Last May, during final exams, John Sexton, the president of New York University, approached a pale, thin freshman leaning against the wall of Bobst Library, smoking. “What can I do to make you stop?” he asked.
The student, Fletcher Nightwine, quickly took out his earbuds.
“Your hands are shaking!” Sexton said. “Come on—don’t be nervous!”
Sexton, who is seventy years old, asked Nightwine how he had enjoyed his first year of college, and then urged him to smoke less, a plea that he frequently makes to students. If Nightwine cut down, Sexton said, he would take him to a Yankees game: “Does that sound fair? Is that a pact?”
Nightwine agreed.
“Can I give you a hug?” Sexton asked. They embraced, and then Sexton began walking toward a public-safety van, which takes him to meetings in university buildings scattered between Wall Street and Union Square. “You can find my e-mail online,” he called back. “Take care of yourself!”
Nightwine went into the library to study for a microeconomics exam, but he kept thinking about all the things he wished he’d told the president. Sexton had become the “face of everyone’s problems here,” he later said. Between March and May, the faculty of four schools at N.Y.U., one of the nation’s largest private universities, had voted that they had lost confidence in Sexton’s leadership. Since he started the job, in 2002, the school had developed campuses in thirteen cities around the world. Now it was planning to add two million square feet to the school’s central campus, in Greenwich Village, and was considering four million more in other parts of New York City. The faculty argued that Sexton had failed to provide an academic rationale for the scope and the pace of the university’s growth.
Half an hour after his encounter, Nightwine began composing an e-mail to Sexton. “Please, don’t close this email now,” he wrote. “Outside you demonstrated something: intention. You very intentionally approached me, gave me very real advice, and did so without shaky hands. I gathered that you value honesty and deliberateness.” He wrote, “You noticed outside that my hands were shaking, which above all was embarrassing, but was also indicative of more than you realize.” He was the first person in his family to go to college, but he’d come to realize that he couldn’t afford it: “I am transferring, begrudgingly.” He asked Sexton to meet with him before he left New York.
A week later, Sexton, a bear-shaped man with white hair and bright-blue eyes, welcomed Nightwine into his office, which resembles a living room that has been in the family for generations. It is cluttered with photographs of his wife, two children, and grandchildren; university relics; a decorative plate featuring the word “HUGGER”—hugging is essential to his managerial style, and he estimates that he hugs about fifty people a day—and a framed passage, by Eugene O’Neill, that reads, “The People who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.”
“I was very moved by your letter,” Sexton told Nightwine, as he led him to a set of armchairs surrounding a coffee table shaped like a pile of books. “So tell me about Fletcher,” he said. “You’ve just finished your freshman year. How did you finance that?”
Nightwine said that he had taken out a fourteen-thousand-dollar loan and paid six thousand dollars from his savings, and had received a five-thousand-dollar Pell Grant and nearly thirty thousand dollars from the university. He thought he was getting a good deal—a two-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar degree for eighty thousand dollars. Then he started working as a receptionist at a hair salon, making only a couple of thousand dollars a semester, and he began to grasp how long it would take to pay for his education.
“Did you talk to Mom?” Sexton asked. “Did you have any sense of the financial challenge in front of you?”
“I thought I did,” Nightwine said, adding that his mother didn’t want to interfere, since Nightwine had dreamed of going to N.Y.U. since he was eleven.
Sexton acknowledged that every week he read half a dozen e-mails from students who could no longer afford N.Y.U., one of the most expensive universities in the country. N.Y.U. has a small endowment compared with schools in its tier, and the university is largely financed through student tuition. Fifty-four per cent of students graduate with debt, borrowing an average of thirty-six thousand dollars. Sexton told Nightwine that he would introduce him to an administrator who runs an emergency fund for students facing financial distress, only a portion of whom are able to receive the aid. “I also want to entertain the possibility that N.Y.U. might not be the right place for you,” he said gently.
“I know,” Nightwine said, nodding.
“You’re a smart young man,” Sexton went on. “You were a little . . . agitated the other day, but now your aura is strong. I want to make it clear, though, that if you end up staying here I want you reporting to me. I’m going to talk to you about books you should read.”
“What would you recommend?” Nightwine asked.
“Are you religious?”
“No.”
Sexton said that he was Catholic (“ecumenical,” “not triumphalist”), and told him that if he didn’t mind a Catholic book he recommended “Mr. Blue,” by Myles Connolly. The book tells the story of an urban saint, a “gallant monk without an order,” who gives away all his money, sleeps on the roof of a skyscraper, shares the Gospel with anyone who will listen, and is considered the happiest man in the world. Sexton recommends the book to nearly all his students, as well as to teen-agers he happens to sit next to on the train. “The goal for all of us,” he likes to say, “is to be like Mr. Blue.”
For Sexton, the ideal professor, like Mr. Blue, is magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and in thrall to the idea of transformation. Sexton’s vision of the university is both religious—it is a “fragile sanctuary,” a “sacred space”—and optimistic about the values of a competitive marketplace. In his first speech as president, in 2002, he warned that higher education was in a “period of hyperchange.” More students were attending college; technology had altered their access to knowledge; government funding was increasingly unpredictable; and tuition was rising much faster than inflation. He announced that, to contend with other universities, N.Y.U. would seek a “category change,” becoming “one of the first exemplars of what universities will be in this new century.”
Sexton called the school the Global Network University. Instead of waiting for the best international students to apply, N.Y.U. will go to them. Students enter the university through three “portal campuses”: N.Y.U. New York; N.Y.U. Shanghai, which opens this fall; and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, which began accepting students in 2010 and is temporarily operating out of a building in central Abu Dhabi, adjacent to a large mosque. They leave the portals to spend up to three semesters circulating through the school’s thirteen study-away sites, situated in “idea capitals” like Berlin, Accra, Buenos Aires, and Sydney. Sexton has described the Global Network University as an extrapolation of the theories of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who predicted that people around the world would become increasingly interconnected: a membrane called the “noösphere,” self-aware and godlike, would envelop the earth. “We—humankind—find ourselves at an inflection point, a critical threshold,” Sexton has written.
