What is news is the silence around last month’s 2013 Human Rights Watch report claiming that the human rights situation in the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is a city-state) “deteriorated rapidly” in 2012.

So far, none of the bastions of Western tolerance have had much to say about that, or, for that matter, the previous annual reports detailing how laborers in the UAE are indentured servants, women have barely more rights than farm animals and political dissent leads directly to jail, sometimes by way of torture.

The details are disturbing.

Women’s rights are basically nonexistent. Like many Islamic nations, the UAE applies Shariah law to women, meaning that women cannot seek adjudication pursuant to a civil code. Rape victims rarely seek justice, and if they do, they are prosecuted themselves. In December, a 28-year-old British woman who claimed she was gang raped by three men in Dubai (another UAE city-state) was prosecuted for drinking without a license. The Supreme Court has upheld men’s right to beat their wives and children. Emirati women can only obtain a divorce through khul’a, a no-fault divorce that requires them to forfeit all financial rights. Emirati females are legally allowed to inherit just one-third of assets while men are entitled to inherit two-thirds. Men, but not women, are allowed to have four spouses. Men can marry non-Muslims; women cannot.

Two prominent human rights lawyers, Mohammed al-Roken and Mohammed al-Mansoori, have been detained for several years, along with judges, teachers and student leaders. Islamist activists simply disappear in detention. Last year, authorities issued a new federal decree on cyber-crime, making it a jailable offense to caricature or criticize the government. In 2011, a lecturer in economics at the Abu Dhabi University of Paris-Sorbonne (also lured to Happiness Island) was arrested for criticizing the government.

Nearly 90 percent of UAE residents are foreigners with limited rights. Many are Bangladeshi immigrant laborers who must work off the fees they are charged to get hired, have no right to organize or bargain collectively and face penalties for going on strike. Worker suicide rates are high.

This milieu would not seem to be the ideal home away from home for professors who teach labor history and gender studies.

But the price was right.

It’s unclear just how much Emirati money flooded Washington Square. Abu Dhabi gave NYU $50 million in the ’00s, but that was only the public, first tender offer. In 2008, Mariët Westermann, the former director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, appointed the first vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) said, “Abu Dhabi is willing to invest in whatever is needed on the Square. They are very committed to the flow.”

NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor declined to put a figure on the total contributed for The Observer but, referring to the new HRW report, he said: “NYUAD is committed to an environment that ensures academic freedom, thereby providing a context in which students, faculty and staff can engage in the intellectual exploration and analysis of even the most sensitive issues. However, such freedom does not extend to tolerating speech, writing and/or behavior that intentionally demeans others based on gender, race, religion, national origin, disability, and/or sexual orientation. It also does not extend to public defamation, libel or slander. Such behavior runs counter to NYUAD’s educational mission.”

Regarding women’s rights, he emailed us a Tumblr link with several dozen snapshots of NYUAD students holding small signs starting with “Feminism is important because ...”

He said that gender studies is not one of the degrees offered at the Happiness Island campus, but women are not subject to the dress code that prevails beyond its walls.

NYU’s president, legal scholar John Sexton (who cut the Abu Dhabi deal and has earned the nickname “the George Steinbrenner of academia” for his fund-raising and grand vision), is teaching a course in religion and government at Abu Dhabi and commutes between New York and the UAE. About a third of the NYUAD staff consists of New York-based faculty members who fly over (first class) to teach on a monthly basis.

A 2008 New York magazine story on NYUAD revealed off-the-record professorial angst over the collaboration, but faculty members have been mostly silent. It’s a rare voice on the left—especially in the academies—who will take on Islamist censorship and Shariah abuses against women.

This is all the more disturbing since at NYUAD, at least, the chill seems to be getting inside. Last summer, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that NYU’s “researchers in the UAE use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution, the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption.”

Reacting to that, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a Wall Street Journal education writer, penned a piece in The New York Post accusing NYU and other American colleges of “pandering to despots.” The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff picked up her theme and accused NYU’s Mr. Sexton of “despoiling” NYU’s reputation.

NYU professor Andrew Ross, head of the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told The Observer that the faculty plans a vote of no confidence on Mr. Sexton next month, and the Abu Dhabi issue is one reason for it.  “The decision to invest so much of NYU’ reputation in Abu Dhabi was made unilaterally by President John Sexton, and it is one of the factors weighing on the faculty’s desire to pursue a vote of no confidence in him,” he said.

