All is not lost for SEAS

Although the winner of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s contest to win an engineering campus in New York City was just selected in December of last year, we will see the consequences of this decision sooner than you think. With the most distinguished engineering college in Manhattan, Columbia had Mayor Bloomberg’s contest in the bag, right? Definitely not, but Columbia engineers still have something to look forward to.

Put yourself in Bloomberg’s shoes. There’s a school with faculty questioning the engineering dean’s leadership, displaying bureaucratic instability. Then there’s a school receiving a $350 million gift for its bid in the contest, showing support for the school’s engineering endeavors. So you ask: reward a new engineering campus to an institution with trust issues or one with a trust fund?
While the School of Engineering and Applied Science was struggling with Dean Peña-Mora’s capabilities and interactions with faculty, Cornell Engineering was coming off of a pivotal donation. To make matters worse for Columbia, NYU and Carnegie Mellon submitted their own respective bids. With competitors in the ring, it comes as no surprise that Columbia’s proposal has so far been overlooked. But surprisingly, the instability in our engineering administration wasn’t the deal breaker. We overlooked something even more obvious than leadership troubles—we already have an engineering campus.

Intuitively, Mayor Bloomberg wouldn’t award the first-place prize, a new engineering campus, to a school that already has one nearby—and a well-established one at that. Broadening Columbia’s engineering campus without giving a campus to another school could create an engineering monopoly in Manhattan with President Bollinger sitting at the top. Understandably, the bid for the new campus in Manhattan became more of an unspoken anyone-but-Columbia contest to give other schools the opportunity to compete with our brand of engineering. Though SEAS fell short of its goal, it could benefit more from coming in second than originally thought.

Despite the obvious and immediate bitterness some SEAS students feel, we’re actually benefitting from not getting an entirely new campus in two ways. First of all, there’s an opportunity for collaboration, competition, and rivalry between Cornell’s new engineering school and our own. In fact, Cornell Engineering’s presence in Manhattan could be an agent of change and growth for SEAS. With a credible engineering rival competing to win over prospective students and engineering faculty, SEAS can be driven to raise its standards—improving faculty, facilities, and CULPA reviews. Competition can lead to improvement. Second, not all is lost. Columbia is still in the running to receive funding to build new applied sciences buildings in Manhattanville. So we get some much-needed engineering competition that could force us to improve and we can get new buildings for the often-overlooked applied science programs? Sounds like a win-win to me.

Although I am a SEAS sophomore, I will still experience the effects of the new engineering campus’ opening in 2017. For starters, the value of my SEAS degree could decrease in the eyes of future employers if Columbia doesn’t compete and collaborate effectively with Cornell. “Oh, you graduated from the other engineering college in Manhattan,” could become commonplace. On the other hand, having an engineering school nearby, like stated before, can make SEAS improve through competition.

At face value, Columbia isn’t getting a new campus because we had problems at the top with questions surrounding Dean Peña-Mora’s job certainty, and because we already have a strong presence in Manhattan with a well-established engineering school. Despite that, the future is looking good for SEAS with applied sciences buildings queuing up to be built and new competition on the horizon, even if it is Cornell.

The author is a School of Engineering and Applied Science sophomore majoring in operations research.