More rapidly and grandly than other schools, N.Y.U. embodies the manner in which higher education is changing: research universities seem to exist in a state of perpetual expansion, much like businesses, with increasing inequalities among those who work for them. N.Y.U. has a long history of financial instability, but under Sexton’s leadership the school completed, in 2008, what was then the most successful fund-raising campaign in higher education, raising more than three billion dollars in seven years. (In 2009, Time named Sexton one of the Ten Best College Presidents in the country.) Compared with universities with long traditions of wealth, N.Y.U. personifies the nouveau riche, spending its money quickly to compete for prestige. Between 2004 and 2010, Sexton hired an additional hundred and twenty-five professors on the tenure track, increasing the size of the Faculty of Arts and Science by twenty per cent. He has aggressively recruited star scholars, like the economists Paul Romer and Tom Sargent and the physicist Paul Chaikin, from higher-ranked schools, paying what he called “meritocratic rates,” which compensate them more generously than professors who have been tenured longer. In the past thirteen years, the university has spent nearly seventy million dollars on home loans for two hundred and fourteen professors and administrators. At the same time, the lowest ranks of the academic hierarchy have swelled. Sexton doubled the number of full-time instructors ineligible for tenure, which is consistent with shifts on campuses nationwide: more than three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts.
In an essay on teaching responsibilities, on the university’s Web site, Sexton encouraged his faculty to accept the “mutual obligations of the social compact.” Given the school’s limited endowment and lofty aspirations, resources could not be distributed evenly. For the students, financial aid increased, but tuition did, too—a fact that did little to deter interest. Under Sexton, undergraduate applications to N.Y.U. have increased by nearly forty-five per cent, and, since 2010, the school has risen nineteen places in the Times Higher Education Supplement’s World University Rankings, to No. 41.
The school’s fortunes have always been closely tied to the health of New York. In the seventies, when the city nearly went bankrupt, N.Y.U. was a commuter school for local students who couldn’t get in anyplace better. To avoid insolvency, the university sold some of its best real estate. N.Y.U. now has half as many square feet per student as Columbia. In the transition year before Sexton took office, a university committee determined that N.Y.U. needed more space, a finding that was reviewed by faculty senators in 2008. Later, with minimal input from faculty, N.Y.U.’s administration decided that the university could save money by building on property that it already owned. An early version of the plan proposed construction in Brooklyn, on the east side of Manhattan, and on two large blocks in the Village where forty per cent of the faculty live. On one block, two crescent-shaped buildings would be wedged in the green space between faculty apartment buildings. On the other block, two new buildings, totalling more than a million square feet, would encroach on the open layout of a city landmark, the Silver Towers, a complex of three buildings designed, in the early nineteen-sixties, by I. M. Pei and James Ingo Freed. The project, which initially included space for shops and a hotel, was estimated to cost six billion dollars.
After decades of relative apathy, professors began demanding a larger role in university governance. In an Op-Ed in the Times, three professors expressed concern that the construction would be paid for by increasing enrollment or raising tuition, pushing students deeper in debt. They wrote, “We’d rather see such misery ended than prolonged,” and warned that Sexton’s ambitions would “eventually degrade our student body,” because “applicants with money will be favored over those without.” Thirty-nine departments passed resolutions challenging the plan. The economics department and the business school argued that faculty recruitment would be impeded, since professors wouldn’t want to move to a “live construction zone.” The French department wrote, “ ‘Construisez vite, construisez grand’ (‘Build fast, build big’), a watchword of Louis XIV’s administration, comes back to haunt us.”
Rebecca Karl, a faculty senator and a professor of modern Chinese history, said that until recently senate meetings were populated by “soon-to-be-retired people who had found a nice social club and spent their time there knitting scarves.” She began writing weekly e-mails to her colleagues, titled “Reports from the Senate.” Chatty and sarcastic—and widely circulated—her reports summarize the week at the university, returning to the same themes: Sexton’s “imperial” mission, the bloating of the administration, the disenfranchisement of faculty, and the creation of campuses in countries with limited commitments to freedom of expression. The administration was connecting “not idea capitals but capitals of capital,” she wrote. “The question I want to pose here is the following: For whom does this University work?”
Karl thought that the administration should be focussing its resources on students in New York, who were exhausted from working part-time jobs to finance their educations. “If being educated at a top-ranked university doesn’t give you the right to follow curiosities that aren’t immediately functional to your career, that’s a tragedy,” she said. “My students don’t have the luxury to discover who and what they are.” The traditional mission of the university had been undermined, she said, because Sexton had gone “slightly wild in his desire to shake the world.”
She and other professors complained that Sexton wasn’t hearing their concerns. Sexton grew up listening to the radio personality Jean Shepherd, and his primary method of relating to people is to tell long, folksy stories. At times, his impulse to break into narrative seems beyond his control; homilies and anecdotes come tumbling out of him. A conversation with alumni about overseas campuses turns into a tale about a puppy his children gave him, his decision to invest in his only suit (“I’m not what you call elegant”), and a story about meeting the Israeli Ambassador, which becomes an account of how his brother-in-law told him, “You reek of goyosity.” His long-windedness can resemble obstructionism. On a Web site that coördinates faculty opposition to N.Y.U.’s expansion, a group of professors wrote, “Sexton, whether at the keyboard or the lectern, prohibits conversation, paradoxically, by going on at length about the need for it, his own devotion to it.”
In long screeds on faculty Listservs, professors accused him of hiding some secret master plan for the university. Katherine Fleming, the deputy provost and a professor of modern Greek history, told me, “Some of my friends are in the conspiracy-theory mosh pit, and I think, Wow! How organized do you think this administration is?” She believes that some of the distrust comes from a misreading of Sexton’s personality, which they dismiss as “shtick.” “They think it is slick packaging,” she said. “Now, the good news is it isn’t. And the bad news is it isn’t. There is not an alternative John in there.”
N.Y.U.’s neighbors also were suspicious of Sexton’s plans. On its Web site, the university advertises Greenwich Village as a “historic neighborhood that has attracted generations of writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals.” But residents argue that the university has ruined the community’s character by turning it into a kind of company town, homogeneous and unaffordable. N.Y.U.’s buildings, which are loosely clustered around Washington Square Park, lack a coherent architectural style and are surrounded by the generic bars that accessorize any college campus. Sexton was the dean of the law school for thirteen years before he became president, and during that time he did little to endear himself to the neighborhood. The law school built a nine-story tower by dismantling a town house, erected in 1838, where Edgar Allan Poe once lived. (Sexton maintains that the house was remodelled so many times during the past century that its significance was only symbolic.)
