Tech-Oriented New York Grad School Backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies Launches
The official opening is scheduled today for Cornell Tech's campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island, marking the start of operations there almost seven years after then Mayor Michael Bloomberg sent universities scrambling to win a competition for a new city-incubated research campus.
During the run-up to the opening, officials have stressed the campus's capacity to mix academics, graduate students, entrepreneurs and business leaders in a setting to advance research and business start-ups. In other words, the campus can be seen as a monument to a creative class-style vision, where highly educated professionals can cooperate, where their ideas can cross-pollinate and where their work can bloom into new technologies and companies.
But Cornell Tech also represents significant power shifts in the higher education ecosystem and in New York City’s information economy. It can be seen as an as an aggressive move by Cornell University, the Ivy League institution tucked away upstate in snowy Ithaca, N.Y., where it has long worked to strengthen ties to New York City. Cornell won the competition for the new campus in part by undertaking an ambitious partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. . .