City still negotiating with CU after Cornell wins tech competition

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Dec. 19 that Cornell University would be awarded $100 million as the winner of his competition to bring an applied sciences school to New York City, but Columbia may still receive money to build its own tech campus in Manhattanville.

Cornell partnered with the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology for its proposal to build an engineering school campus on Roosevelt Island, beating out Columbia, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

But Bloomberg said that his office would continue to negotiate with the other finalists, and media outlets have reported that the city will announce the recipient of more grant money from the Economic Development Corporation by the end of January.

“This is the first selection in this initiative of applied sciences, and stay tuned,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Steel said in December. “We hope to have more to come.”

Columbia’s proposal was to fund the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, which will occupy three buildings and 1.1 million square feet in the Manhattanville campus expansion. NYU and Carnegie Mellon plan to build their campuses on city-owned land in downtown Brooklyn.

According to a press release from the Mayor’s office, Cornell will open an off-site location this fall prior to construction, with the first phase of the permanent expansion to open no later than 2017.

According to Columbia's proposal, the first building to house the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering would be complete by 2018, and all three buildings combined would be complete in 2032.

“We have great respect for our engineering colleagues at Cornell and Technion,” a statement from a Columbia spokesperson read. “We welcome them to New York City, look forward to finding opportunities for collaboration and wish them success on their important new endeavor.”

Cornell and Stanford University were considered front-runners early on in the competition. Stanford withdrew its bid shortly before Cornell announced a $350 million donation on Dec. 16. The donation, the largest in the university’s history, was contributed by Charles F. Feeney, a Cornell alumnus who has made generous donations to the school in the past.

Cornell’s proposal “is clearly what would be the biggest of all of the projects. That doesn’t mean the others won’t be equally as important or equally as impactful,” Bloomberg said.

Casey Tolan contributed reporting.

jillian.kumagai@columbiaspectator.com

Correction: A previous version of this article implied that the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering is a definite plan, rather than a proposal for the competition. Spectator regrets the error.