Tech-oriented grad school launched by contest opens
The city’s quest to make itself a legitimate rival to Silicon Valley as a high-tech hub has long bumped up against some harsh realities, among them the fact it hasn’t had a top-tier technology school pumping out the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers.
A potential answer to that problem, a new technology-oriented graduate school called Cornell Tech, was dedicated recently at a ceremony at its new campus on an island in the East River.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, called the school’s opening “an important milestone in New York state’s longterm economic strategy and a powerful symbol of possibility.”
Cuomo said New York has been losing ground in the tech race “not because others were winning but because we were not competing.”
The collaboration between Cornell University and the Technion-israel Institute of Technology, built with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropies and from the city, has just 250 master’s degree students and 50 doctoral students taking classes this fall. But officials hope to ramp up to 2,000 students by the time the campus is fully developed.
Part of the concept is to promote close ties between academia and the startup economy, officials said.
“Cornell Tech presented an opportunity that is almost unheard of today, to build a new type of academic program and a new type of campus from scratch,” said Martha Pollack, the computer scientist who was named the 14th president of Cornell University this year.
She called the school “the first of its kind campus, built for the digital age.”
The first three buildings of a 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island are now open after a fledgling Cornell Tech program spent the past four years as a rent-free tenant at a Google office building in Manhattan.
The campus was born from a competition held by New York City in 2011, backed by independent then-mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who made his fortune selling innovative data terminals to Wall Street.
“The best inheritance that I can leave my daughters and my grandchildren is a better city and a better world,” said Bloomberg.
Donations to build the new campus have included $100 million from the former mayor’s charity, Bloomberg Philanthropies, $350 million from philanthropist and duty-free magnate Chuck Feeney and $133 million from Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs. The city provided $100 million in seed money plus development rights on city land.