Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!
Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!
The obvious question is why even try and bring in outside institutions — as good as they might be — rather than get behind the growth ambitions of the three largest in-city engineering research programs? Why start from scratch when you can build on gathering strength? Engineering is engineering, and it can be done well or badly, with strong commitment to industrial partnership or not, but there’s nothing magic about Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, or Carnegie Mellon. It’s about size, scale, momentum, and institutional leadership, and the home teams will always be larger than the NYC “satellites” of institutions based elsewhere. So why the competition? No one has been able to give me a good answer, so what follows is purely my own speculation. Feel free to contradict me in the comments.
More on The responses are in to NYC’s ‘applied sciences campus’ RFEI
The responses are in to NYC’s ‘applied sciences campus’ RFEI
Tags: Engineering, NYC
Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!
Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!
The obvious question is why even try and bring in outside institutions — as good as they might be — rather than get behind the growth ambitions of the three largest in-city engineering research programs? Why start from scratch when you can build on gathering strength? Engineering is engineering, and it can be done well or badly, with strong commitment to industrial partnership or not, but there’s nothing magic about Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, or Carnegie Mellon. It’s about size, scale, momentum, and institutional leadership, and the home teams will always be larger than the NYC “satellites” of institutions based elsewhere. So why the competition? No one has been able to give me a good answer, so what follows is purely my own speculation. Feel free to contradict me in the comments.
More on The responses are in to NYC’s ‘applied sciences campus’ RFEI
Filed under Commentary by David Hochman