In public forums and lectures, Sexton presented the university, one of Manhattan’s largest landowners, as the factory of a new era. He proposed that an economy stimulated by young professionals working in a sector that he dubbed ICE (intellectual, cultural, and educational) would “magnetize the talent class” and generate more revenue for the city. Other university presidents have also made this argument, but, because their campuses are encroaching on working-class communities (West Philadelphia, the South Side of Chicago, East Baltimore), they haven’t attracted as much negative publicity as N.Y.U., which is impinging on one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.
To appeal to government and business leaders, Sexton has tried to repackage a liberal-arts education as something that has measurable value. At a panel that he moderated for a conference called Creative New York, in 2006, he opened the event by boasting about the concentration of college and graduate students in the city. “We have tremendous assets in place,” he said. Then he turned to the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had been asked to share his thoughts on the city’s “ICE sector.”
“Start spreading the news!” Jones sang. “I’m leaving today!”
“No, you’re not leaving,” Sexton said.
“I’m asked to sit on this panel and talk about being part of the new economic engine of New York City: are we serious? Are we serious?” Jones said. “Does the culture, talking all this highfalutin talk today about creativity, truly value something that does not have a product?”
Sexton likes to joke that he will turn any institution he leads into a version of his Jesuit high school, Brooklyn Prep. As a student there, in the late fifties, he was enraptured by a teacher named Charlie Winans, whom students called Mr. Blue. Sexton and his classmates often spent their afternoons at Charlie’s home, in Crown Heights, listening to classical music and discussing books that he had recommended. At N.Y.U., where Sexton teaches four undergraduate classes a year on religion and the Constitution, all his students have heard stories about Charlie, whom Sexton describes as a “combination of Rabelais and St. Francis of Assisi.” One former student, Peter Schwartz, told me that everything Sexton does is “an extrapolation of Charlie. He lives and breathes this Charlie ethos. He’s a Charlie knockoff.”
Sexton grew up in Belle Harbor, Queens, in a family well versed in the spiritually motivating language of Alcoholics Anonymous. His father, an underemployed lawyer, was sober for only brief periods of his son’s childhood, and died during Sexton’s freshman year at Fordham. A few months later, Sexton decided to “do Charlie.” He had won the national Catholic debating championship in high school, and he persuaded the nuns at his younger sister’s school, St. Brendan’s, to let him create a debate team and coach it for free. His sister, Adrienne Beck, recalls sitting in the front row of a school assembly when she saw her brother make his announcement. “Oh, boy,” she said. “I was in shock.”
The team was called the Society. On Monday nights, Sexton played classical music and showed the girls slides of sculptures and paintings; on Tuesday nights, they discussed literature. “It was a total education,” Patricia O’Brien, who was on the first team, said. “He’d be all over the blackboard, running from side to side, drawing arrows between ideas, talking so quickly.”
In 1963, Sexton enrolled in Fordham’s graduate program in religion, but his primary focus continued to be the Society, one of the few female debate teams. He spent fifteen years as coach, and the team won the national championship five times. During this period, he married one of his former students (after a few years, the marriage was annulled) and held a number of teaching jobs: he worked at Brooklyn Prep and St. Francis College, tutored students for the Regents Scholarship exam, and started John Sexton’s L.S.A.T. Preparation Center, a multicity franchise. During long drives to debate tournaments, Rosemary Lawlor Genberg, a former debater, recalled, “he would talk about the nature of time, the progression of life. He made us feel that what we were doing was very deep and important.”
After writing his dissertation, on Charles Eliot, a leader in the Unitarian movement and the longest-serving president of Harvard, Sexton enrolled at Harvard Law School. At thirty-three, he was the oldest student in the class and resembled Paul Bunyan, sporting a bushy beard and a red flannel shirt that he wore nearly every day. He dated Lisa Ellen Goldberg, a student who was passionate about women’s rights, for two months, and then they eloped. Sexton refused to spend a night apart from her, a rule he followed for the first eight years of their marriage. “ ‘Fanatic’ is too strong a word, but there was always a level of devotion that exceeded pure rationality,” his friend Kelly Welsh said. In 1980, Sexton began a clerkship for Warren Burger on the Supreme Court, where he took care, when writing opinions, to include a number of footnotes that was divisible by four, the number of letters in Lisa’s name.
Sexton joined the faculty of New York University School of Law the next year, at a time when the institution placed little emphasis on scholarship. Many tenured professors worked at law firms downtown, leaving their school offices empty. The boundary between Sexton’s personal and professional life had always been porous, and he was frustrated by the lack of a communal culture. He was often in his office until eleven at night, and he invited his students to visit him on the weekends at his mother’s home, in Rockaway Beach. Former students showed up, too. One of them, Kenny Charles, who played professional basketball after graduating from Brooklyn Prep, said that he acted as Sexton’s gatekeeper, since some of their old friends were struggling with substance abuse. “I told the guys, ‘If you want to see the big fella badly enough—because he can help you—first you have to pass my test.’ ”
After Sexton was appointed dean of the law school, in 1988, he called some of the best legal scholars in the country and invited them to move into eight spacious dorm rooms. “Congratulations!” he told them. “You’ve just been made a penumbral member of N.Y.U. law school.” During visits to New York, they stayed in the rooms for free. In exchange, they participated in forums, and helped to create an intellectual community. Sexton began recruiting permanent faculty from this élite group, and rewarded them with a level of benefits, including mortgage-loan assistance for vacation homes, that were unavailable to what he called the “gray team”: faculty with minimal records of scholarship. The “blue team” were the professors who could have taught anywhere in the country. (When he interviewed these candidates, he sometimes lowered his knee to the ground in genuflection.) N.Y.U. gave some of them personal loans every year, on top of their salaries; if they stayed for a decade or more, the loans would be forgiven.
