Brooklyn Dumbo NYU Applied Sciences Campus Joins Roosevelt Island Cornell Site On NYC F Train Technology Corridor - More On Stanford's Bid Withdrawal and Entrepreneurial Academic Cullture

Excerpt of Interview With Cornell President David Skorton and VP Cathy Dove

The New York City F Train Technology Corridor got another anchor to join the Roosevelt Island Cornell - Technion Applied Sciences & Engineering School with the announcement yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg of a Jay Street Brooklyn based Applied Sciences Center led by NYU. According to this Press Release from Mayor Bloomberg's office:

...  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New York University President John Sexton, Polytechnic Institute of New York University President Jerry M. Hultin and MTA Chairman Joseph J. Lhota today announced an historic agreement among the City, MTA, and a consortium of world-class academic institutions and private technology companies that will lead to the creation of the NYU Center For Urban Science and Progress, to be located in Downtown Brooklyn. The announcement is the next milestone in the City’s groundbreaking Applied Sciences NYC initiative, which seeks to increase New York City’s capacity for applied sciences and dramatically transform the City’s economy. The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly, and will focus on research and development of technology to address the critical challenges facing cities, including infrastructure, tech integration, energy efficiency, transportation congestion, public safety and public health....

and:

... The NYU proposal was selected through this highly competitive process due to its bold vision to provide solutions for the world’s growing cities in the 21st century. CUSP will establish itself as a world leader in this important field of study, and will complement the City’s many other leading institutions, including the previous Applied Sciences NYC selection of the partnership between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which will build a campus on Roosevelt Island. Collectively, these institutions along with other potential winners will further strengthen New York City’s global competiveness – including its growing technology sector – and ensure that the City establishes itself as a global hub of science, research, innovation and world-class urban solutions for the future.

Click here for the entire Press Release from NYC.gov and video of the NYU Applied Sciences announcement.

At one time, Stanford was considered to be the frontrunner to develop the NYC Applied Sciences and Engineering School here on Roosevelt Island but they withdrew their bid. The New Yorker has a fascinating article on what it takes to create an entrepreneurial academic center and why Stanford withdrew from the NYC competition. According to the New Yorker:

... the entrepreneurial spirit is part of the university’s foundation, and he attributes this freedom partly to California’s relative lack of legacy industries or traditions that need to be protected, so “people are willing to try things.” At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better. Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues....

... But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune. Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities....

... It would be solely an engineering and applied-science school. Hennessy proposed that each department base three-quarters of its faculty in Palo Alto and a quarter on Roosevelt Island....

....Not everyone on Stanford’s campus shared Hennessy’s enthusiasm. Members of the humanities faculty were upset that Stanford proposed to create a second campus without including liberal-arts faculty or students. Casper, the former Stanford president, asked whether the Roosevelt Island project would “reinforce the cliché that we are science and engineering and biology driven and the arts and humanities are stepchildren.”...

As to why Stanford withdrew its bid, The New Yorker reports:

... On December 16, 2011, Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy praised “the mayor’s bold vision.” But he was seething. In January, he told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible. The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s general counsel and lead negotiator, added “many millions of dollars in penalties that were not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” One demand that particularly infuriated Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford officials. However, city negotiators were undoubtedly aware that Mayor Bloomberg, in a speech at M.I.T., in November, had said of two of the applicants, “Stanford is desperate to do it. Cornell is desperate to do it. . . . We can go back and try to renegotiate with each” university. Out of the blue, Hennessy says, the city introduced the new demands.

To Hennessy, these demands illustrated a shocking difference between the cultures of Silicon Valley and of the city. “I’ve cut billion-dollar deals in the Valley with a handshake,” Hennessy says. “It was a very different approach”—and, he says, the city was acting “not exactly like a partner.”....

Click here for the entire New Yorker article.

More on Stanford's withdrawal from previous post.