First the [former Merck CEO Roy] Vagelos Commission; then the [former Governor Tom] Kean Commission; just this past week, the final report of the UMDNJ Advisory Committee. Here’s a recap of what’s happening with the reorganization of public medical education in New Jersey, and my own evaluation of the outcome, emphasizing the impacts on research budgets (a matter which is underplayed in the advisory committee report).

Since 2003, New Jersey has moved in fits and starts to undo the damage done more than four decades ago under former Gov. William Cahill, who in 1970 — perhaps angered by what he saw as gold-plated research facilities or maybe for more prosaic political reasons following the 1967 Newark riots — severed the Rutgers Medical School from the state university and attached it instead as the new Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) to what was then called the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ).

That move placed under different institutional ownership facilities that were actually across the street from each other, requiring crippling negotiations between two bureaucracies for any major bioscience research projects, significantly constraining both public universities’ abilities to contribute to regional economic development.

Beyond that, what eventually became UMDNJ was a unique beast, a health-sciences university spread across four widely separated campuses. Among its eight graduate and professional schools were no fewer than three different medical schools, two allopathic and one osteopathic (don’t ask), and one university-owned teaching hospital. It was truly an ungovernable nightmare, and one that soon and unendingly got into trouble.

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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.

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