“Can New York Rival Silicon Valley?“ asks The New York Times. Yes. We can. We are. Ask your compatriots at the Boston Globe for a quick heads up on how NYC is doing.
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Thus far the anticipation index over Michael Bloomberg’s big plan to bring an engineering campus to New York has centered around which university will win the bid. (The mayor’s rather sweet on Stanford, but Cornell is doing a full court press.) While those two duke it out, jockeying for position has swung back over to where, exactly, this campus will be located. NYC EDC has offered up three city-owned plots of land: the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Governors Island, or the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island. And the latter has come out swinging.
At a press conference earlier this week, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin (D-Manhattan) told reporters, “We want Roosevelt Island to be Silicon Island.” But as Capital writer Dan Rosenblum points out, the pitch wasn’t held on the would-be developer mecca, but rather a Manhattan plaza at the end of the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tramway, “the gondola that for many years was the only public transportation available to the island from Manhattan without going through Queens.” (You can now get there via the F train.) A spokeswoman for Ms. Lappin told Capital said they wanted to host the press conference “on the quieter island, but said that they also wanted to make sure reporters would come.” Read More
The city will be revealing the RFP tomorrow for its new engineering campus, and if history is any guide the mayor will name drop Stanford at some point during the proceedings. The world’s best known computer science university has been playing public footsy with New York during the ongoing bidding process to build a huge new outpost in the Big Apple. But it seems like Stanford’s student body has other ideas. “West Coast, best coast,” writes Kristi, a sophmore who loves hi-tech, swing dancing and walking backwards talking loudly about how great Stanford is to a bunch of sweaty overweight strangers (ahhh, the student tour guide type).
Yes, admits Kristi, New York is a center for finance, media and fashion, but Stanford epitomizes California’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit. “Why mess with that?” asks Kristi incisively. “Were money, time, and resources no object, this might represent an interesting academic experiment. However, in my opinion this is an unnecessary venture that is at best an altruistic publicity stunt and at worst an expensive and distracting dilution of the international prestige of our wonderful University.” Read More
We already know that Bloomberg has his eyes on Stanford for the new applied sciences university the city plans to build. Stanford President John Hennessey, a Long Island native, laid it on thick in his monthly column for Stanford Magazine. Read More
The Bloomberg administration is wooing a big time engineering campus to the city in order to beef up the amount of home grown tech talent here in New York.
18 proposals came in from top flight schools like Stanford and Cornell and from as far away as Korea and Switzerland. New York Read More