Still, hundreds of NYU’s faculty members have volunteered to work in Abu Dhabi anyway. And why not? Who could resist the lure of large bonuses—in some cases the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s salary—first-class airfare for family and free private school for the kids?

NYUAD aims to have 2,200 undergraduates within the next 10 years. Currently the school has 450 students who pay $65,300 per year, much of it underwritten by UAE financial aid.

While NYUAD has been open for business on Happiness Island since 2010, the Louvre’s opening has been delayed to 2015, and the $800 million deal to bring the Guggenheim there is also stalled, until at least 2017. Frank Gehry’s 90,000-square-foot design, looking every bit like a crazy pile of discarded origami bits, remains a model only. Not a spade of desert sand has been overturned.

Last year, artists and curators signed an online petition threatening to boycott the Goog over the treatment of workers in Abu Dhabi. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born New York artist who was one of the boycott’s organizers, said in a statement. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”

But abused laborers aren’t the only obstacle to a happy marriage between the Goog and the emir. In a Guardian piece last year about the stalled plans, a museum official said the delay provides time to “educate the audience,” in case the art might provoke an “aggressive response” from conservative Emiratis. William Wells, director of the Townhouse gallery in Cairo, told the Guardian that the Guggenheim did not have a signed commitment from Abu Dhabi that there would be no censorship, although the project managers told the paper there was an understanding. Eleanor R. Goodbar, a Guggenheim foundation spokesman, told The Observer that terms of the agreement were confidential.

Last September, independent auditors looking at worker conditions at Happiness Island found that three-quarters of the site’s workers had paid recruitment fees for their jobs, a form of indentured servitude banned under international labor standards.

There is a very good argument to be made for liberal institutions putting down stakes in repressive regimes. They can serve as good bacilli of sorts, implanting ideals of tolerance, women’s rights and free speech in the belly of the beast. But there is no evidence that NYU or the Guggenheim ever insisted on anything like a free speech or women’s rights clause when they sold their brands.

We have (cynically) come to expect American corporations to remain silent on human rights abuses as one dirty cost of global capitalism. When these institutions, desperate for cash in recessionary times, take money (and first-class plane tickets) to expand the global brand without retaining the meaning of the brand, they aren’t much different from Shell, BP or anyone else doing business in the Gulf.

If our strongholds of tolerance and free and open discourse don’t maintain standards vital to our society and to their own enterprises, they are merely selling their souls, and by extension, ours.

editorial@observer.com

New York City icon, author, and essayist Fran Lebowitz needs little in the way of introduction. Via ANIMAL New York, she recently made an appearance at SoHo bookstore McNally Jackson for the release of the book 'While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York' which was written by a group of NYU faculty members (but of course) who are in opposition to the university's president, John Sexton. Ms. Lebowitz was her usual, fiery self, which is to say: Utterly captivating and refreshingly impassioned.

Some highlights, with the full video below:

On NYU:

"I don't love NYU. I didn't hate it before. I just never thought about it. It's not of interest to me. And it really should be stopped from being called NYU, because it really has nothing to do with New York. It is Suburban. To. The Core. Those buildings they built on the south side of Washington Square Park are giant pieces of suburban junk. They have no place in any city. Even cities we hate! Even Atlanta doesn't deserve these! We have a mayor we don't deserve, we have a city council we don't deserve, and now we have a neighborhood we don't deserve."

On NYU's Student Body:

"The worst thing about being around these people, about these students, is overhearing their conversation. For that alone, I walk around my neighborhood in a constant rage, thinking I want to say to them: No, no you're not. NYU should move out of New York. A campus is a suburban entity."

On Michael Bloomberg:

"I said actually to Michael Bloomberg, 'I never thought I'd have the chance to vote against you three times.'"

On New York's Lack of Affordability:

"Whenever people say 'I can't really afford to live in New York,' I say 'No one can afford to live in New York! You just stay here and as long as you're not in jail, you're living in New York. You have no idea how you paid all this rent. If you add up all your rent from 1968, you realize you can be like, a prince from Dubai. How did you pay this? You don't know. The entire time I lived here, I lived inside. It's an amazing feat! I don't know how I did it. I don't. I don't know how you do it. Neither do you."