Sexton thought that the law-school curriculum was a “closed and self-referential system,” so he introduced classes that were more interdisciplinary and theoretical. He created what he called the first Global Law School, comprising a group of twenty scholars visiting from other countries. Linda Silberman, a law professor on the committee that reviewed the global program, was skeptical about the scope of the transformation. “I would say, ‘Why don’t you start smaller? First wait and see how it works.’ ” She said that Sexton, whose grandfather was the city’s tax commissioner, ran the school like “the Brooklyn pol he was”: he was good at placating different factions of faculty, and was loyal and generous, counselling distressed colleagues and doing them favors.
In 1999, the chair of N.Y.U.’s board of trustees, Martin Lipton, a founder of one of the country’s most successful corporate law firms, began considering Sexton as the next president of the university. Sexton had distinguished himself as a fund-raiser, increasing the law school’s endowment by more than a hundred million dollars. His attention to faculty recruitment helped the law school rise as high as fourth place in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and to first place for international law. Sexton initially dismissed Lipton’s proposal, explaining that his talent was his “relational skills, which aren’t transportable.” He told me, “Moving from retail to wholesale is a very different way of being in the world, and it’s not natural for me.”
The following year, Lipton convinced Sexton that he was the right person to lead the university. Because of N.Y.U.’s brushes with bankruptcy, its trustees have been more active than other boards in their oversight of the administration. Before appointing Sexton, they didn’t interview any other candidates, provoking the anger of many professors. The president of N.Y.U.’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in the Times that the decision exemplified the way that universities were “doing their best to reduce faculty power.”
Sexton was never entirely forgiven for what some saw as his illegitimacy, but it wasn’t until the campus got embroiled in a debate about unionization that a significant group of faculty became alienated. In 2002, N.Y.U. had become the first and only private university to recognize a graduate-student union. After a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, Sexton and the labor leader John Sweeney, whom he knew socially, helped negotiate the terms of the deal. “If you’re a working-class Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, this is your tradition, the charter you grew up with,” Sexton told me.
Two years later, students at Brown tried to unionize, prompting the N.L.R.B., then under Republican control, to reverse its decision. More than twenty-five university presidents privately urged Sexton not to renew N.Y.U.’s union contract, now that it was no longer legally obligated. The N.L.R.B. wrote that collective bargaining was incompatible with the mission of a university, which has “primarily an educational, not economic, relationship” with its students. Dissenting members on the N.L.R.B. complained that the decision was “woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality.” To cut costs, universities were hiring fewer tenured professors and shifting teaching duties to graduate students, who received stipends that barely covered living expenses. “A big corporation has replaced the once self-centered company of scholars,” they wrote, quoting the historian Jacques Barzun. Given the perilous academic job market, the traditional justification for refusing the union—the idea that graduate students were apprentices, preparing for a lifelong vocation—no longer resonated. For many Ph.D. candidates, the receipt of their degree will mark the end, not the beginning, of their teaching careers.
The union had succeeded in winning a nearly forty-per-cent increase in compensation for graduate students and significant gains in health-care benefits, but, after nearly a year of deliberation, Sexton decided that it had been a failed experiment. At a university meeting, with two open microphones, Sexton told an audience of three hundred that the rules of industry corroded the trust between professors and graduate students. As students and professors booed—“Get serious, stop smiling!” one shouted—Sexton became more assertive, offering rebuttals to their arguments, as if he were defending himself at a debate tournament. The union had filed grievances that consumed “huge amounts of time, resources, and potentially principal,” he said. He reiterated the concerns of the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the feminist scholar Catharine Stimpson, who had warned that the process of collective bargaining could impose excessive standardization on teaching, and blur the line between setting work conditions and making academic decisions.
At the meeting, students and faculty members complained that Sexton had discounted their opinions and rejected their requests for transparency. “There’s a double standard,” Lisa Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis, said. “The university moves in this corporate direction and then somehow expects the students to believe that they exist in this utopian, non-economic world of education.” Another professor, Mary Nolan, told Sexton, “As a historian of labor and management, I find this rhetoric all too familiar.” She urged her colleagues to be skeptical of the university’s claim that its teaching assistants were not workers but “members of a company family, part of an enterprise community, under the benevolent leadership of a wise father figure.”
The following fall, more than a hundred graduate students went on strike. They formed a picket line outside Bobst Library and held signs that read “The nerds are pissed.” In solidarity, professors held classes off campus, using space in union halls, bars, and churches. Fifty-seven protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct, and several graduate students lost their teaching positions and stipends.
Sexton describes the period of the strike (which petered out over the school year) as the first “hellacious” one of his presidency. He encountered sidewalk etchings of himself with horns, and received a flood of hate mail. Perhaps to justify his discomfort, he told himself that he was making a personal sacrifice for the good of the university. He recalled, “At one meeting, this woman stood up and said, ‘When will we inflict enough pain on you that you will capitulate?’ I said, ‘You got a bad break here. You have a president who was taught to think that crucifixion is a good thing.’ ”
The only time Sexton contemplated resigning was in the winter of 2007. On a Saturday evening in late January, he was in his den writing a critique of Richard Dawkins’s and Sam Harris’s denunciations of divinity. When he walked into the bedroom to ask his wife, Lisa, if she was ready for dinner, she said that she wanted to finish what she was reading, an essay by an astrophysicist about parallel universes. He returned thirty minutes later to find her unconscious. She’d had an aneurysm, and was pronounced dead the next day.
Lisa’s voice is still on Sexton’s answering machine, and her stacks of paperbacks remain on her nightstand. Two years after Lisa’s death, Sexton’s daughter tattooed Lisa’s Hebrew name on her foot; the next day, he had his assistant schedule an appointment at East Side Inks, a tattoo parlor in the Village, so that he could get a matching one. His Catholicism, which has been diluted over the years, seems most vivid when he speaks of Lisa’s presence in his life. She is “my hyper-conscience,” he told me. “I am representing both of us now.”
The first time I visited Sexton’s apartment, he pointed out Lisa’s decorative flourishes—the bookshelves she had built, the Chinese pewter tea sets, the framed portraits of their children—so that I could understand “the way Lisa warmed places.” He also gave me a video of her memorial service, explaining that I would never understand him without knowing her. In his eulogy, Sexton said that he subscribed to C. S. Lewis’s belief that the death of a spouse marked a new phase of love: “not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.” At the end of his speech, he quoted a passage from “Mr. Blue,” replacing the name Blue with Lisa. “It can’t be so,” he said. “No. Say what you will. Do what you will. You can’t make me believe that Lisa is dead.”
