NYU Tel Aviv (NYUTA) marked its 10th anniversary earlier this month with a series of events that brought together faculty, students, and administrators from across NYU’s global network, as well as alumni, and members of NYU’s leadership team, including President Andrew Hamilton, and several members of NYU’s Board of Trustees. On November 10th, participants toured Tel Aviv and the surrounding area, and also had the opportunity to meet with NYUTA lecturers, students, and staff.

The group also visited the offices of one of NYUTA’s key internship partners, The Floor, a financial technology company located at the Tel Aviv stock exchange where they met with co-founder, Moises Cohen. Deyang Sun, a senior CAS major in Economics and student at NYUTA, and intern at The Floor, presented to the group his experience working with an international team to create an innovative tool that fosters connections between big banks and startups offering sought-after telecom and cybersecurity expertise. He explained, “this project is very meaningful because on the one hand, it increases the efficiency of the banks, and on the other hand, it also creates business for the Israeli startups.” Having studied away at three of NYU’s global locations, Sun noted that Israel’s thriving entrepreneurial and fintech arena was one of the reasons he chose to weave a fourth study away experience into the final year of his degree. 

The tour, led by Benjamin Hary, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Site Director of NYUTA, and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Network Faculty Planning, and professor in NYU’s departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, led a walking tour of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, the old city in Jaffa, and then finished the afternoon at Caesarea, where NYUTA has launched a new program in archaeology. In the evening, the group attended a reception with over 200 members of the NYU Alumni Club of Israel and local partners at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa. 

On day two, the site hosted an international symposium, entitled International Higher Education in the Digital Age. Bringing together leading scholars, educators and administrators from Israel and across NYU’s global network, more than 130 attendees heard from and engaged with speakers who analyzed a number of critical challenges facing higher education today, including diversity, equity, and inclusion, academic freedom, and global mobility. The presentations brought to the fore “why we are doing Global Education”, explained Hary, and discussions “tackled difficult questions such as, how do you teach contested issues in the Global classroom? or how do you deal with the new challenges of growing diversity in the academy?”

Highlighting the shared goals of a liberal arts education and a global education, Hamilton pointed out that, “[t]he mission of every major US university is to teach as many excellent students as it can, to create new knowledge through research, and to provide a foundational liberal arts education. The most important thing to understand about global education is that it is in furtherance of these goals. It’s not a diversion. It’s a new development in the way we fulfill our mission.”

Those in attendance included representatives from many Israeli universities — including Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, and the Technion — as well as from other local partners such as organizations hosting internships for NYUTA students, the NYU Alumni Club of Israel, and more.