Their curriculum devotes months to helping a company solve a current technological challenge. Their progress is supervised not just by an academic adviser, but also by an industry adviser. Their vast campus on Roosevelt Island, when it is built, will intersperse classrooms with office buildings, where high-tech companies can rent a suite and set up shop.
And when they showed up Monday for the very first day of classes at Cornell NYC Tech, the most ambitious institution of higher education to open in New York City in decades, students arrived not at some temporary structure on the edge of a construction site but to 20,000 square feet of donated space in the middle of Google’s $2 billion New York headquarters.
Cornell NYC Tech, a new graduate school focusing on applied science, is a bold experiment on many fronts: a major expansion for an august upstate school, a high-impact real estate venture for Roosevelt Island, an innovative collaboration with a foreign university, a new realm of influence for City Hall. But the most striking departure of all may be the relationship it sets forth between university and industry, one in which commerce and education are not just compatible, they are also all but indistinguishable. In this new framework, Cornell NYC Tech is not just a school, it is an “educational start-up,” students are “deliverables” and companies seeking access to those students or their professors can choose from a “suite of products” by which to get it.
Colleges and universities across the country — a great many of which are scrambling to find new ways to finance scientific research, as well as new ways to profit from the fruits of that research — are watching closely. In the last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced the creation of technology schools by both Columbia and New York University. And Cornell’s president, David J. Skorton, said he had been visited by representatives from other cities hopeful that the Cornell NYC Tech model might work there, too.
Of course, Cornell NYC Tech is not the first school to forge alliances with the local business community. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology plays a prominent role in that state’s technology scene, and Silicon Valley would not exist without Stanford, which has collected more than $1 billion in royalties as innovations linked to its campus made their way into the market.
But for Cornell NYC Tech, that close relationship is not merely the desired outcome; it is the founding premise. “The campus was set up specifically to increase the talent pool in New York City,” Dr. Skorton said, “to positively influence the New York City economy.”
New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped select Cornell NYC Tech as the winner of a competition for $100 million in funds and $300 million worth of real estate from the city, predicts that the companies that will spin out from its campus will create tens of thousands of new jobs.
Calculations like that, impressive as they may be, have given some observers pause.
“The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s,” said Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell’s main campus in Ithaca. “Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.”
Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell NYC Tech, is the first to admit that this new academic model is rife with potential conflicts of interest.
“I think there are lots of risks in trying to bring what are fundamentally different cultures and sets of goals together,” he said. “Companies need to make a profit. Universities have different motives — partly societal good, partly education — and that leads to different value systems.” For starters, he said, “if a student that a faculty member is advising is working at a company that the faculty member has a financial interest in, is the faculty member really keeping students’ interests in mind?”
Dr. Skorton, an expert in research ethics, mentioned several other areas of concern, including the work that students will do with outside companies. “If you don’t protect that interaction crisply and clearly,” he said, “you could be concerned about the student basically working in an unpaid capacity for industry.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 22, 2013
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the starting tuition at Cornell NYC Tech. It is $43,185, not $29,500.
Cornell NYC Tech Will Foster Commerce Amid Education
This article
Cornell NYC Tech Will Foster Commerce Amid Education
can be opened in url
http://newsdiery.blogspot.com/2013/01/cornell-nyc-tech-will-foster-commerce.html
Cornell NYC Tech Will Foster Commerce Amid Education