On Bloomberg's New Micro-Apartments: 

"Am I the only person who found it unbelievably offensive to see a billionare and a millionare—Bloomberg and [City Planning Commission chair] Amanda Burden—pacing off to see: How tiny a room can someone else live in?! There is a reason there are laws against apartments that are too small. There is a reason for it. There is a reason for it. He has to change the laws to make apartments this small. He's used to changing laws. It's his profession. [...] It's important that it's illegal to live in a place that small. It's important because laws show the value of the country, of the city. So we say, we have a value, our value is that people shouldn't live in a showbox. It's not good for human beings. We know you're going to go against this law. But we're gonna have the law to show that we believe you shouldn't do that!

But when you have a mayor who says: You know what? We just looked at the census and we see that there's all these people in New York, it turns out, this is news to him—everything's news to him, by the way—it turns out that fifty percent or sixty percent of the people who live in New York are single, or live in one or two-person households. So these people don't really need these gigantic, 350-square feet apartments! They could live in 245-square feet. Michael Bloomberg lives in a two-person household. In eleven houses. I am offended. Aren't you offended?"

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

While we share your concerns about the potential for exploitation, our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education. We constantly monitor and reassess placements based on student feedback.

We urge great caution in changing an approach to learning that is viewed as a huge success by educators, employers, and students alike, and we respectfully request that the Department of Labor reconsider undertaking the regulation of internships.

Indeed, a huge success! The prospect of internships in the city continues to draw students to NYU, free labor continues to please employers, and the ever-dimming hope of employment continues to tantalize and motivate students. What's not to love?

The school, with a beefed up community affairs operation, has thrown bones to preservation groups (consenting to the landmarking of a large NYU block); adjusted plans to demolish a building with a theater when faced with opposition; and held a recurring set of community forums with the goal of improving town-gown relations (the topic this month: "NYU's Haitian Relief Efforts").

The effort—aimed at shedding the historically strained, and at times abysmal, relationship with the pernickety Village—is all a prelude to the university's planned major expansion over the next two decades, as it seeks to increase its holdings by 6 million square feet, a key initiative of NYU president John Sexton.

Early next month, NYU is set to publicly unveil the master plan for this expansion effort, termed "NYU 2031: NYU in NYC " for the school's bicentennial, plotting a route toward achieving its goals to boost the student body by 5,500, grow its housing space by 3 million square feet as it hosts more students and faculty in NYU-owned housing, and grow the academic space as well. The school has previously said it wants around 3 million square feet in or around its current Village campus.

The most contentious aspect of this plan will surely be the growth of the school in the Village itself, where there's a set that seems ready to scream and yell the moment anyone proposes putting a shovel in the ground.

To this end, according to two people briefed on NYU's general plans, the school intends to move ahead with an earlier circulated proposal to build a tall residential tower in its I.M. Pei-designed Silver Towers complex, among other plans. An earlier draft plan called for a 40-story tower to rise on the site, a modernist tower-in-the-park development that holds a Pablo Picasso sculpture in its central courtyard. (It was this site that NYU consented to have landmarked.)

Whatever the specifics of the plan, it is clear that the unveiling will merely be a beginning, and the most jarring elements will likely need extensive public approvals (the Silver Towers plan would seem to need approvals from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the City Planning Commission, which can take years, and would need votes by the City Council as well).

TO SOFTEN THE INITIAL blow of the plans, NYU in 2007 began a listening tour of sorts, broadcasting its intentions and taking feedback. It held open houses for residents with large poster boards of conceptual plans; residents were encouraged to leave sticky notes indicating a preference or distaste for each board (negative, of course, outweighed the positive by a large margin).

To lead the planning effort, the school brought in a large team of respected architects, including Grimshaw, Toshiko Mori Architect and SMWM. Its community relations staffers, vice president Alicia Hurley and former Community Board 5 district manager Gary Parker, are respected by many in the community. It has brought on an array of other consultants, including the Marino Organization for public relations, and filings list Geto & deMilly as lobbyists for the school. And university officials have, since 2006, sat on a frequently-meeting task force convened by Borough President Scott Stringer, devoted entirely to talking about the expansion.

"We've been in a three-year planning process that deeply involved the community; we've listened a lot, and we've heard a lot," said John Beckman, an NYU spokesman. "That's why NYU's strategy for the first time is looking to develop as much outside our core and neighborhood as inside it."

The question for NYU is whether or not its mollification campaign will do anything to change the reaction to its development plans, which, generally in the Village, is a not-in-my-backyard response, particularly when the developer is NYU.

"I expect that it is going to be a very long, difficult fight, from everybody's point of view," said Jo Hamilton, chair of Community Board 2. "There's a history of people down here who not only care about their community but know how to put up a fight."

