Reception Honors Tenured Faculty

On Oct 30, the Office of the Provost hosted the first Special Promotion and Tenure Reception honoring faculty who received tenure over the past three years. Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen, Vice Chancellor Jeffrey Lehman, and NYU Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics Perri Klass, a former member of NYU Shanghai’s Promotion and Tenure Committee, toasted faculty members before a luncheon for tenured and tenure track faculty. 

Provost Waley-Cohen honored recently tenured faculty for putting in intensely hard work, excellent scholarship, and first-class teaching along their tenure journey.  “At NYU Shanghai this feat has been doubly intense, because it all took place against a backdrop of building a brand new university, where very little had yet been established, where the labs had to be built from scratch, the institutional norms worked out, and many more firsts than any of us probably cares to remember.”

Vice Chancellor Lehman spoke on the importance of tenure to a vibrant academic environment. “Tenure helps to nurture academic creativity by providing a supportive environment where creative work can take place,” he said. “It says, you have found your intellectual home. We want you to be here for a long time. You have something valuable to contribute here. We trust you to do it. We will do everything we can to help you succeed.”

Professor Klass, visiting from New York, said the tenured faculty are a testament to the research excellence that NYU Shanghai encourages. “This was an institution which was from the very beginning being built with incredible attention to high standards of research, high standards of teaching, a really serious commitment to finding scholars whose early work was incredibly promising who had earned the respect of the most important people in their fields, and who would go on to do more important, more exciting work that would shape the future for their fields and for their students,” she said.

Between 2022 and 2024, NYU Shanghai has awarded tenure to 16 faculty members, bringing the number of tenured/tenure-track faculty to over 100. 

Following the lunch reception, Provost Waley-Cohen, Dean David Atwill, Dean Nasir Memon, and Professor Klass moderated a panel discussion for tenure-track faculty. The panelists shared their insights about the tenure and promotion process as well as several key pieces of advice on navigating tenure.

A full list of tenured faculty members from the past three years is below, including tenured through lateral hires and internal promotions.