In 2016, The Economist ran a provocative editorial proclaiming the demise of the classic left-right political spectrum, arguing instead the advent of a new era characterized by the struggle between so-called globalists and nationalists.

Subsequent media coverage of electoral campaigns waged in countries as varied as the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil were soon all recast in these reductive, if mnemonically convenient, terms. This was perhaps best exemplified by the second round of the 2017 French presidential election, which pit Emmanuel Macron’s globalist La République en Marche movement against Marine Le Pen’s avowedly right-wing nationalist and xenophobic National Front. Time and time again newspaper editorials reaffirmed the dichotomous choice facing voters, bellowing that the future of the ‘liberal world order’ depended on the triumph of the globalists against the purveyors of hate — or, as immortalized in the words of Hilary Clinton, the “basket of deplorables”.

Underlying much of this discourse is an unspoken belief in the inevitability of the historical process of globalization, a phenomenon that naturally tends to elevate notions of cosmopolitanism and diversity over provincialism and tradition. For many students at NYU Abu Dhabi, our personal and educational backgrounds, have conditioned us to perceive and covet the globalized as better than the local. I’m reminded of this condescending attitude every time I hear one of our fellow global leaders dismiss their friends back home as being relatively less capable of carrying on substantive, intellectually-stimulating conversations when compared to their NYUAD colleagues.

We all worked incredibly hard to be attending this one-of-a-kind university. We were also incredibly lucky. As for any highly selective institution, no objective criterion can possibly be discerned that distinguishes the accepted few from equally qualified, but rejected, candidates. It serves as a reminder of the arbitrary vicissitudes of life — unfeeling lotteries to which we are all subject. This framework can be extended to the Davos global elite at large: a system that masquerades as a nondiscriminatory meritocracy, in order to conceal the hidden privileges at play. Hard work is a necessary prerequisite for success, but no guarantee of it.

It’s high time that we abandon the saccharine rhetoric surrounding the concept of a global university, as well as globalization writ large, for a more even handed appraisal of the opportunities and risks they entail. Talk of the international mobility of peoples and ideas should be regularly and visibly coupled with discussions about the corresponding international mobility of diseases.

We need to steer clear of any and all analytical approaches that aim to divide diverse groups of people into the mass categories of open and closed. These prejudicial classifications serve more to obscure than to illuminate and function more as an elitist value judgment than an empirical tool. To be global is to constantly push oneself above and beyond the limits of one’s comfort zone, including most critically, the capacity to cope with manifestations of alterity. It never was a lifestyle — it’s always been a mindset. An ambitious institution of our caliber deserves better than to conflate true worldliness with trophy collections of passport stamps and ‘foreign,’ ideologically homogenized friends.

As a community, we must start critically interrogating and deconstructing the prevailing constructs of globality. To do so, it behooves us to tackle the issue from different angles.

First, the self-appellation of “global leaders” must be recognized for what it is: an unfounded pretension to superiority, rooted in a belief that a “globalized elite,” by virtue of its supposedly cosmopolitan composition, enjoys an implicit right to govern the inward-looking, cloistered masses of the countries to which they belong. The collective NYUAD student body’s experiences of globality are certainly unique, but the entire premise of objectively valuing some experiences — arbitrarily deemed “more global” — as intrinsically more legitimate than others is simply flawed.

Second, we need to modify the discourse of open versus closed to account for the overarching class dynamics that dictate the present-day contours of globalization. Instead of playing into the hands of the Davos global elite, we must instead scrutinize the complicity of governing classes in countries throughout the world in perpetrating the planet’s malaise. In an era of declining confidence in the ability of governments to advocate for the best interest of their people, what we need now more than ever is to understand the construction of a collective consciousness of the ordinary people of the world. Chinese citizens criticizing the Communist Party’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, Lebanese citizens demanding the end of corrupt confessionalist politics and Americans rallying to the defense of their beleaguered democracy. For the sake of future collaboration and the betterment of all people, we must recognize our privilege as well as our ability to perpetuate injustice.