The author of the report, Sahiba Gill, an NYU law-school student, said that one of the university’s main selling points in establishing its branch in Abu Dhabi in 2009 was that it offered students an education in how to be ethical global leaders. Most migrant workers are forced to pay onerous recruitment fees to be hired in the UAE; NYU said it would reimburse any fees incurred by workers building its campus. However, Gill said, NYU has failed to live up to its own standards. “When NYU is out of the spotlight overseas, where it doesn’t have the constant media attention on it, it has really dropped the ball in the last three years in rectifying major human-rights abuses,” she told me. “And this really calls into question whether NYU is fulfilling its mission of being that global, ethical university that it so wants to be.” NYU disputes the report's findings: “We believe the Coalition for Fair Labor’s assessment is neither right nor fair,” Kate Chandler, a NYU Abu Dhabi spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We disagree with the report’s findings, which are not based on primary evidence.”

The issue of forced labor at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus came to light after a 2014 New York Times article detailed how migrant workers on the project were housed in dismal conditions, paid lower salaries than they had been promised, and subjected to police brutality upon launching a strike. The vast majority of workers had to pay up to a year’s salary in recruitment fees to get the job in the first place, and had their passports taken by their employer, leaving them trapped and with no choice but to continue working. NYU didn’t reimburse most construction workers’ recruitment fees, interpreting its commitment as applying only to those who paid fees specifically to work on the campus project. Following the New York Times report, NYU released a new set of rules meant to protect workers, and established stronger and more transparent mechanisms for monitoring compliance with its labor standards.

The NYU coalition argues, though, that the measures put in place by the university don’t go far enough. Its report evaluates the changes implemented after the New York Times article, and assesses the risks still facing workers on the university’s Abu Dhabi campus. It faults NYU for continuing to decline to reimburse workers involved in the construction of its campus for their recruitment fees, and alleges that the university has gone back on its commitment to greater transparency. When it comes to workers employed by the university today, the institution guarantees reimbursement only for those who paid recruitment fees within one year of starting work on the Abu Dhabi campus, leaving those workers who have been in the UAE longer—and paid the fees in the past—without hopes of redress from NYU. Meanwhile, a report by an independent monitor on the university’s compliance with its own commitments on labor standards, which NYU promised to make public by 2016, had yet to be completed until this month.