A first-class university is made not from its impressive architecture, but from the inspiring and talented educators who teach there. Since its founding in 2012, NYU Shanghai has embodied the purpose of higher education. The University has three missions: Creating a model for higher education reform in China, contributing to the development of Shanghai’s Pudong New District, and strengthening people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States. A decade ago, these goals provided the school with a unique opportunity to grow and flourish. Today, they give even greater meaning to the university’s development. When NYU Shanghai was established, its very existence was seen as a success for the international higher education community. I look forward to the day when it truly embodies the value of its existence by becoming a world-class research institution.
Over the past decade, NYU Shanghai has grown into a superb university that integrates cutting-edge research with innovative teaching for a unique community of cosmopolitan, creative, and curious people. As we move to our beautiful new campus, our university will serve as an ever-stronger intellectual bridge that unites exceptionally talented people from all around the globe in a common effort to improve life on our planet.
NYU Shanghai has grown steadily both in its size and in its intellectual footprint since it opened ten years ago. In that decade it has multiplied its undergraduate student body, added hundreds of doctoral and masters students, and expanded its faculty, at first a select and distinguished small group and now an intellectually substantial and wide-ranging community of nearly three hundred scholars and teachers. In NYU Shanghai’s deepening profile of research, in its expanding and innovative curriculum, and in its relation to the city of Shanghai, our role as a beacon of connection between China and the world is set to go from strength to strength as we move into our second decade.
In just ten years, NYU Shanghai has grown into one of the most exciting universities in China, and, as such, reflects NYU’s ambition, creativity, and willingness to take risks. NYU Shanghai contributes enormously not only to NYU, but also to cultural understanding across the globe. At a time of division in the world, it’s a tribute to the vision of my predecessors at NYU and our partners in Shanghai to see what remarkable results can be achieved when boundaries are broken down. The new campus, which nearly doubles the capacity of the original Century Avenue building, serves as a testament to NYU Shanghai’s many successes over the past decade, and a signal of an even brighter future.
After ten years of hard work, NYU Shanghai has become a model for China’s most representative Sino-foreign cooperative institutions. It is not only an important landmark achievement of East China Normal University’s “International+” development strategy but also revitalizes Chinese higher education development in China and the world. With its move to a new campus, NYU Shanghai will begin a new chapter and fulfill its role as a modern international university, promoting academic excellence, cultivating outstanding talents, and making great contributions to the development of Shanghai, the country and all humanity.
NYU Shanghai’s value lies in exploration, innovation and reform. Education paves a way for students to experience a larger world. Over the past ten years, our outstanding graduates have used the NYU Shanghai platform to expand their worldviews. Through their own determined steps, they have realized the school’s educational ideals. They have traveled the world to build their talents and achieve their ambitions; they have fulfilled their responsibility to serve society; and with their actions and their hearts, they have written the history of NYU Shanghai.
Today, NYU Shanghai is one of the world’s great universities and an integral part of the first global network university. It is hard to grasp that a little more than a decade ago it was a dream, a hope shared by Yu Lizhong, Tong Shijun, Chen Qun and an NYU team led by David McLaughlin, Jeff Lehman and Joanna Waley-Cohen. This journey from dream to reality and beyond is one of the great stories in the history of higher education. And, as we celebrate a decade of achievement, there is a real possibility that the next decade will see NYU Shanghai become a center of excellence that was unimaginable a decade ago.