New York City hates seeing itself as a second-string town.
Yet for technology entrepreneurs here like Micah Rosenbloom, ever on the lookout for talented software engineers and academic collaborators, the city too often comes up short.
“Recruiting engineers in New York City is really hard,” says Mr. Rosenbloom, and it’s missing institutions with the mind-set of a place like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As he knows from a company he founded near Boston, postdocs there routinely keep an eye on commercial trends, and professors are encouraged to work in start-ups. “That’s not what the New York scene is.”
Mr. Rosenbloom’s alma mater, Cornell University, along with Stanford University and at least eight other institutions, from as far away as India and Israel, are clamoring for the chance to remake that scenario.
The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has invited universities to build or expand an “applied sciences” campus here, in a competition that has turned into a head-to-head contest between Cornell and Stanford for the biggest prize.
To encourage bidders, the city is offering up to $100-million toward capital costs and some prime real estate—including a tree-lined, 10-acre site on Roosevelt Island with magnificent views of the Manhattan skyline.
The competition has spawned proposals for nearly $2-billion in new construction over the next 30 years for a commercially focused campus that boosters say has the potential to reshape the academic and business terrain of one of the world’s most important cities. The bidders are pledging spaces for as many as 2,000 tech-focused graduate students—about 20 percent more than the city has in those fields today—and an influx of academic programs in new media, “smart cities” technologies, and other futuristic fields.
A foothold in New York City, still arguably the world capital of finance and philanthropy, could also reshape the institution—or institutions—that win.
And even with the uncertainties of a worldwide economic crisis in the air, those with the wherewithal are taking their shot.
Stanford and Cornell have each spent the past few months relentlessly courting the city’s business and start-up communities, rallying alumni and potential donors, and honing ideas for academic offerings and commercialization programs in an all-out effort to prove that its campus could be the economic game-changer the city is seeking.
“We just keep reminding ourselves this is about doing something that New York needs,” says Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Cornell’s dean of computing and information science.
A familiar face on the university bus that makes 21 round trips a week between the Cornell Club, on East 44th Street, and the main campus in Ithaca, in rural upstate New York, Mr. Huttenlocher has racked up more than 200 meetings with alumni, business leaders, and others in the city over the past four months. (Cornell’s president, provost, and dean of engineering have all been active, too.) The meetings have helped Cornell decide which degree programs best match the city and, Mr. Huttenlocher allows, have generated some “buzz on the ground” as well.
Last week Cornell announced that the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology had joined its bid, with plans for a Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, a 50-50 dual-degree-granting collaboration to which the two institutions would contribute faculty and undertake joint research.
Stanford, too, is coming on strong, capitalizing on its stature as the engine of hundreds of Silicon Valley successes.
It grabbed headlines with bold descriptions of its plans for a $2-billion campus (and $1-million just to prepare the bid) and is using its handsome stanford.edu/nyc Web site to remind decision makers of the more than 700,000 people now employed by companies founded by Stanford faculty and alumni.
It also has the ideal spokesman in its president, John L. Hennessy. Mr. Hennessy, who himself started a company, MIPS Technologies, as a young professor at Stanford, has used recent meetings with journalists in New York City and White House officials in Washington to highlight how his university can help with the competitive pressures America faces.
As he stated in a CNBC interview, “We want the next major innovation center to be built in the U.S. of A., and from Stanford’s viewpoint, New York is the place to do this.”
Bids are due by October 28. City officials say they’ll make a decision by the end of this year.
Besides Stanford and Cornell, at least two other major proposals are expected. One is from Columbia University, for what it calls a Data Sciences Institute, and the other is from a New York University-led consortium of companies and five universities: Carnegie Mellon University; the City University of New York; the Universities of Toronto and of Warwick, in England; and the Mumbai campus of the Indian Institute of Technology.
Both Columbia and the NYU consortium seek the city’s financial support. (The consortium is hoping to land a different city property, in a bustling Brooklyn business district, for its venture.) Carnegie Mellon will also be part of a somewhat smaller proposal for an entertainment-technology program on another city-offered site, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s proposed by Steiner Studios, a giant film-and-television operation that is already there. (See a list for details on who’s proposing what, and how the contenders stack up.)
Columbia, which wants to make its data institute part of the $7-billion, 30-year expansion for about 3,000 new professors and researchers that is already under way near its Upper Manhattan campus, recognizes that it is an underdog, says its president, Lee C. Bollinger. The idea of Cornell or Stanford moving into town worries him—not, he insists, out of fear of competition, but because he frankly questions whether the city will get what it needs.
There’s value to a city from a great university, but “I don’t think it happens much through branch campuses,” says Mr. Bollinger. “A more imaginative approach” for the city, he says, would be to create incentives to spur more collaboration between New York’s established universities and its emerging industries.
“It would be a pity,” he adds with all deliberateness, “if there were an undue fascination with the new and the novel.”
