By Rebecca Henely
Two entities have been rejected in their bids to build an applied sciences or engineering campus somewhere in the city because they did not meet the criteria for the city’s competition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week. Roosevelt Island is one of the possible sites.
While the mayor did not confirm which entities were rejected, sources said they were India’s Amity University and a group of local institutions that included the New York Genome Center, Mt. Sinai Medical School, Rockefeller University and SUNY Stony Brook.
The mayor said two applicants were rejected as they did not meet the criteria to create jobs, among other issues.
“It’s a heated competition,” he said.
The competition, the Applied Sciences NYC Plan, was created by Bloomberg and the city Economic Development Corp. to entice universities to build a technology campus in the city that would allow New York to maintain its global competitiveness and create new jobs.
The mayor’s announcement leaves five entities in the running to build an applied sciences school in New York City. Despite support for building a center at Willets Point from the nonprofit Coalition for Queens, run by activist JuKay Hsu, no sites in Queens have been selected as potential spots for this campus.
But western Queens officials, such as U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Astoria) and state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria), have thrown their support behind building the school at Roosevelt Island, saying the high-tech center would benefit Long Island City.
Two major universities, New York’s Cornell and California’s Stanford, both expressed an interest in building a campus on Roosevelt Island.
Cornell, who is partnering in the venture with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, said its campus would offer master’s and Ph.D. degrees and would be built around multidisciplinary research areas instead of academic departments.
Stanford is partnering with Manhattan’s City College of New York. The campus would include the School of Engineering, Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and Technology Ventures.
Reach reporter Rebecca Henely by e-mail at rhenely@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4564.
