NYU Shanghai to Welcome Renowned Guest Faculty

This fall, NYU Shanghai will welcome a veteran broadcaster to campus when Ray Suarez NYU '85 joins NYU Shanghai’s Social Science team as a visiting professor. 

“We've always very much appreciated the infusion of fresh intellectual energy that visiting faculty bring in different ways to our scholarly community, and I believe that most if not all of our visitors have found NYU Shanghai a stimulating and enriching environment,” said Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen. “We’re terrifically pleased that for next year we’ll have a visitor who is a leader in his respective field, both for the knowledge he brings and for the way in which his extraordinary life trajectory offers a model of the possibilities that lie ahead for our students.”

The author of three books on immigration, American politics, and the Latino-American experience, Suarez has built a more than 30-year career working as a host and correspondent for  the United States’ National Public Radio (NPR), CNN, and Al Jazeera.  “Professor Suarez brings a unique perspective of the longue durée of the American political scene, both domestic and foreign, something that as citizens of the world we all should care about,” Waley-Cohen said.  

At NYU Shanghai, Suarez will teach the fall semester course, "SOCS-SHU 255 The End of Authority: Politics in a Post-Truth World," which examines the concept of living in a "post-truth" era.“As we are seeing in the current war in Ukraine, one of the great struggles of the remainder of this century will be over nothing less than the Truth itself. The basics of truth, sure, but also, who has the power to shape the truth, and what does that power allow individuals and institutions to do?” Suarez said.  “Do the rapid changes in communication, and the technology of communication arm us to better know the truth, or in the hands of the powerful, leave us even more vulnerable to being misinformed and misled? I hope to work with my students to examine these questions.”

Suarez, who graduated from NYU in 1985 with a degree in African history and participated in a Conversation with the Vice Chancellor last fall, said he was looking forward to exploring Shanghai and learning more about the world’s first Sino-U.S. university.  “I have been intrigued by the project: Taking the DNA from a famed research university in the great world city of the 20th century and opening a school in what is arguably the great world city of the 21st century. Could it work? Could you take the dedication to free inquiry and openness that has marked NYU throughout its history and make a partnership that brings in Shanghai to create a hybrid with the best characteristics of both? I am looking forward to finding out in person.”