The school has said it is looking to expand in other parts of the city as well—it has highlighted downtown Brooklyn, the East Side health corridor and perhaps Governors Island, a concept that seems aspirational and years away from being a real possibility—although it owns the most open space in the Village.

In terms of well-received development, the school does not have a great record. Its new buildings are often bulky and out of context. The red rock-clad Bobst Library, which sits along the southern end of Washington Square Park, is a monstrosity, while the new Kevin Roche-designed Kimmel Center for University Life just to the west is widely criticized as too big and out of character. And a recently completed dorm in the East Village on 12^th Street is a towering 26 stories high, and has drawn scorn from many in the community.

WHATEVER RESISTANCE NYU DOES meet, it is sure to find one of its biggest foes in Andrew Berman, the highly vocal executive director of the well-organized Greenwich Village Society for Historic  Preservation. Mr. Berman has been a scourge of real estate developers in the West Village, waging fights against most every big or gaudy development plan that pops up. His loud resistance helped slow the LPC's approval of a new hospital for St. Vincent's and an associated apartment building, a process that took months more than it typically does. (That plan is now in doubt as the hospital may shut down.)

With regard to the expansion, he has taken the position of accepting olive branches to the community, but then has gone on to heavily criticize the school once it does not, in his view, follow through. He's traded barbs with school officials in the community paper The Villager; he criticized the implementation of a plan to preserve a building that houses the Provincetown Playhouse as insufficient (it was initially eyed for demolition); and he publicly raised complaints about signs NYU placed in the Silver Towers courtyard, after it was landmarked.

With the future plans, he said he is prepared to strongly oppose them should they indeed call for large developments in the NYU-owned "superblocks" between Houston and West Third streets (the Silver Towers complex and Washington Square Village, both of which have open space that is not heavily used by the public or even residents).

"If it is as bad as we think it is going to be, the plan is to oppose it vigorously and hold elected officials and city officials accountable," Mr. Berman said.

He said he is pushing NYU to look outside the Village for its development—which, in fairness to the school, it is doing, though not to the level Mr. Berman would prefer. "NYU has certainly oversaturated the neighborhood already, and they need to make a priority of looking outside the neighborhood," he said.

Of course, community resistance does not necessarily mean rejection, and even a university like NYU is generally viewed in higher regard than the typical private developer. Columbia managed to push through its planned 17-acre expansion in West Harlem, which was projected to result in substantial residential displacement of the existing community, using eminent domain to boot. And Fordham recently received approval to add more than 2 million square feet to its Lincoln Center campus, also a superblock.

With regard to the public approvals, much will likely depend on just how much of a harbinger NYU's new community relations approach is—in other words, how flexible will the school be.

"Are they really becoming an institution that is looking to have a meaningful dialogue, or was this whole process just a way to push themselves forward?" Ms. Hamilton of the community board asked. "It's all going to be wait and see."

ebrown@observer.com

NYU President John Sexton, a big personality who's staked a lot on a big plan, talked up some benefits more tangible than the creation of a "global university."

Notably: while New York City has always been NYU's trump card in luring applicants, Sexton predicts that generous financial aid at the Abu Dhabi branch (all students to graduate debt-free) will really thrust the school into the big leagues:

"We're going to be turning down kids who applied early action to us, who would have been easy admits for Harvard or Oxford or Stanford or Cambridge," NYU President John Sexton said. "When that begins to happen, that makes NYU hot. [It's] not just going to affect just the 100 students that show up at NYUAD next September. That's going to affect the students that show up here [in New York]."

The Washington Square News tracks down a student who seems to have responded exactly accoding to Sexton's plan:

Lan Duong, 17, attended the most recent weekend over Thanksgiving break and is an early-decision candidate. Duong has a 4.5 weighted GPA. It was the challenge of such selective admissions that enticed her to apply.

"It's almost even more prestigious than an Ivy because it's so selective. I jumped at the challenge," she said.

Will other, less suggestible students feel the same way? Will Abu Dhabi be able to keep the money rolling in? Will the United Arab Emirates be the new Greenwich Village?

Or will it go the way of The World?

CUNY, which owns the property and put out a request for proposals in December, has extended its bid deadline from March 7 to May 22, citing a desire to give developers more time to craft their proposals, according to spokesman Michael Arena.

The site, which analysts estimate could fetch CUNY some $250 million, occupies the block that runs from First Avenue to F.D.R. Drive and from 25th to 26th streets. The campus consists of three buildings used for dorms and various research and community health facilities.