John Sexton, NYU’s president, says anything that “maximizes the intellectual capacity and the creative capabilities of the city” is also good for NYU. He says he has told Stanford’s Mr. Hennessy that if he were in his shoes, “it would be obvious to me that I should take a quarter of my endowment and pour it into New York.”
The applied-sciences proposal that the NYU consortium is proposing is smaller in scale than what the city is seeking, but its chief architect says its focus on solving the great problems of giant urban regions is an important one for New York City. “Ultimately you want Shanghai not to be a competitor of New York but a customer of New York,” says Paul M. Horn, a former director of research at IBM who is now senior vice provost for research at NYU.
It’s conceivable that the Bloomberg administration could give at least some support to each of these other bids if it decides it has the will and the wallet to pony up the money.
It’s harder to see how it can award the bid for Roosevelt Island without making either Cornell or Stanford a loser.
A Fevered Pitch
Universities compete all the time, but academic one-upmanship is usually cloaked in an air of collegiality. The Cornell-vs.-Stanford campaign has more of the feel of a hard-fought political contest, complete with dueling big-name endorsements (Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang and the investor Stanley F. Druckenmiller for Stanford; Irwin M. Jacobs, a co-founder of Qualcomm, and Abby Joseph Cohen, a partner at Goldman Sachs, for Cornell); grass-roots petitions and other online efforts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (mostly from Cornell alumni and students); and orchestrated media tours by university leaders (landing Mr. Hennessy those four minutes and 45 seconds of featured interview time in September on CNBC, a cable channel favored by Wall Streeters and other business leaders).
Stanford, considered a front-runner for its Silicon Valley cachet and the strength of its balance sheet, has never before considered so big an academic investment outside of its Palo Alto, Calif., home. The university says Stanford-NYC is a test for a new multicampus model for research universities and, as Mr. Hennessy has described it, a chance for it to tackle important scholarly challenges in an urban environment “like no other in the U.S.”
The campus would also present new avenues for its professors and graduate students to connect with the financial sector and creative industries like publishing, that aren’t major players in Silicon Valley.
“We like to think we’re a great university, but to be honest, one never moves forward by standing still,” says James D. Plummer, Stanford’s dean of engineering and a key architect of the university’s proposal.
Cornell, already with a medical school in Manhattan and a strong alumni base in the region, sees the New York City Tech Campus as the fulfillment of a long-held dream to extend its technology and business expertise well beyond Ithaca.
Both Stanford and Cornell hired big public-relations firms and top city lobbyists (Stanford’s choice ran the mayor’s most recent campaign) to help them manage their messaging. Stanford drew the spotlight two weeks ago by announcing a partnership with the City University of New York that would allow it to open its tech campus in the fall of 2012 with a cadre of professors based at CUNY’s City College campus. The relationship is bound to win Stanford some points with CUNY’s growing legion of political supporters.
More than two dozen research institutions from around the world expressed initial interest in bidding, but as the costs and city expectations became clearer, many dropped out, among them Purdue University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Others, like Warwick, IIT-Mumbai, and Toronto, were part of, or have since joined, the NYU consortium.
“This is a great opportunity for any university to have a footprint at the center of the earth,” says Richard O. Buckius, vice president for research at Purdue, whose officials visited New York donors and alumni several times before pulling out.
What the City Needs?
Mr. Bloomberg made his own formidable fortune as a technology innovator, and with close ties to higher education (he’s chaired the Board of Trustees at the Johns Hopkins University), he sees the campus as a catalyst for the city’s economic future.
That was clearly the message he delivered this month at a “Tech MeetUp” talk in Greenwich Village. The event drew hundreds of young, fashionably dressed-down members of the city’s start-up scene, and they responded with rousing cheers as he championed the proposed campus as a tool for raising New York’s tech profile, declaring, “We can’t sit here and let Silicon Valley be bigger than us.”
Still, for all the applause, the campus may not be what New York City needs today. Alexis Tryon and Scott Carleton, both in their early 20s, founded a company, Artsicle, that uses the Internet to connect emerging artists to buyers or renters of art. Artsicle is “desperate for developers and engineers,” Ms. Tryon said before going on stage at the event. But, she added, a “really well-done continuing-ed program” would serve her company just fine. Mr. Carleton said they’d be “willing to talk to high-school kids if they could code.”
David Tisch, managing director of TechStars, a start-up incubator in Manhattan, says the deep-science ideas that made Silicon Valley flourish aren’t what energizes the New York scene now. “New York’s angle is different,” he says. The city’s homegrown tech companies, like Foursquare, capitalize on things like population and density. “Over the next five years,” says Mr. Tisch, “this scene is not going to be impacted by academic research.”
While several of the bidders say they’re hoping to get started within a year in temporary locations, Bloomberg-administration officials say they recognize that the applied-sciences campus is really a bet for the future.
Yet, as others have noted, a lot of what fueled Silicon Valley successes for the past 50 years—including a culture of unusually porous interaction between academic and industry research scientists and a sustained gusher of federal research money, inspired, back then, by the cold war—are not as easily reproduced amid today’s political and economic realities.
