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Martin Lipton, the superlawyer, has advised hundreds of boards of directors in the midst of crises. Now, however, Mr. Lipton is grappling with a board governance crisis of his own.

As chairman of New York University’s board of trustees, Mr. Lipton has been dealing with revelations that the university’s much-heralded new campus in Abu Dhabi might have been the product, in part, of rights abuses of foreign laborers.

Those conditions were detailed in an article in The New York Times last week that described workers being arrested, beaten and deported for going on strike; being charged a year’s wages to get their jobs; and being denied access to their travel documents. After the article appeared, N.Y.U. apologized to mistreated workers and said it would investigate.

Hours after the article was published, Mr. Lipton went into full crisis mode and sent an email to some members of N.Y.U.’s board, which is stacked with Wall Street boldface names including Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock; the hedge fund impresario John A. Paulson; and a Home Depot founder, Kenneth G. Langone.

Mr. Lipton’s email said that he had been unaware of the reported abuses and that an independent investigation would be undertaken, according to people who were briefed on the message.

The university’s president, John Sexton, followed up later in the day with a memo to the trustees, calling the reports “troubling and unacceptable” and insisting, “They are out of line with the labor standards we deliberately set.”

Yet Mr. Sexton took pains to distance the university from the reported abuses, highlighting the low accident rate at the construction site and saying that the contractors responsible for the reported problems weren’t under the university’s control. “It was built with the construction contractors working for the Abu Dhabi development entity building it, not directly for N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi itself (unlike the operational contracts for providing food, transportation, public safety, etc.),” he wrote.

Mr. Sexton might have been trying to create distance between N.Y.U. and the contractor, but it is a red herring: The general contractor that helped oversee the construction of the campus isn’t some fly-by-night firm outside N.Y.U.’s purview. Quite the opposite. The contractor is run by a trustee of N.Y.U.’s board: Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company.

It was Mr. Mubarak and others who helped persuade Mr. Sexton and the rest of the university’s board to build the campus in the first place, with a $50 million donation from the government of Abu Dhabi. In addition to running Mubadala, Mr. Mubarak, a Tufts graduate, is chairman of Abu Dhabi’s governing executive council and is also chairman of the soccer team Manchester City. He was added to N.Y.U.’s trustee board after the Abu Dhabi campus plans were announced.

Some faculty members were rankled by Mr. Sexton’s response.

“It was a classic exercise in damage control, meant to distance N.Y.U. as far as possible from the horrific wrongs inflicted on those workers, and — therefore — divert attention from the fact that Khaldoon Al Mubarak is not some faraway rogue operator but an N.Y.U. trustee,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of culture and communication at N.Y.U. who has long publicly clashed with Mr. Sexton.

Another N.Y.U. professor, Andrew Ross, put it this way: “In the early days of the anti-sweatshop movement, Nike and the Gap tried to pass responsibility for labor violations on to their subcontractors. But where does the buck stop in this case? Labor standards are fine on paper. But enforcement is the real test of any protection effort.”

Building a campus in Abu Dhabi was considered a high-risk exercise from the start. Mr. Sexton and his board wanted to transform the university into an international education platform with hubs around the globe — the equivalent, to some degree, of a far-flung multinational corporation. He was supported in that ambition by a who’s who of corporate America accustomed to seeking growth abroad — and the travails it sometimes involves.

Critics argued that doing business in Abu Dhabi for would be too perilous for the university: It is arguably an oppressive regime, which has been accused of torturing political prisoners, looking the other way at abusive labor conditions for migrant workers and discriminating against homosexuals. Some trustees privately, and some outsiders publicly, groused about the project.

“By selling a degraded clone of itself to the highest bidder, N.Y.U. is doing irreversible damage to U.S. universities as a whole. This frightening love-child of Western multicultural lunacy and Arab oil money represents a new low,” Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary magazine at the time the Abu Dhabi campus was planned.

To its credit, N.Y.U.’s board and its partners established a Statement of Labor Values intended to raise the standards for workers in Abu Dhabi. The standards set were praised by outside organizations like Human Rights Watch and became a model for other organizations, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, which are building major projects in the area. N.Y.U. also rightly hired an outside auditor to monitor worker conditions.

Yet it now appears that at least some laborers fell through the cracks of the standards that had been set. Maybe that is inevitable in a project of this scale, but it doesn’t appear that the university sought to investigate the problems until the report by The Times last week.

An N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman, told me by email: “John Sexton’s communication to the N.Y.U. community was not meant to ‘distance’ us, but to make this point: that there are instances — those involving worker safety (surely an important labor issue, and one relating directly to the construction site…) and those involving contracts on the existing campus (which N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi oversees directly) — where we have a clearer picture.”

He added: “The troubling instances reported by The Times, which relate to compliance by contractors and subcontractors on the Saadiyat construction site, require more investigation; we and our partners have committed to do that.”

When I raised the issue of Mr. Mubarak’s involvement as both developer and trustee, the spokesman said, “Mr. Al Mubarak is a respected member of the N.Y.U. board and his membership is not in question.”

A spokesman for Mr. Mubarak could not be reached.

This is not N.Y.U.’s first governance crisis. While part of the N.Y.U. faculty objected to the new campus, calling it a distraction or worse, others have been upset with Mr. Sexton’s other initiatives, which they say have devalued education at the university, and led to one of the highest tuitions in the country and soaring debt levels for its students. They went so far as to approve a vote of “no confidence” against Mr. Sexton in March 2013. (The vote was 298 to 224, with 47 abstaining.)

In the middle of all of this is Mr. Lipton, the chairman of N.Y.U.’s board for more than a decade and a half, who has made his career as the top consigliere to corporate boards doing mergers and acquisitions as a founder of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

In the corporate world, Mr. Lipton has long championed big ideas and campaigned against what he called “short-term-ism.” The campus in Abu Dhabi would be a prime example of the big investments he’s willing to make. But his approach to corporate governance — which has long been criticized as protecting the interests of entrenched boards against hostile takeovers and activists through his invention of the poison pill — has similarly come under scrutiny at N.Y.U.

His steadfast support of Mr. Sexton, in light of the criticism from the faculty, has rankled some who say he is simply following his corporate playbook. A group of university faculty members wrote a public letter calling Mr. Lipton’s support of Mr. Sexton “an intransigence that is as threatening to N.Y.U.’s survival as the scandals whose clear impact you deny.” The letter went on to say that Mr. Lipton’s approval of the university’s global ambitions were motivated more by the bottom line for N.Y.U. — which has raised nearly $6 billion during his tenure — than education.

“Any school that profiteers so avidly is sure to be renowned, not as ‘a world-class residential research university,’ ” they wrote, “but as a global clip joint with an academic logo; and yet, like the Gilded Age inequity at N.Y.U., that sprawling operation has your full support.”

Whatever the outcome of this crisis for N.Y.U., it is a case study that should be examined for years to come by its students — both in New York City and Abu Dhabi.