Arthur R. Miller, who taught Sexton and Lisa at Harvard Law School, told me, “For the longest time, there was no conversation in which John didn’t bring up Lisa. She is alive as far as John is concerned.” Miller worries that Sexton will never date another woman, and wonders if after his presidency Sexton will “follow Charlie and turn to religion.” He said, “It’s not inconceivable that he would become a Jesuit and lead an ascetic, contemplative life.”
Sexton is constantly rehearsing and revising his story of himself, folding each episode of his life into a larger narrative, taking care to connect the themes. After Lisa’s death, he abandoned a plan to create a modern version of Brooklyn Prep—he had already recruited a headmaster—because it no longer felt relevant. “That was going to be an homage to Charlie, to my life before Lisa,” he said. Instead, he focussed on opening a new campus in Abu Dhabi, a project that had excited Lisa, who ran a foundation devoted to education and urban affairs. She thought that the university couldn’t be complete without a campus in the Arab world.
Shortly before her death, Sexton was invited to a meeting at the palace of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. He was served tea and a large plate of dates. The scene has assumed a central place in the Sexton canon of stories. “The Crown Prince took a date, and it disappeared into his mouth,” Sexton told me. “I put the date into my mouth, and it had a pit! If you’re from Brooklyn, you know how to push a pit up into the side of your mouth. But I’m a demonstrative person. I’m scared I’m going to gesture and it will fly out! So I swallowed the pit. Where was I going to put it? In my pocket?”
Sexton described the meeting as a “fortunate accident of two deeply relational personalities coming together.” The conversation, scheduled for fifteen minutes, lasted nearly an hour, encroaching on the call for prayer. At the end of the meeting, the Crown Prince asked Sexton to keep the details of their negotiations private—a decision that later inflamed the faculty, who suspected that the university’s global expansion was conceived, at least partly, as a solution to a real-estate problem. On a campus pressed for space, a global network of study-abroad sites—visited by almost forty per cent of undergraduates—creates room for more students in less costly environments.
Professors resented that one person seemed to be determining the university’s pedagogical vision. Stephen Duncombe, a professor of media studies, said that faculty members were unable to make a “rational judgment” about the new campus. “We weren’t given the materials, the data,” he said, explaining that Sexton “failed to honor a basic principle of the university, which is built on the idea of free and open debate. He locked us out of the greater discussion.” Another professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that, “until a few years ago, the faculty had the sense that we and John were all in this together—we liked being a part of this scrappy overachieving school, and there was a sense that John really cared about the faculty and their input. Then, sort of overnight—some people speculate it was in the wake of Lisa’s death—he became this top-down guy who was obsessed with his vision and his legacy to the exclusion of attention to faculty concerns.”
N.Y.U.’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, which will open in 2014, is surrounded by several acres of sand. Its twenty-seven buildings have been constructed in the past three years by seven thousand guest workers, mostly from South Asia. Four hundred palm trees will be planted on the grounds, which will also have two soccer fields, an Olympic-size pool, and a larger performance center than the ones for students in Greenwich Village.
The three-and-a-half-million-square-foot campus is being paid for by its owner, the government of Abu Dhabi, which has one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Citizens of the Emirates can receive a free public education through graduate school, and the government has extended this luxury to students at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, which accepts about two hundred students a year. Students who can’t afford the school, which is most of them, receive scholarships for tuition, housing, meals, textbooks, and travel to and from their homes, in a hundred different countries. Sexton told me that N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi exists “in the tradition of the best state universities twenty-five years ago, before they began privatizing.”
During the school year, Sexton travels to the Emirates every two weeks to teach two classes on the relationship between church and state. He has brought so much revenue to the Emirates airline—the government pays for his travel—that he’s been elevated to Invitation Only status, which means that he is the first person on the plane and may choose any seat he wants. When I travelled with him in June, the airline sent an S.U.V. to pick him up at his apartment, on Washington Square, and a flight attendant escorted us from the car, through security, to the Emirates Lounge. On our way, he persuaded the flight attendant to take classes in N.Y.U.’s hospitality program. “We have this locational endowment, because we’re in New York City,” he told her.
The next morning, we visited the new campus, on Saadiyat Island. A decade ago, the island, which juts into the Persian Gulf, was a large expanse of mangroves and sand. It’s now being developed as a cultural district, and branches of several museums, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, are being built. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, said that, compared with the two arts organizations, N.Y.U. has been “much more forthright and upstanding in terms of addressing labor values.” The university reimburses recruitment fees, enforces eight-hour workdays, and provides medical insurance, paid vacation, and severance pay. Whitson added that working conditions will never be ideal, since the country’s employment-sponsorship laws limit the rights of foreign workers, and forming unions and striking is illegal.
We went on a Friday, the first day of the weekend in the Emirates, and less than a third of the workers were at the campus. In an improvised parking lot, there were three white buses that shuttled workers to barracks, ten minutes away, after they finished their shifts. It was windy and nearly a hundred degrees, and our view of the St. Regis hotel, the closest structure to campus, was partly obscured by gusts of sand. Sexton, who wore slacks and a Fire Island T-shirt, stood outside the entrance of the school, which was covered in scaffolding, and said that sixty years ago Abu Dhabi had only a few buildings, most of them Bedouin forts. He repeated a quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “If you want to build a world-class city, build a great university and wait two hundred years.” As we walked down a sandy trail to the parking lot, he told me, “The Crown Prince completely gets that idea.”
After leaving the campus, we had dim sum at Shang Palace, a Chinese restaurant in a luxury hotel. Ali Al Mansoori, the director of the Higher Colleges of Technology, the largest institution of higher education in the Emirates, was waiting for us at the table. He was the only person in the room in traditional dress, in a white dishdasha and, on his head, a ghutra. Sexton, who drank two Diet Cokes and a coffee in quick succession, began sharing statistics about N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi’s incoming class, which was larger than planned—eighty-six per cent of admitted students have decided to enroll—and would include twenty-four students from the Emirates, more than from the United States.