“There are lots of reasons that Silicon Valley developed that can’t be replicated in the 21st century,” says Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington who wrote Venture Labor, a forthcoming book from MIT Press about New York’s “Silicon Alley.”
Even Woody Powell, a leading innovation-cluster expert at Stanford who wants to see it win, recognizes the obstacles.
The “horizontal networks” that connect professors and industry “are extraordinarily strong” in Silicon Valley, says Mr. Powell, a professor of education and sociology. And many of those connections thrived because the industrial scientists were far from their East Coast corporate headquarters. “It was a lot less supervised,” he says, which encouraged creativity and collaboration. Plus, he says, in Silicon Valley, it doesn’t take long to learn the likeliest late-night sushi spot where programmers congregate, or which wine bar to frequent to bump into venture capitalists.
Translating that ambience to New York “is a fantastic challenge,” says Mr. Powell. “Will that recipe cook New York City ingredients?”
Stanford’s academic culture, famously industry-friendly, is a crucial piece of that. So is MIT’s. New York’s universities say that they, too, work well with companies, but that their contributions aren’t as often recognized, because New York’s economy is so large that their efforts don’t register as much.
Whatever the case, the Bloomberg administration is clearly looking for an academic venture that will rev the city’s commercialization metabolism.
Mr. Powell, who has already agreed to teach for a period at Stanford’s New York campus, should Stanford win, says success would be “vastly easier” for a university that’s done it before.
Stanford hasn’t announced the academic specialities it plans for New York but says they will include things like entrepreneurial education, sustainable urban systems, and financial math and engineering.
Its faculty didn’t embrace the New York idea initially, concerned that a smaller campus 3,000 miles away would be too detached from the academic culture of the university. But many have warmed to it, ever since the university sought their ideas for academic and research programs, in a memorandum from Mr. Hennessy himself.
Stanford’s leaders have also assured the faculty that the proposal envisions “one university with two campuses,” and that New York wouldn’t drain resources from Palo Alto. One way the university will do that will be through a reliance on distance learning, with only 100 full-time faculty positions permanently based in New York.
But that, too, has raised some concerns, says William J. Dally, a professor of computer science at Stanford who chairs a faculty advisory committee for the New York campus. Keeping departments and academic programs vibrant through a telepresence, he says, is “one of the hurdles we need to overcome.”
Cornell is planning a campus of comparable size, with a New York-based faculty of at least 250, including professors from the Technion, plus corporate research scientists. That’s equivalent to establishing an institution the size of its current engineering college. It would be focused initially on three hubs of study, affecting health, interactive commerce and media, and the “built environment.”
A Win for NYC
Along with information on the contendors’ academic offerings and research prowess, New York will judge them on the number of patents they’ve won, the number of companies and local jobs they’ve created, and matters like how their tenure and other policies encourage faculty-industry ties. Stanford, very likely the only university in the country that can command as much as $2,000 simply for a tour of its technology-transfer office, no doubt will have the edge on that front. It counts the founders of Google, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and dozens of other companies among its faculty and alumni. Cornell hopes its new partnership with the Technion, whose graduates lead 59 of the 121 Israeli companies on the Nasdaq, will help it even the field.
Given the costs (even outside of New York, $100-million doesn’t go very far when it comes to building top-flight academic complexes), the city is also looking for a bidder who can carry it off.
Online petitions and Twitter traffic in and of themselves don’t count for much, but “to the extent that tweets calibrate to alumni support,” and alumni support translates to contributions, it can help, says Robert K. Steel, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development. “We talk about your ability to support your ambition.”
Neither Stanford nor Cornell has publicly laid out how it would finance a new campus. Stanford’s $19.5-billion endowment is nearly four times the size of Cornell’s, but both have strong records in fund raising, and the Technion’s added donor connections could help Cornell. Each would probably rely heavily on gifts, and on the tax-exempt borrowing options the city has offered, to help pay for the construction. “It’s a big lift for any university,” says Cornell’s dean of engineering, Lance Collins.
Mayor Bloomberg will make the final call, and despite talk that he’s already decided he wants Stanford, city officials insist the competitors will be judged on the merits of their bids.
Aside from CUNY’s role in both Stanford’s and NYU’s bids, only the wealthiest private universities are contending from the United States. They are the kinds of institutions that have rebounded most quickly from the economic crisis that still grips most of the rest of higher education. Still, says M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and a former chairman of New York-based Dow Jones Inc., it’s a remarkable opportunity for all of higher education and for the country. “Another big operator builds instead of detracts,” he says.
Research universities are in demand all around the world, particularly in developing regions like China and the Middle East. Apart from some very valuable real estate, New York is offering a lot less upfront than those places are. Given all that, Seth W. Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, says the interest of several of the world’s major universities is also a heartening vote of confidence in New York City.
“What they are all implicitly saying is that they believe the future is here in New York,” he says, “and for their own competitive advantage, it is worth it to them to make that investment here.”