CB Richard Ellis broker Paul Liebowitz, who is handling the sale along with Darcy Stacom, declined to comment because of government guidelines.

Part of the deal will require the developer to build a school to house the Julia Richman Education Complex, which will be displaced by a new Hunter building on the Upper East Side.

New York University, which is seeking an additional six million square feet to carry out its long-term expansion plan, is among the parties bidding on the property, but did not lobby for the extension, the school confirmed.

Spokesman John Beckman was unable to provide details about N.Y.U.’s plans for the site, but the university has said that various health-related programs could benefit from the location, which is close to N.Y.U.’s Medical Center and its dental school.

Community Board 6 is pushing for a medical development, to maintain a coherent character for the area, which also includes Bellevue Hospital Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“It’s a real feeling of pride,” board chairman Lyle Frank said of the neighborhood attitude toward the existing health corridor. “It’s sort of a reverse NIMBY, if you will.”

The group of editors were led by metro editor Joe Sexton, politics editor Mary Ann Giordano (former Observer managing editor!), metro political editor Carolyn Ryan and investigation editors Matthew Purdy, Kevin Flynn and Ian Urbina.

The team of reporters was led by Danny Hakim, the Albany reporter who was reporting in the city yesterday.

The group of reporters also included David Chen, a reporter out of the paper's Trenton bureau, and William Rashbaum, the paper's court reporter.

According to our source, editors and reporters, led mostly by Mr. Sexton and Ms. Girordano, were shuffling in and out of conference rooms and repeatedly calling field reporters deep into the night. It was especially rare for Mr. Sexton and Ms. Giordano to be in the office on a weekend night, with Mr. Sexton only "rarely" making appearences on Sunday nights, the source said.

The story went on their web site around 2 p.m. today, which since has been going on and off line.

At the building, a huge crowd has gathered near the paper's metro area on the third floor.

This memo, sent by metro editor, Peter Khoury, was just sent out as well: "Obviously, we're going to have much late news, thanks to the governor. So we really need you to file all nonrelated stories as early as possible. It's going to be a long night...."

Just got off the phone with Mary Ann Giordano: "I was the last person in the entire newsroom to find out about the story," she said. "I was at the gym when i found out. I was there yesterday working on national politics." With David Chen, it appears.

Mr. Sexton: We don’t see ourselves as players in real estate—the kind of people your column deals with. Our interests aren’t the same. We engage in thinking about space and real estate only to the extent that that’s driven by our academic mission. And we need space.

Columbia rightly views itself as space-starved. Columbia has 236 square feet per student. We have 96 square feet per student.

We’re not investing in real estate because we never sell. I wish our endowment could somehow benefit from the fact that we own all the real estate we do. One real-estate tycoon suggested to me, actually, that we should build our endowment on a cash basis by selling all our real estate and rebuild our campus on Governor’s Island. The delta he estimated between what we could get and what we would pay to do that would be between $5 and $6 billion. But we’re not in that business.

If Columbia is space-starved, what is NYU?

We’re space-emaciated. If they’re malnourished, we’re close to death by starvation.

What motives do you ascribe to your critics because, as you said, NYU has been in the Village for such a long time. You’re an institution here.

There are some people who would prefer not to have the NYU of today or a better NYU. Those are just not critics. Those folks have a completely different value system from most people who think about the future of this city. Or they have some sort of agenda, like personal aggrandizement.

There are people of good will who see NYU as really failing to be as good a neighbor as it could have been. Sometimes that’s because of misunderstanding on one side or the other; sometimes it’s because of inadvertence; sometimes it’s because something boneheaded was done.

Are you conducting meetings with the community about your future plans because of prior mistakes?

We would be going to the community regardless because it’s the right thing to do. If they’re going to come to appreciate us as the good force that we are, I think we owe them that. I want to emphasize to you that—let’s assume there’s no history here—going to them would not be prompted principally by a desire to appease or to keep them at bay. We want to listen to the community.…

Ultimately the decision is NYU’s within the parameter of the law, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to build every building to the maximum FAR [Floor Area Ratio]—which has been the NYU way of doing things—or that we’re going to require that all of the six million square feet be right here at Washington Square Park.

Will a sizable portion of the six million square feet planned for the next 25 years be in the Village?

If by sizable you mean, Is two-thirds of it going to be within a five-minute walk from the arch? It would startle me if it were two-thirds.

What about half?

I don’t know the answer to that. More than 20 percent? The answer is yes.