Al Mansoori, who, like many leaders in the country, is younger than forty, complimented Sexton for attracting students who are “top of the cream” and observed that other satellite campuses in the Emirates, like Michigan State and George Mason University, shut down after only a few years. The schools were dependent on tuition, and failed to attract enough students. For similar reasons, N.Y.U.’s first degree-granting satellite campus, a graduate school in Singapore, created in 2007 by the School of the Arts, announced its closure last year; it now owes Singapore nine million dollars. Sexton told Al Mansoori, “I must get two offers a week from India. They say, ‘We’ll build you a campus. We’ll give you free land. We’ll fund you.’ But they almost always leave financial aid out of it.” He reached for a small plate of dumplings. “That kind of higher education will lock kids into a certain strata more than any caste system.”
Sexton continued, “There’s an argument going on in the United States, and all these fancy opinion-makers want to reduce the cost of an education.” Given cuts in government funding, there was no way to achieve this without “hollowing out the degrees.” “I feel like Don Quixote,” he went on. “I tell people that in a healthy economy the cost of higher education should be going up. The question is, what is the price for the student? What subsidy is provided?” In free moments on the trip, Sexton was drafting an essay in which he proposed a new method for financing higher education: students would take out low-interest government loans, and, after graduation, pay the federal government a small percentage of their annual salary for twenty years, at which point the loan would be forgiven. (The process would take half that time for those in “socially desirable occupations,” like nursing or teaching.)
His work on the essay had been interrupted by calls from administrators in Greenwich Village, who were trying to limit fallout from a report about professors and administrators at N.Y.U. receiving low-interest loans to buy million-dollar homes. After the votes of no confidence in New York, the London study-away site was preparing to take a vote on his leadership, too. In the car after lunch, Sexton listened on the phone to the concerns of the administrators, calmly reassuring them. His buoyancy was only slightly tempered after the phone call; it usually takes about twenty minutes for the wave of dejection to pass. At times, he seemed to temporarily convince himself that what he called the faculty “churn” or “Sturm und Drang” would benefit the university, because it could lead to new mechanisms for shared governance—N.Y.U. could be a model for other schools, he said—before dismissing his wishful thinking. In conversations with people in Abu Dhabi, where he was still treated as a visionary, he avoided discussing faculty unrest except to say, vaguely, twice, that he hoped to turn lemons into lemonade.
The collegial community whose loss professors are mourning in Washington Square appears to be in full flower in the Emirates. The faculty and the administration at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi have an open, congenial relationship, and the professors have built the curriculum from scratch. Nationality is no longer the organizing rubric for disciplines in the humanities; literature, for instance, is divided into classes focussed on particular genres (with texts translated from multiple languages). N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi has freed itself of N.Y.U.’s inheritance: the lumbering bureaucracy, the stratified faculty, the overpacked classes, and the students burdened by debt. But the school has little viability as a model for higher education, since it depends on the extraordinary largesse of a government patron.
The associate dean of arts and humanities, Shamoon Zamir, who used to chair the faculty council at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, was surprised to discover that the New York faculty saw the Abu Dhabi professors as sellouts, even traitors, for profiting, indirectly, from the project of an autocrat. When Zamir sat in on a university-senate meeting in New York, he was alarmed by the way professors talked about the Emirates. He said that he had heard professors refer to the “sultan” of Abu Dhabi (a non-existent position), and that they seemed to believe that all women visiting the country would be oppressed. “It is quite galling to hear a classically Orientalist view coming from your liberal college,” he told me.
The critiques of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi reached a peak after the Arab Spring, when the Emirates government detained several democracy activists, including a lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne. A hundred and thirty N.Y.U. professors signed a petition urging the university to issue a public statement condemning the arrests. Human Rights Watch criticized Sexton after learning that he had told the university senate that the Emirates had a “right to defend itself against security threats” and that N.Y.U. should be less “ethnocentric.”
Sexton insisted that he was adhering to the same principles that the university had always followed: N.Y.U. has never issued institution-wide political statements to the American government, so he didn’t intend to do so with foreign ones. Cyrus Patell, an English professor at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, said that “lefty liberals are having a conservative knee-jerk reaction. They somehow assume we should be in the Arab world to export democracy, as the Bush Administration did.”
The degree to which universities can or should address the politics of their host countries has pitted several university faculties against their administrations. More than forty American universities have expanded overseas; some, like Yale, with its new college in Singapore, explicitly studied N.Y.U.’s model. Unlike traditional study-abroad sites, these campuses are generally initiated by administrators rather than by professors. They are focussed less on local language and culture than on creating “global citizens,” an ideal that runs the risk of absolving students from responsibility to their surroundings.
N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi operates according to the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which states that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” None of the professors or students I talked to said that they felt restrictions on what they could study. (Political freedom is a different matter; no one seemed sure what would happen if a student criticized the government.) As with any liberal college, there were many gay and Jewish faculty and students, annual performances of “The Vagina Monologues,” and student activists working on behalf of the laborers. For a theatre project, four female students created a short documentary, in which thirty of their classmates, as a parody, repeat what their friends at home continually say to them: “Aren’t you going to be, like, uncomfortable over there?” “So is it O.K. to be there as, like, a woman?” “You are so brave.”
The Emirati students, some of whom are visiting from the country’s national universities, found themselves fielding similar concerns from their own friends and families. One female student, who now works for the government and asked that she not be named, told me that when she applied to N.Y.U. a teacher warned her, “You should be careful, because I don’t know what their agenda is.” Another student, Mohamed Al Mahmoud, said that his father asked him, “Aren’t they going to try to teach you secularism?”
Sexton’s class is particularly popular among the Emirati students. In New York, he tends to hover over his students, gripping their shoulders as they respond to his questions. In Abu Dhabi, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to resist the impulse to make physical contact, so he taught his first class while standing in a hole in the middle of the table—an open circle for computer plugs.
He wanders around the campus like a benevolent headmaster. In this intimate atmosphere, where many administrative decisions are left to the vice-chancellor, formerly the president of Swarthmore, Sexton is free to busy himself with student gossip rather than with finances. He is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional needs of lovelorn nineteen-year-olds. Twice, he approached female students who looked dejected and asked, “Are you O.K.?” With some gentle persistence, they broke into tears.
