Embrace Big Red

This Saturday, the Columbia men’s basketball team will travel to Ithaca to face Cornell. Yet the basketball game is hardly the first competition that comes to mind when Columbia and Cornell are mentioned in the same sentence. If the city of New York could have had its way, the most important competition between Columbia and Cornell in the past months would have been the one over the city’s backing for a new engineering campus.

Mayor Bloomberg’s ambition to allocate city resources toward the creation of a new Silicon Valley in New York is admirable. The city’s willingness to grant a sizable plot of land and $100 million shows dedication to this ambition. It is worrisome, however, that the city is framing academia in terms of a competition. Academic institutions tend to view their relationships as one of cooperation rather than competition, and Columbia is no exception.

As it stands, numerous Columbia schools and departments have established cross-registration programs with other institutions in the city—including New York University, The Juilliard School, and the Manhattan School of Music. In fact, Columbia already has experience collaborating with Cornell: Their medical schools share New York-Presbyterian as a teaching hospital.

While we recognize that Cornell Engineering’s presence in New York may threaten the School of Engineering and Applied Science in the short term—especially its ability to attract faculty, researchers, and graduate students—the eventual outcome is hardly certain. Cornell’s presence will increase demand for engineering minds, yet if Bloomberg’s vision of a New York-based Silicon Valley comes true, it will also add to the pool of candidates that the city and Columbia can draw from.

In this scenario, New York would become a more attractive place for engineers. Both Columbia and Cornell would benefit from this agglomeration of talent. The idea of having two elite academic institutions in close proximity is hardly new or threatening—the Berkeley-Stanford, Harvard-MIT, and Chicago-Northwestern relationships would suggest otherwise. Cornell’s or any other school’s success in New York would stand to benefit Columbia at least as much as it stands to diminish it.

It is also important to consider that Cornell does not plan on building a full-scale engineering campus that houses undergraduates. Its proposal focuses on a research center that caters to a small niche of academics. Here it is fairly certain that SEAS’ hegemony as New York’s primary engineering school will remain unchallenged. The content of the SEAS proposal to the city appears to reflect a similar attitude.

The city had clearly laid out its intentions to foster an outside institution’s growth on Roosevelt or Governor’s Island, but Columbia seemed uninterested. Columbia’s proposal focused on expanding its Manhattanville campus, with full knowledge that Manhattanville was not what the city wanted.

Thus we reject the notion that SEAS and Cornell Engineering are in competition. Instead we look forward to the opportunity for cooperation and mutual benefit.

Getting back to basketball, though … go Lions!