I am writing to share my experiences. This piece is not a sermon and certainly not a lecture. Rather, it is a summary of four years of feeling increasingly alienated and uneasy.

There are two interconnected thoughts that I want to share, united by the following: our university is American. It did not have to be, but the current path it is taking has led us to this point. The U.S. American cultural and institutional discourse is not simply perpetuated by our university but also by those who inhabit it, including staff and students. Our internalization of U.S. American understandings of the nature of achievement and progress, as well as how ideas are connected and manifest, is oppression we submit to, and eventually start to perpetuate.

My first thought concerns our understanding of value. How many times have you asked a friend whether their day was productive? I do it on a daily basis. Up until very recently, I never thought to ask myself why productivity is the standard against which I measure the quality of a day. We admire not just people who achieve in material and professional terms, but also the amount of output they produce. We are constantly told by numerous departments across the university what a good work ethic looks and feels like, and we are made to believe in the invaluable transformative power of work. If you don't go off to be a consultant, do a Ph.D., — in the U.S. of course — law school, med school or some other acceptable form of engagement, such as working in an NGO or governmental agency, you have not succeeded.

Another example of this focus on productivity above all else is the attitude toward leaves of absence. For all the great work of REACH and mental health awareness efforts, it is unacceptable in this U.S. American framework to take off semesters. But the reason for that is much more surreptitious than we think. If you want to take off a semester for mental health reasons, most people will show their sympathy and at least pretend to support you. Something is wrong and you are going to fix it. There is a limited time period in which you have to progress to the next stage of one’s career. Now what if mental health is taken out of that equation? What if you want to take off time, just ... because? What if finishing your undergraduate degree at NYUAD is not a priority anymore? What if having an undergraduate degree is not a priority at all? Well, that is still fine if you are going to do something seemingly productive with your life. And here is the catch. Your value is determined by your productivity. We measure the quality of our experience in terms of output over time. We forget about alternative forms of human worth: having a deep and genuine connection with your friends, living by your convictions and connecting with your spirituality. Productivity comes in many types, including fighting for a cause at a civil rights organization. But there are always goals and output, and a finished product. It may come in many forms, flavours and colors, but the determining impetus is the same: capitalism.

My second thought touches on our understanding of what Western means, which is almost always defined within an American epistemology. In my four years at this institution, my European identity, which is not equivalent to a U.S. American identity, and my understanding of European cultures and values were systematically washed together under the label of the West. Racial literature, almost entirely based on a U.S. American understanding of an Other, has taken over our discourse of racism. That is not to say that similar experience of racial othering cannot be found all over the world: Uyghurs in China, Mizrahi Jews in Israel and Romanis in Hungary and the Czech Republic. The list goes on. But the European experience with racism is not the American experience. More than that, what is meant by being Western was defined for me by the American institutions of thought that have been internalized by our students. I am Western and white, — despite the two being entirely unrelated — and of course automatically by the virtue of those two, the colonialist and the oppressor. If I point out the borderline absurd connection between the two, people point to my white fragility. Other aspects of my identity and their meanings are also very much tied to my culture, and my identity is defined through a U.S. American lens. My consumption of alcohol is necessarily a problem; my smoking is not simply a deadly habit but a social class; my belief in a united Europe is exceptionalism; my conviction that work and social lives are separate, and my opinion that it is completely fine if you simply want to work from nine to five and then go to a theater play or just to a pub is strange.

To tie my two comments together, the American work ethic that labor and production is virtue in its own right coupled with our theorization of the Occident as stretching across the Atlantic are not coincidences and a special feature of the institution: it is the wholesale import of a U.S. American liberal arts college with a seasoning of spices such as the UAE, being away from home and living in a closed environment on a desert-island. Our diversity has not flourished into something unique beyond its flags and statistics. The vast majority of our administrators are from the U.S.. The past few years have been a dream because of the people I have met and the friendships I have made. It has also, however, felt like I was running away from the American aspects of it. I am looking forward to waking up.