Cornell’s Bid for NY City Campus Gains

Extracted 16DEC2011 from http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/stanford-drops-bid-to-build-high...

New York City’s contest to build a science graduate school took a startling turn on Friday, as Stanford University bowed out of the competition, shortly before Cornell University announced receipt of a $350 million gift to help pay for its proposed campus on Roosevelt Island...

The city received seven proposals, but Cornell and Stanford were considered the top contenders. Both are national leaders in engineering and computer science, and they proposed the most ambitious plans, each calling for about two million square feet of space on Roosevelt Island, which is one of three sites that was offered by the city. If anything, Stanford, the catalyst for Silicon Valley – Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s model in dreaming up the project – was seen as having a leg up.

Columbia proposed about 1.1 million square feet in West Harlem, while much smaller plans were submitted for Brooklyn, one from a consortium led by New York University, and one from Carnegie Mellon University. They are also still in the running.