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New York University

New York University In 2009, the university responded to a series of New York Times interviews that showed a pattern of labor abuses in its fledgling Abu Dhabi location, creating a statement of labor values for Abu Dhabi campus workers. A 2014 follow-up article in The Times found that while some conditions had improved, contractors for the multibillion-endowment university were still frequently subjecting their workers to third-world labor conditions. The article documented that these conditions included confiscation of worker passports, forced overtime, recruitment fees and cockroach-filled dorms where workers had to sleep under beds. According to the article, workers who attempted to protest the New York University contractors’ conditions were promptly arrested.The university responded the day of the article with an apology to the workers. Another report was published and it maintains that those who were on strike were arrested by police who then promptly abused them in a police station. Many of those who were not local were then deported to their country.NYU was the founding member of the League of World Universities, an international organization consisting of rectors and presidents from urban universities across six continents. The league and its 47 representatives gather every two years to discuss global issues in education.L. Jay Oliva formed the organization in 1991 just after he was inaugurated president of New York University.

The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, built between 1967 and 1972, is the largest library at NYU and one of the largest academic libraries in the United States. Designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, the 12-story, 425,000-square-foot structure sits on the southern edge of Washington Square Park and is the flagship of an eight-library, 4.5 million-volume system. Bobst Library offers one Multidisciplinary Reference Center, a Research Commons, 28 miles of open-stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. The library is visited by more than 6,800 users each day, and circulates more than one million books annually.Bobst’s Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year.The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.
NYU houses approximately 11,000 undergraduate and graduate residents,and had the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. as of 2007, and one of the largest among private schools.NYU’s undergraduate housing system consists of more than 20 residence halls.Uniquely, many of NYU’s residence halls are converted apartment complexes or old hotels. In general, NYU residence halls receive favorable ratings, and some are opulent. Many rooms are spacious and contain amenities considered rare for individual college residence hall rooms, such as kitchens, lavatories, living rooms and common areas.The university operates its own transit system to transport its students by bus to its campus.Undergraduate students are guaranteed housing during their enrollment at NYU. Most freshman residence halls are located near the Washington Square area. While nearly all of the residence halls that primarily house sophomores are located near the Union Square area, two former residence halls were located in the Financial District and one is still in use in Chinatown.All of NYU’s residence halls are governed by the Inter-Residence Hall Council, an umbrella student council organization.In 2007, the National Association of College and University Residence Halls named NYU the National School of the Year for IRHC and NRHH’s strong efforts over the past year. In addition, NYU was named the National Program of the Year for UltraViolet Live, the annual inter-hall competition that raises funds for Relay For Life.

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