MANHATTAN — Bids for the city's high-profile contest to build a major engineering and applied science campus aren't due until Friday, but like an ace student, Stanford University submitted its plans two days early.
StanfordNYC, the Palo Alto-based school's proposal to build a $2.5 billion, 1.9-million-square-foot eco-friendly campus on Roosevelt Island, would focus on bringing research and discoveries into the marketplace, officials said Wednesday.
The school has been tapping some of its illustrious grads, who have been successful in the tech world, like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to tout its New York City plans.
"StanfordNYC has the potential to help catapult New York City into a leadership position in technology, to enhance its entrepreneurial endeavors and outcomes, diversify its economic base, enhance its talent pool and help our nation maintain its global lead in science and technology," Stanford President John Hennessy wrote in his letter submitting the 600-page proposal.
The university would invest an initial $200 million in startup costs and in an initial endowment to support research on the campus. It would launch a $1.5 billion, 10-year fundraising campaign to finance the new campus that would eventually house more than 200 faculty members and 2,000 students, officials said.
The 10-acre eco-friendly campus would open in 2016 and take 30 years to develop. But Stanford's program would initially open in 2013 at City College, the CUNY school it's partnering with on the venture, as the Roosevelt Island campus is built.
Stanford would develop joint programs with CCNY in undergraduate entrepreneurship education and allow CCNY undergrads pursue graduate degrees at StanfordNYC. The school would also reach out to local K-12 school as part of a "community engagement program."
School officials said if StanfordNYC creates even half of the startups Stanford has helped spawn in Silicon Valley, more than 100,000 new jobs could be created in the first 20 to 30 years of the new campus. The school said it selected Roosevelt Island — among other city-owned land the Bloomberg administration offered along with $100 million for infrastructure — for its proximity to Manhattan and Queens, easy public transportation and diverse residential community.
Stanford is vying for the Roosevelt Island campus against Cornell, which recently teamed up with Technion Israel Institute of Technology, to build more than 2 million square feet on Roosevelt Island after the city-owned Goldwater Hospital, on the southern tip, closes in 2014.
The campus would have nearly 2,000 grad students and 250 faculty on a “sustainable campus” that would include space for class, for incubating startups, housing and community gardens. Cornell officials said its school would initially open in 2012 in leased space or Cornell’s existing facilities, such as the Weill Cornell Medical College, on the Upper East Side.
Other schools expected to submit bids include Columbia, which is already expanding its campus into Manhattanville; Carnegie Mellon, which is looking at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and NYU, which wants to move into Downtown Brooklyn.
