Last week, NYU CISO Rich Sparrow and I visited NYU Shanghai. It is a 12 hour time difference and a very long time in an aircraft, but it was well worth the trip. Unknown to us, Secretary of State Blinken was also visiting while we were there. His visit signifies the importance of NYUSH to China-US relations. If you didn’t know, its mission is to improve relations between the two nations. The student body is 50% Chinese and 50% international, with each Chinese student having an international (mostly US) roommate.
There are nine western partnership universities in China: six European and three US. Of those nine, only NYUSH offers unfettered access to the Internet. This is a huge strategic advantage and makes NYUSH scholars the envy of other scholars in China. Protecting the network from unauthorized access is a top priority so that NYUSH can keep this important privilege.
The Shanghai campus is brand new, built by the Shanghai government for NYUSH. It is a beautiful campus located in a very nice part of town. The IT team did a great job designing the technology for the new campus. It is rare in higher ed to see an installation where everything is as we would want it to be!
The IT team under Chang Pan (Pan is his given name) is a highly professional and competent group. They have a very complicated environment and manage it very well. There are a couple of initiatives that I found really impressive
- They have a rule that if they do something five times, they automate it. In doing so, not only are they more responsive to their community, but they free themselves from the mundane so they can focus on the more challenging.
- The other is their leveraging of Splunk to give them visibility to their equipment and the ability to be proactive. Did you know that USB ports have serial numbers? I didn’t, but they are using that as one of the data points determining whether a classroom is ready or not.
Shanghai is a very impressive city. It is over 25 million in population with fantastic infrastructure. Relations between our governments are not as strong as they were. I think that most Chinese people want to have good relations, and NYUSH faculty and staff strongly believe that we are one University with many campuses. NYUSH has importance well beyond its size to Shanghai, China and the US. It is another aspect of NYU of which we can all be proud.