During his office hours, students who had scheduled appointments ended up overlapping with one another. “We’re collectivizing, because I talk so much,” he told newcomers. He referred to one student as the “mother hen,” and another as the class’s “big daddy.” To a student from Ethiopia, who admitted that he had no internship for the summer, Sexton said, “You’ve got to manage that, big fella. You’re going to run Ethiopia someday, right? Is that the goal? If you are going to run the world, it sounds like you need to get more organized.” To a freshman from Rwanda, who was frustrated that no one was sponsoring the nonprofit organization he intended to found, Sexton said, “God, we’re so much alike!” He paused. “I take that back. I cannot compare. I admire you so much. We’re similar in personality, O.K.? You’re letting your passion overwhelm your foundation.”
In the past two years, faculties at more than a dozen universities have held votes of no confidence, a method of desperation that was once rarely employed. Molly Corbett Broad, a former president of the University of North Carolina and the president of the American Council on Education, told me, “All too frequently now, I’ve been receiving calls from presidents who are afraid they are about to be fired.” Some worry that they’ve lost the trust of their faculty, while others fear that they’ve disappointed their boards. She said, “Board members come out of the private sector, where their corporations have gone through dramatic change as a result of new technologies and globalization. They don’t want their institutions to be left behind.”
The principles that make academia a unique American workplace—the fact that workers have tenure and share the responsibility of governance—often conflict with the ambitions of the trustees, who want more flexibility to stake out their corner of the market as quickly as possible. Last year, the board at the University of Virginia was so impatient with its president, Teresa Sullivan, for not innovating enough—she had failed to understand the merits of “strategic dynamism” and the benefits of online education—that it fired her without consulting the faculty. (The faculty senate voted no confidence in the board, and Sullivan was reinstated.)
Craig Calhoun, the director of the London School of Economics and a sociologist who studies higher education, said that faculty members, too, have accepted the logic of the corporate world; rather than spending their careers at one university and devoting themselves to its improvement, they are often on the market, looking for a better deal. He said he wished that tenured professors would be more proactive in responding to the changing conditions of their work. “They are extremely conservative and tend to look at things in a narrow, self-interested way,” he said. “It would be a tremendous resource if they were the ones coming up with ideas about how the university can change to meet future challenges. But all they have is a defense of the status quo.” Calhoun taught at N.Y.U. for sixteen years, and he said that Sexton “came in with a strong, communitarian message—he was serious about his commitment to that ideal—but it played to the university as a corporate message, because it was filtered through a big, hierarchical leadership structure.” He thinks that the Sexton administration blundered by assuming that faculty criticism was just a matter of “sour grapes,” from chronic whiners whose careers had gone stagnant.
Initially, the Faculty of Arts and Science was divided about holding a vote of no confidence. But faculty sentiment shifted last February, when President Obama appointed Jacob Lew, the university’s former executive vice-president, to be Treasury Secretary. Lew had been tasked with making the university more efficient, and he had cut seventy million dollars from its operating budget. But, in the confirmation process, it emerged that N.Y.U. had paid him a salary of nearly eight hundred thousand dollars, as well as a six-hundred-and-eighty-five-thousand-dollar exit bonus, and $1.4 million in loans (which were partially forgiven) for a home in Riverdale. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, has asked Sexton for financial documents going back to 2000, so that he can investigate whether the university misused its nonprofit status by bestowing on its top employees benefits more fitting for a corporation.
A month after Lew’s confirmation hearing, every professor at the university received a memo titled “Where the Money Goes at N.Y.U.” The letter was composed by the steering committee of Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, a group of twenty professors who send daily e-mails to some four hundred professors on their Listserv. The group had analyzed the university’s I.R.S. filings and discovered that Lew was not the only administrator who had received special perks. Sixteen administrators, collectively, had salaries that totalled more than twelve million dollars. Sexton received a salary of $1.5 million and a loan from the university for a home on Fire Island, and soon he will receive a “length of service” bonus of $2.6 million. The memo noted that the “inflated compensation for N.Y.U.’s top administrative caste” was in sharp contrast to its growing body of adjunct professors, who have no job security and can earn less then four thousand dollars a class. The letter described N.Y.U. as an “empty, bright world brand that profits no one but its managers.”
Three days later, the Faculty of Arts and Science voted that it had lost confidence in Sexton. Five more schools held votes, three voting against Sexton and two in support, including the law school, which composed a report that criticized the “political style of the leaders of the dump Sexton movement.” (The faculty councils of the medical, nursing, and dentistry schools also expressed their support.) Martin Lipton, the chair of the board, told me that the votes took him “completely by surprise.” “I was flabbergasted, frankly,” he said. At a black-tie dinner for trustees last May, Lipton asked, “What would our nineteenth-century forefathers think about the unwarranted calumnies thrown at him? What would they think about the attempts to derail the most important innovation in university education in the last two centuries?”
Lipton held meetings with fourteen groups of faculty last spring to discuss ways of developing more democratic methods of governing. The process convinced him that the construction plan had motivated professors to voice all their frustrations, many of which were personal, involving their own compensation, and went back many years. He said that the board hadn’t paid much attention to the debate about unionization until it was too late. “Sometimes, later on, you wish you would have made an opposite decision,” he told me. “It would have avoided a real schism.”
In the fall of 2012, to mollify critics of the Greenwich Village expansion, Sexton had set up a committee to evaluate the plan, and to review and to publicly disclose all relevant legal and financial documents. But some professors, appointed by their deans, refused to serve. They saw it as a mockery of democracy: a committee of professors who had been appointed, not elected, to rubber-stamp a set of decisions that had already been made. (Faculty Against the Sexton Plan and neighborhood groups are now suing the city for allowing the destruction of parkland by approving the buildings N.Y.U. has designed.) Eventually, twenty professors, half of whom lived on the blocks flagged for construction, agreed to be on the committee. After a year of research, they found that N.Y.U. has an urgent shortage of academic space, and proposed that the school build on one of the faculty blocks, on a lot now occupied by a gym, which the university had been planning to do, and put off everything else for nine years (at which point, another committee will decide how the rest of the plan should be executed). The committee also concluded that the university had adopted prudent assumptions in its three-billion-dollar plan for capital spending, roughly a quarter of which will be devoted to construction on the block. In the next decade, the university intends to raise a hundred and seventy-four million dollars and borrow $1.8 billion.
