Mayor’s engineering initiative offends at SEAS

Columbia is one of 27 institutions that have submitted proposals to build a new engineering and applied science research facility in New York City in response to an initiative announced in December by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But some Columbia scientists have questioned the mayor’s attempt to bring a new engineering campus to the city, saying the School of Engineering and Applied Science is already a top-notch institution.

Physics department chair William Zajc said that Bloomberg should spend “more time exploring the great resource that is Columbia.” But he added that the University needs to put more effort into developing its science facilities as well.

“Perhaps Columbia could address science and engineering space on Morningside with the same fervor shown for Manhattanville, Istanbul, Amman, Beijing, Mumbai, and Paris,” he said, referring to the University’s campus expansion and five global centers.

Bloomberg announced his initiative last December. Earlier this month, the New York City Economic Development Corporation announced that it had received 18 campus proposals from 27 different institutions.

“A new, state-of-the-art applied sciences research school would be a major asset for New York City as we develop a 21st century innovation economy,” Bloomberg said in a press release at the time.

Electrical engineering professor Richard Osgood wrote in an email that the initiative is misguided.

“It has not been at all helpful to Columbia in strengthening our message that we are a school with top-flight faculty and research and teaching capabilities in applied science and engineering,” Osgood wrote. “It was very troubling not to hear Columbia mentioned when the city said that it did not have a top-flight applied science school, since that is manifestly not true.”

Andrew Brent, a spokesman for Bloomberg, acknowledged that there are advanced research institutions in the city, but said there is still a need for more.

“Given the size of our economy and the role technology is playing and will continue to play in its development, there is substantial room for growth in the field,” Brent said.

A MYRIAD OF PROPOSALS
Columbia partnered with the City University of New York on a proposal for a joint research facility.

“We hoped Columbia and other local universities would respond to our invitation, and we’re thrilled they did,” Brent said.

Columbia University Medical Center also submitted a joint proposal for a genomics research facility in conjunction with New York University, the New York Genome Center, and six other institutions.

Tom Maniatis, chair of CUMC’s department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, was heavily involved in the development of the proposal. He said the institutions began planning the joint venture last summer, well before Bloomberg announced his initiative.

“Obviously it’s going to be extremely competitive, and we hope that we’re chosen as one of the finalists,” Maniatis said. “But we’re certainly not planning our effort based on a positive outcome for that.”

Physics professor Chuck Hailey wrote in an email that if another school’s proposal is chosen, it might hurt Columbia’s ability to recruit faculty. He said that if another university builds a new, state-of-the-art facility in the city, that institution would have “an excellent opportunity to poach those professors who chose to live in NYC and chose Columbia.”

According to a press release, Stanford University proposed a campus on Roosevelt Island that would be built in stages over 25 years. Construction would begin by 2013, and by 2015 the campus would be able to accommodate 440 master’s and Ph.D. students. Eventually, Stanford’s proposed campus would be home to up to 2,200 graduate students and 100 faculty members.

University spokesman Robert Hornsby said in a statement that Columbia is “a national leader in translating research dollars into viable start-up companies and our commitment to engineering and applied science.”

He noted that Columbia opened the Northwest Corner Building—which is dedicated to interdisciplinary science and engineering—last semester, and that the Manhattanville campus includes plans for the Jerome L. Greene Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior studies.

“With our strong track record of collaboration among local peer institutions that includes the New York Structural Biology Center, Columbia has joined with CUNY in expressing our shared interest in the City’s offer of resources to help ensure that New York is the 21st century capital of innovation,” Hornsby said in the statement. “We have also joined with several other local academic medical institutions in a preliminary expression of interest in a collaboration to enhance core research facilities in the cutting-edge field of genomics.”

A WAKE-UP CALL
SEAS is currently ranked 16th on the US News and World Report list of the country’s best engineering schools, while other universities that submitted proposals—such as Stanford, Cornell, and Purdue University—have higher rankings. Biology department chair Stuart Firestein wrote in an email that this should be a wake-up call to Columbia.

“The very fact that Cornell [and] Stanford … recognize the value of doing science in New York and see an opening opportunity here should be a clue to Columbia that we ought to be paying more attention to how important we could and should be to the economy and intellectual life of this city,” Firestein said.

Some at Columbia said the University needs to put more energy into existing facilities.

“Columbia has made itself vulnerable to this sort of external threat precisely because of deferred maintenance and failure to address a long-standing issue with quality laboratory space throughout science and engineering,” Zajc wrote in an email.

Zajc cited Pupin Hall, the Small Business Development Center in Mudd, and the labs in the corridor of the Engineering Terrace parking garage as evidence of the poor quality of some of Columbia’s science facilities.

“The facilities here most definitely will put Columbia at a disadvantage on its home turf,” Hailey wrote in an email. “The best one could hope for … is that Columbia would be forced to do more to correct the lamentable state of its facilities for conducting research in science and engineering.”

Still, SEAS’s ranking has improved in recent years, an achievement chemical engineering department chair Sanat Kumar credited in part to the leadership of SEAS Dean Feniosky Peña-Mora.

“The dean here has for the last two years told us that we need to be improving our rankings if we want to be seen as being on par with the other engineering schools,” Kumar said. “Over the last two years he’s been here, the rankings have turned around. We are on an upward trail.”

A bigger problem, Kumar said, is that the city is trying to recreate the success of Silicon Valley without considering the specific circumstances within the scientific communities already present in the city. The December press release noted the success of the expanding technology industry.

“I think that the city is sort of naïve in that they looked at Silicon Valley and the role that Stanford played there, and they would like to take that in a bottle and reproduce it here in New York,” Kumar said. This, he added, “is naiveté at the best, and wishful thinking.”

Sammy Roth contributed reporting.

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