It’s very important that people in the community come forward with suggestions with how we might do it. At my town halls over the years I’ve invited some of the people who have criticized what NYU has done in the past to come forward with ideas. Take, for example, the site of the supermarket on LaGuardia and West 3rd Street. We have owned that site from before my presidency, and I’ve made it clear that we have to build on that site. People know the FAR that is available.

Do you know what it is?

I don’t offhand. I would assume it’s similar to the three buildings already there on the site. It’s a tall building. What would people propose we would do for that site? I’ve asked everybody from [City Council Member] Alan Gerson to Andrew Berman [executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation] and so forth to come forward with an idea; give us a plan.

I’ve been waiting four or five years for some of these people to come forward. It’s easier to say, Don’t build anything—which, of course, means don’t be the university that the city needs and that you want to be.

Is it frustrating that they’re not sympathetic to your needs?

My experience is that the vast majority of people are very bullish on NYU and view what we have done as miraculous. When viewed through the lens of academic institutions, we are not big space consumers. That’s reality and it’s objective. Does that mean we’ve been perfect? Anything but. Do we deserve criticism? I’m the leading critic.

You’re its biggest critic. So what mistakes have been made?

We’ve made mistakes of process and mistakes of planning.… And look, did we make mistakes of taste? That’s inherently subjective.

What’s your opinion?

My opinion? People don’t generally equate the word “taste” with the guy as so common as I am.

But still: your opinion?

Why do you want to try to get me to criticize people who came before me who did a wonderful job of building this university? I mean, David Kirp, the Berkeley expert on higher education, says that NYU is the—he italicized the word “the”—success story of contemporary American higher education. And he wouldn’t have talked about Sexton’s relay race.

They did a lot of things great, O.K.? Did they do all their buildings to my usually unreliable taste? No, they didn’t do it all in the right taste. Could they have done better? There’s no question about it.

Columbia just made an announcement that it won’t use eminent domain in its own expansion. Will NYU use eminent domain as you expand?

It’s not a question we’ve asked or answered.… I’m not ruling it out because there may be some context we’re not envisioning.

One of your plans is to own more property instead of leasing property. Why do you want to own?

[Leasing space] is a bad situation. We’re losing a lot of money because landlords rent to us and we rent to the students at less than [the landlords] rent to us. This is a stupid business model.

Why should New Yorkers believe that they’ll be O.K. with everything that NYU will build?

I’m not asking people to make an act of faith in me. I want to pick up on one thing you said. PlanNYC already posits that New York City is going to have a growth of its population of one million people over the next 25 years. If there are people out there that don’t want to address that reality, then those people are asking the city to begin its own demise.

If people say, “Don’t build another building, don’t penetrate the verticality of the city anymore,” they’re living in some world where they want to put a cap on this city, which is going to be a death warrant for the city. It’s especially inscrutable and difficult to understand that they would want to make the cap more stringent on higher education and the great universities.

This town is blessed to have at least two of the top 25 universities in the world; at least two. That is a great asset. If you cap the capacity of those two universities to stay in the top 25 in the world, you’re making a stupid decision for this city. My answer to people who want to cap or severely restrict the capacity of NYU or Columbia is that you’re just missing the essence of what will be the future of this city.

Maybe you should move to Sioux City, where you don’t have to confront growth.

“I am very pleased to share the fabulous news that Professor Jeremy Waldron has accepted our tenured offer and will join us in Fall 2006,” he wrote. Then came the kicker: “Jeremy is currently a University Professor and Professor of Law at Columbia.”

He is also the third Columbia Law School professor to announce his intention to join N.Y.U.’s faculty in the past year.

The three moves would seem to be a break in the standoff between the two law schools that has existed since the late 1980’s, when two law professors defected in the opposite direction—from N.Y.U. to Columbia.

In the intervening years, the schools have become an academic anomaly: ultra-competitive law schools essentially tied in the rankings ( U.S. News and World Report has Columbia and N.Y.U. locked as the fourth- and fifth-best, respectively, in the country) and located in the same city. The faculty at Columbia often considers N.Y.U. faculty members academic second cousins, and vice versa. They co-teach classes and occasionally “visit” at one another’s campuses. But they never stay.

In part, that’s because there’s very little impetus to move, since so much about teaching at the two schools is the same. Now, the threshold for drawing professors from one school to another is being tested—and many New Yorkers see it as an aggressive move that has upset the equilibrium between the two schools.

