Administrators say they believe the Northwest Corner Building will attract renowned scientists to Columbia, but some faculty members say they are skeptical about the building’s potential to stimulate interest in interdisciplinary work.
Eleven professors from different science departments will start moving into the building—which boasts top-of-the-line lab space—later this month.
Rafael Yuste, a biology professor making the move, said he is concerned that the building will be “no more than the sum of its laboratories.”
The building as it is now “would add very much needed space to existing research programs, and provide growth opportunities to different departments,” Yuste said in an email. “But, at the same time, it would not have any added value, or particularly enhance the synergy between departments or schools.”
THE INSTITUTE NOT TAKEN
Yuste said he supports a proposal—which has been discussed among administrators and faculty—to create an interdisciplinary institute or center based out of the building. This center would have “a focused scientific goal, a prominent leader, and an interdisciplinary mandate,” Yuste said.
Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks said that the University decided against creating such an institute because it might take away from the work of the individual departments.
“In many respects, we were worried that a separate institute would not fulfill our mandate, which is to both strengthen the departments and strengthen interdisciplinary science,” Dirks said.
But Yuste was not the only faculty member who said he saw the benefits of an interdisciplinary center.
“I was advocating for that [an interdisciplinary center]. Many of us were,” said biology Professor Brent Stockwell, who is moving into the building. “But the administration hasn’t moved ahead with that, unfortunately.”
Biology department Chair Stuart Firestein said that creating such a center in the building would have been better than just “divvying it up” among different departments.
“I’d like to say that one could have found some important and well-known scientist, either only on this campus or from outside, who was senior enough to have a kind of big overview of science, and was of an interdisciplinary mindset, and so could have had more to do with making it truly interdisciplinary,” Firestein said.
Executive Vice President for Research David Hirsh cited cost as another reason that an institute was not created.
“Having an institute would be great,” Hirsh said. “The problem is, I think to have an institute without independent funding is not a strong case. And it takes, in my view, funding we simply don’t have to support an institute structure.”
But Yuste said that an institute could have paid for itself by generating fundraising and grant-writing.
Although the University will not move forward with the proposed center, Hirsh said that he feels the building will still foster the interdisciplinary interactions for which it was intended.
“I think that a lot of the strength of some of the buildings at the medical center is because people are mixed up together,” Hirsh said. “So you bump into them going upstairs, downstairs, elevators.”
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY?
Some faculty members have also questioned the way in which the building’s occupants were selected. Firestein said that the selection process was unclear to him, which he thinks was the case because the building “has lacked a clear leader from the beginning.”
“I think that’s resulted in some back and forth in how to get people in there, how to choose who goes in there,” Firestein said.
Chemical engineering department Chair Sanat Kumar said he believed the process of selecting professors for the building was “incredibly political.” He noted that it is not clear to him what criteria were used to select the building’s occupants or who chose them.
“One, there’s no consistency, and two, it’s completely arbitrary from what I can tell,” Kumar said. “If somebody’s making a decision, they haven’t told us about it.”
Kumar added that Jingyue Ju, the one chemical engineering professor making the move to the building, “was in for some time, he was out for some time, [then] he was back in.”
“I think he deserves to be in there, he should be in there,” Kumar said. “Having said that, I think there are other people on my faculty, and also other faculty within the college, who deserve to be in that building.”
Hirsh said the process of choosing faculty for the Northwest Corner Building was long and deliberate.
“I think maybe we’ve done a poor job of advertising to the community at large our process, or making sure that everyone knew about it,” Hirsh said.
According to Hirsh, the process began in 2003, when a committee made up of administrators and professors—Hirsh among them—began soliciting proposals from faculty on what scientific themes should be examined in the building. In 2005, Hirsh wrote a report detailing those themes and also mentioning which professors might suit them.
Then, in 2006, a new committee, which Hirsh was also a part of, started discussing possible occupants for the building. In 2007, Hirsh met three times with the chairs of Columbia College and SEAS science departments to discuss occupancy.
In 2008, a third and final committee, comprising faculty from both SEAS and Columbia College, made recommendations for eight professors to move into the building, Hirsh said. Those eight professors will soon make the move, along with one other professor who has since been chosen, and two outside hires.
INTERDISCIPLINARY ENOUGH?
Some of the 11 professors were chosen because they have already done interdisciplinary work, Hirsh said. For instance, Stockwell, who has a joint appointment with the biology and chemistry departments, will share a floor in the building with chemistry professor Virginia Cornish, with whom he’s worked in the past.
But Firestein said it does not make sense to create an interdisciplinary building, and then put faculty in it who are already doing interdisciplinary work.
“Why not take people who don’t think about that, [interdisciplinary work] and put them together, and see what happens to them?” Firestein said. “But again, that takes a certain kind of leadership thinking, I guess, that we didn’t get for this building.”
However Stockwell said that he will benefit from sharing a floor with Cornish.
“We work together to some extent, but we haven’t had a great deal of interaction relative to perhaps what we could do,” Stockwell said. “So in the new building we designed our floor to be completely integrated.”
LEANING TOWARDS CC
Kumar also noted that the building seems to have “a very strong leaning” towards the College over SEAS. There are currently seven members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and four engineering professors from SEAS slated to occupy the new lab space.
Hirsh said he doesn’t believe there was any bias. He said that the determination was made early on that the building would have seven faculty members from SEAS, and 14 from outside engineering, and that these numbers were acceptable to the parties involved.
“Engineering was at the table for every one of these discussions,” Hirsh said.
If seven spots are supposed to be filled by engineers, that leaves three spots open. Administrators say that the remaining spots in the building are supposed to be filled by new hires, but Kumar said he does not know when that will happen.
“I have no understanding of that. I don’t know who to ask, I don’t know if there’s space available,” Kumar said. “Like I’ve said, it’s completely nontransparent.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that seven professors from science departments within CC are moving into the Northwest Corner building. They are members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Spectator regrets the error.
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