SEAS the day

In December of last year, Mayor Bloomberg launched a competition in order to bring a new applied sciences campus to New York City by offering $100 million in funding and nearly free space on Governors or Roosevelt Islands. By the end of this week, competing schools—Columbia included—will submit their final proposals for evaluation. In the bid to develop New York City’s start-up and high tech industries, it appears that Columbia lags behind.

Peer institutions have demonstrated serious interest in competing for the grant. The president of Stanford University even appeared in a two-hour long video explaining why his school should win the competition. By contrast, senior administration officials at Columbia have expressed little interest in Bloomberg’s challenge. President Bollinger has left Columbia’s proposal almost entirely in the hands of faculty at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. While their inaction may seem like an unspoken concession to one deputy mayor’s suggestion that SEAS is not a “top-caliber” engineering school, there are other reasons why Columbia’s administration has chosen to withhold active support.

Since the University has recently freed up acres of land in Manhattanville that will hugely expand the resources available to engineering students, pursuing a competition that includes space on Governors or Roosevelt islands doesn’t sync with Columbia’s long-term plans. What Columbia does seek from the competition is the $100 million grant, something it’s unlikely to win given its divergence from the city’s vision.

What Columbia stands to lose, though, is also great. Competition to recruit and maintain notable engineering faculty will increase. If it loses professors to the new institution, SEAS’ reputation will surely decline—and with it, the University’s. The two top contenders for bid—Stanford and Cornell—will surely entice SEAS faculty with their cutting-edge programs.

Columbia must retain their faculty and carve out a space of its own in an emerging start-up and engineering community. Programs for a multidisciplinary center for engineering and data science are still being revised, but we hope that they will match and exceed those of our soon-to-be neighbor.