http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/nyregion/cornell-nyc-tech-will-foster-commerce-amid-education.html
New Cornell Technology School Tightly Bound to Business
By ARIEL KAMINER
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 Googles $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 Cornells 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 states 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 Citys 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 Cornells main campus in Ithaca. Now its 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 dont protect that interaction crisply and clearly, he said, you could be concerned about the student basically working in an unpaid capacity for industry.
Like Dean Huttenlocher, however, Dr. Skorton argues that the best solution to these potential conflicts is not to tiptoe around them, but to highlight them, debate them and arrive at appropriate safeguards.
Cornells program, a partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is starting small, with just eight students this semester (and a starting tuition of $43,185), but it will scale up to 2,000 students by 2037. Unlike schools like Stanford or M.I.T., it is open only to masters degree students studying the applied sciences. This allows it to bypass the broad educational needs of undergraduates or the super-specialization of doctoral students and focus instead on one distinct but shared goal: cultivating entrepreneurial technologists, in the words of Greg Pass, the former Twitter executive who is Cornell NYC Techs chief entrepreneurial officer.
It is all an attempt, Mr. Pass said, to catch up with the way research occurs these days. In the manufacturing age, he said, it really was largely true that innovation began in university labs, then made its way to corporate research and development labs, and years later to some consumer application.
Today, many of the most innovative ideas come from the market itself, and only later undergo intensive research. In my own experience at Twitter, he said, we had to backfill expertise into the most difficult areas of technological challenge.
To create a more fluid exchange of ideas, then, professors will be not just permitted, but also encouraged, to take time off to work on commercial (or even nonprofit) projects. And instead of protracted legal battles with the university over intellectual property rights to those projects, the companies that oversee them will get a contract designed to facilitate frictionless collaboration. At the same time, Cornell Tech is setting up a business development office to seek out prospects for cooperation and promote opportunities, and Cornell itself is setting aside $150 million to invest in New Yorks technology scene. As for the companies involved, they will have the option to co-locate in office space on campus.
In some cases, a companys employees will pursue their work in the academic buildings themselves, coding and designing and networking right alongside the faculty and students, then breaking for lunch in the cafeteria just like any other member of the Cornell NYC Tech community. They can come and lecture on Fridays, which are set aside for students to learn from people outside of academia, or invite teams of students to work on challenges the company faces as part of a hands-on masters project that takes the place of a traditional masters thesis.
A number of companies have signed on for some part of the Cornell NYC Tech experience, from young start-ups like Artsy to nonprofits like the Robin Hood Foundation to influential corporations like McKinsey & Company, the management consultants, and Google itself. The main motivation they cite is the shortage of qualified job candidates in New Yorks rapidly expanding technology sector.
By the time theyre graduating and theyre looking for a full-time job, its too late to get the best ones, said Daniel Doubrovkine, Artsys head of engineering. We want to reach the best ones very early, and we want them to experience the real world of a technology company while theyre still in school.
Many companies would, presumably, be willing to pay a high price for access to the most elite new talent pool in New Yorks technology world, but they will not have to. I think the companies that can pay the most money dont necessarily make the best partners, said Dean Huttenlocher. Universities live and die on their academic reputations. So to the degree to which interaction with a company can help us attract better faculty or generate better research, thats incredibly valuable.
But the model is still in an early phase, or in beta, to use the preferred idiom. Its entirely possible, Mr. Pass said, that this time next year well have scrapped these principles and come up with others.
No one, however, envisions exporting them to the creative writing program. There certainly is a case for large swaths of scholarship that should be divorced from the market, he said.
