so much more to offer than what is depicted on sterile travel brochures. The NYUAD experience is a carefully curated one; it’s sterile and exists in isolation to Abu Dhabi. When we restrict our undergraduate experience to the Saadiyat Bubble alone and fail to meaningfully engage with the community surrounding us, we simultaneously fail to make the most of the opportunity we have been given to have a truly global experience.

To not critically engage — with the diverse student body and Abu Dhabi — and to not actively advocate to decolonize our academic experiences at the Abu Dhabi campus is the greatest loss to our global education. While study aways are important, instead of overly relying on them, we must refocus our energies on constructing an NYUAD experience that is sufficiently global in its exposure.