This summer, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan called on Lipton to resign as chairman, saying that the board had been too supportive of Sexton’s “ ‘growth’ obsession.” A month later, the board announced that the university would establish a committee that would include professors and students to search for the next president. Sexton intends to step down as soon as his contract expires, in 2016. He told me that the next three years will be “a time for breathing.” “You can’t have people running at full throttle the whole time,” he said. “The analogy isn’t to exhaustion so much as it is to: enough already.”
Like few other university administrators, Sexton has become synonymous with the institution he leads. Many of his initiatives are anchored in personal relationships. (Fletcher Nightwine’s encounter with Sexton resulted, a month later, in a significant increase in his financial aid, and he has chosen to remain at the school.) When I asked Sexton if he had ever considered leading another university—years before, he had been approached about the presidency of Johns Hopkins—he told me, “I am in a monogamous relationship.” It’s hard to imagine all the institutional arrangements he has brokered continuing in his absence. In addition to N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, the university is navigating a recent merger with Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, an engineering school. This fall, N.Y.U. Shanghai, which is modelled on N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, is welcoming its first three hundred students, fifty-one per cent from China and the rest from other parts of the world. The governments of Shanghai City and the Pudong District have underwritten construction, and, with the federal Ministry of Education, will provide funding for the school and partial scholarships to all the students from China.
The Shanghai campus, which is working together with East China Normal University, has already come under scrutiny. In June, Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident who was a fellow last year at N.Y.U. School of Law, suggested that he was being forced to leave the university because of pressure from China, a claim that the university vigorously denied. Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the Department of State, told me that he called Sexton in the middle of the night in 2012 after Chen had fled to the American Embassy in Beijing. Although Sexton was deep into negotiations with the Chinese government, he immediately offered Chen a fellowship. “He said, ‘Absolutely,’ without hesitation,” Koh said. “I don’t know if there is a single other university president who would have done that.” Koh said that the stories in the media about Chen’s departure were “totally preposterous and inconceivable,” explaining that there was no expectation that the fellowship would be open-ended. Koh added that since he first got to know Sexton, at Harvard Law School, there have always been people who are suspicious of his uncanny optimism, his commitment to serving some larger social mission. He said, “Somehow, they want to suggest that he is not for real.”
Last spring, Sexton attended his fifty-year reunion at Fordham. More than fifty white men in their early seventies, wearing string necklaces with crimson nametags, mingled in a banquet room. Sexton introduced me to his friends with compliments that they immediately rejected; one had “started the Peace Corps.” Another had “invented adolescent medicine.” When he ran into a former suite mate who had been the general counsel for the United Steel Workers, Sexton, unprompted, explained that N.Y.U.’s student union hadn’t worked. “We tried hard,” he assured him. He and his former suite mates spent the night exchanging memories, many featuring Sexton behaving as some sort of daredevil or buffoon: the time he streaked across campus; his commitment to wearing pimple cream both night and day; the phone calls to his girlfriend that he paid for by selling pints of his blood.
Two weeks later, Sexton returned to Fordham to attend Mass and to visit the priests in Murray-Weigel Hall, a home for ailing Jesuits. Charlie Winans had spent the final years of his life there, and Sexton had visited him every few weeks. Now Sexton came to the nursing home only about once a year, but everyone still remembered him as Charlie’s protégé and caretaker. Pale, stooped men, clutching the bannister, or rolling along in wheelchairs, called out his name (“That sounds a hell of a lot like John Sexton!” or “Oh, my goodness, John, how lovely!”) as he walked down the hall. The Mass was held in a small chapel, a short walk from the men’s bedrooms. The priests sat in two rows, one for those in wheelchairs and another for those who could walk. The sermon, which was given by one of the healthier residents, was about finding common ground with those who hate us. (“A pretty interesting message, given what I’m going through,” Sexton said later.) He seemed like the perfect schoolboy: he dutifully sang along with the hymns, waited in line to receive the wafer, and, at the end of the service, found a man half-asleep in his wheelchair and pushed him out of the room.
After Mass, he visited James DiGiacomo, his former debate coach at Brooklyn Prep, who lives on the third floor of the home, in a small room with a reclining bed, a tray for meals, and an unused desk. A recreational therapist knocked on his door and announced, “John Sexton! President of N.Y.U.!”
DiGiacomo, who was lying in bed, seemed to have lost most of his capacity to speak. He let go of his television remote control and smiled.
Sexton pulled up a chair and talked aimlessly about TV and baseball. Then he reminded DiGiacomo how his class had translated “Meet the Mets” into Latin. “Occurrite Mettibus, occurrite Mettibus,” Sexton sang.
“Come on,” he said, encouraging DiGiacomo to join in. “You did this! You were the Latin teacher, I was the student.”
DiGiacomo quietly sang a few syllables. “Veniamus, occurramus Mettibus.”
“I’m at N.Y.U. now,” Sexton said, stroking DiGiacomo’s hand. “We have our graduation at the Yankees’ stadium.”
“Oh, really?” DiGiacomo said, faintly.
“We fill the whole place.”
“Wow.”
On our ride back to Greenwich Village, Sexton remarked that the visits to Fordham had been “very reinforcing.” Surrounded by his former teachers, he was seen the way he wanted to be: the striving student, following their example. In this realm, there was no clash between the spirit of inquiry and worldly concerns, a conflict that he seldom acknowledges as such. His most controversial decisions—the ones that appear most antithetical to the core values of a university—seem to come from a place of deep idealism. In the car, he told me that he had been particularly inspired to realize, at his fifty-year reunion, that his class had graduated during the Second Vatican Council, a coincidence that he hadn’t previously considered. “You realize these things are in you,” he told me. “I’ve been consistently searching, I would say, for a dogma-less religion.”
At the end of the car ride, he handed me a folder of documents that would be my “homework.” He often gave me e-mails that he’d printed out, articles that he’d annotated, or scraps of paper with notes that he’d scribbled in the middle of the night. This batch included a newsletter about interdisciplinary education in medicine, a report on the internationalization of higher education, and an outline he had written titled “A Framing.” The document listed significant periods in his life, in chronological order and organized into subcategories, and a synthesis of his life’s major theme. “Widening and deepening of experience and understanding as the constant,” he had written. “Every encounter, every day.” ♦