Mr. Waldron was a big coup: He’s one of the foremost legal and political philosophers in the world right now. Last month, labor and employment-law professor Cynthia Estlund accepted an N.Y.U. offer. Over the summer, her husband, civil-procedure and voting-rights expert Samuel Issacharoff, joined N.Y.U. permanently.

In a word—fabulous!

But Mr. Waldron was really N.Y.U.’s white whale. He’s a Goliath in legal philosophy, which has emerged as one of N.Y.U.’s marquee fields—one that Columbia had dominated over a long history dating back to the 1930’s.

Mr. Waldron said that he moved because he wanted to work closely with N.Y.U.’s legal philosophers—including the titan of the field, 73-year-old Ronald Dworkin. Along with the eminent political philosopher Thomas Nagel, Mr. Dworkin holds court every Thursday afternoon in the fall at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, where the two dissect a (quaking) scholar’s paper.

Mr. Waldron is their obvious successor. (“It’s a little bit silly. Dworkin is perfectly active, isn’t he? He doesn’t need any sort of heir,” responded Mr. Waldron.)

But unlike Mr. Dworkin, whose influence is felt everywhere but seldom seen outside of academia, Mr. Waldron has a broad public persona. He writes book reviews and letters to the editor in The New York Times, debates John Yoo on torture. Just last year, Columbia recognized his popularity when it appointed him to serve as a University Professor, a high honor that allows him to teach across disciplines in various schools within the university.

Faculty members at Columbia were quick to characterize the recent departures as isolated events related to individual professors’ preferences.

“People make decisions for personal reasons, and it’s the kind of environment where people move on,” said David Schizer, the dean of Columbia’s law school. “We have such an amazing faculty, and one sign of that is that people have other options.”

But for the faculty at N.Y.U., the three hires are also cited as evidence of a tipping point. It’s about superiority over—not parity with—Columbia Law, part of an Ivy League university whose prestige is a birthright. As recently as 2004, the word was that the N.Y.U. Law School was on the rocks, having lost several important scholars. But two years later, the story is very different.

“After Monday, I think there will be a little bit of a glow,” said Professor Marcel Kahan on the Friday before the Waldron announcement was made public. Mr. Kahan emphasized that it was the infusion of the Columbia émigré’s talents into the N.Y.U. mix that made the news noteworthy. But he allowed himself this: “They will have a hard time maintaining that they are better than we are.”

“People are mostly interested in what intellectual community will be most supportive of their work,” Mr. Revesz said. “I think we have a great intellectual community, and I’m very pleased that they’ve recognized that.”

Nor could he resist a dig at his uptown rival.

“I think any objective observer would say that we now have, sort of across the board, a faculty that is stronger in many, many more areas, and that is very exciting.”

And if a genteel aura surrounds the comings and goings of these august lawmen, there was still the faint hint of an old-fashioned duel in the air.

Of course, in the era of academic free agency, N.Y.U. had better watch its back.

“Maybe there will be more,” said Mr. Schizer, the Columbia law dean, about the moves between his school and N.Y.U. “Going forward, we certainly have our eye on a couple of people. The atmosphere now is that people are becoming increasingly mobile.

“It makes it fun to be a dean,” he added. “There are more opportunities to hire really great people.”

The Long Détente

At one time, it might have been thought fun to be the dean of Columbia Law because it consistently beat N.Y.U. in the rankings. Columbia has dominated on that score since its founding in 1858, at times spoken of in the same breath as the Harvard and Yale law schools.

While N.Y.U. Law is 23 years older, it has only been in recent decades that the school’s reputation put it out of the class of local law schools catering to commuter students.

That had already begun to change by 1988—the year John Sexton assumed the deanship of the law school: N.Y.U. had climbed up the ranks to the No. 9 slot the previous year.

Mr. Sexton compounded the school’s prestige by luring faculty from highly regarded schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

Things were changing in New York: It was suddenly becoming a desirable place to live, and thanks to a unique financial arrangement the law school had developed with the larger university, it could offer housing—some of it quite luxurious—in the school’s increasingly attractive Greenwich Village surroundings.

The school developed a buzzy momentum. So it was propelled into the upper echelon of what one faculty member termed “high-end legal education.”

But, according to a source, there was initially a price to be paid for Mr. Sexton’s ascent: Professor David Leebron left for Columbia the following year. The two had been rivals since their days on the Harvard Law Review.

A second faculty member, Jeffrey Gordon, left in 1988 to run a center on law and economic studies at Columbia, which was building a stronger corporate and mergers-and-acquisitions faculty at the time.

“John Sexton told me that he had the opportunity to poach [from Columbia], but that he decided not to poach,” said Jules Coleman, a law professor at Yale who is close to Mr. Sexton.

In 1996, Mr. Leebron became the dean at Columbia. One senior professor said he had heard that the longtime competitors had an understanding not to recruit aggressively from each other’s schools.

“I think the assumption was that it would be too upsetting,” said the source, who didn’t want to be identified because he could not assert it as fact. “It would make relationships between the two schools unsettled … and unfriendly.” The agreement “would be a way of saying … ‘Let’s have nuclear disarmament.’”

Mr. Sexton and Mr. Leebron did not respond to requests for comment made through their spokesmen. Other knowledgeable sources denied that there had ever been an agreement, even an informal one. They said that the reason there had been no raiding wasn’t because the schools weren’t interested. (Not to mention the potential anti-trust concerns—paging Alfred Taubman!) They were interested, and both deans made overtures. But they may not have needed an agreement, since no one wanted to move badly enough.

Even so, Columbia and N.Y.U. regularly competed both for entry-level candidates and lateral hires from outside New York. In 1999, for the first time, N.Y.U. placed one notch above Columbia in the U.S. News and World Report pecking order, a feat they repeated in 2000.

In 2002, Mr. Sexton was promoted to university president, and Mr. Revesz, an environmental-law scholar, succeeded him as dean. Mr. Leebron announced in December 2003 that he was stepping down to run Rice University.

So the old standoff was at an end. Meanwhile, the search for a dean to replace Mr. Leebron was roiling the waters at Columbia.

Many law schools follow a dean-search model in which the university president makes an appointment in consultation with a committee that includes some faculty members from the law school and other faculty members outside it. Columbia follows what is known as an open or “faculty democracy” model. The process is akin to a popular election, with professors voting among candidates for the job.

Columbia professors who threw their hats in the ring were thus subjected to the public scrutiny of their peers—an uncommon and unwelcome development for law dons well into their tenured professorships.

“Everyone was eligible to vote, and so everyone was eligible to be lobbied … You wanted your candidate to do well, so you ended up saying things that were negative about other candidates,” said one person close to the situation, who requested anonymity because he did not want to generate publicity for the news. “We had a really, really good result, [but] the process itself generated a lot of frustration and ill will on the faculty.”

Among the candidates were Mr. Issacharoff and Carol Sanger, a family-law and feminist legal scholar who is Mr. Waldron’s longtime companion. The faculty chose a 35-year-old whippersnapper and tax scholar, David Schizer, for the job.

Mr. Issacharoff, a revered teacher who had expressed strong views about the kind of intellectual heavyweight needed to direct the school, visited at N.Y.U. the following year, through an arrangement he had made before the deanship shake-up. He never returned to Columbia.

“This is the last reverberation of the dean-search process we had,” said The Observer’s source. “The people who left were the people who were most closely affected by the dean search.”

So why didn’t all the moves happen immediately after the election of Mr. Schizer? And if Mr. Waldron feels that Ms. Sanger was mistreated, then why is he—not she—leaving?

“People need to consider their positions very carefully; they’re not required to act precipitously,” said Mr. Waldron, N.Y.U.’s latest acquisition. Ms. Sanger declined to comment. (Mr. Waldron has an outstanding offer on the table from Harvard, which has also made Ms. Sanger a visiting offer.)

Mr. Issacharoff wouldn’t comment on whether the circumstances of the dean search were the catalyst for his move to N.Y.U.

“People make decisions for many reasons,” he said, pointing to a cohort of scholars at the school working in his fields of complex litigation, governing and the political process. “I accepted at N.Y.U. because I liked the fit better.”

He added, “As I told David Schizer, I said ‘this is not on your watch. This is because of things that have been a source of frustration for me at Columbia for a long time.’”

“I think that would be a very simplistic way of describing what motivated me or anybody to move. It’s bound to be more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Ms. Estlund said when presented with the hypothesis that she had left as a result of the bloody dean search. “These are just always personal and idiosyncratic decisions. I think Columbia is a great place.”

And not everyone associated with the dean search was left wounded. Robert Scott, a professor and former dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was a finalist along with Mr. Schizer for the Columbia deanship, until he withdrew near the end of the process.

Now he and his wife Elizabeth, who is also a professor, are joining the Columbia faculty in July.

Fabulous. But when will the N.Y.U. professors start signing up?