For a Top-Tier University, There’s Now Room to Get Even Better

N.Y. / Region

For a Top-Tier University, There’s Now Room to Get Even Better

By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: December 21, 2007

As Columbia University officials doggedly pursued their plan to acquire 17 acres a few blocks north of their main campus in Manhattan, they often pulled out a chart showing their pint-size 36-acre campus stacked up against those of competitors like Harvard, Princeton and Yale, whose campuses are measured in the hundreds of acres.

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The New York City Council’s approval of a rezoning plan Wednesday that clears the way for the expansion in Manhattanville, in Harlem, will still not put Columbia into the big leagues on space. But Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president, says it will give the space-starved university enough room to hold its own for decades to come in an increasingly competitive arena.

“The key to preserving and enhancing Columbia’s greatness is space,” Mr. Bollinger said on Thursday. “It’s always space and resources. But in this case, space was critical.”

He added that while the university had used space deftly — and would probably rank highest if universities were judged on creativity per square foot — it had pretty much reached the limit.

In critical rankings like research dollars received from the National Institutes of Health, for example, Columbia slipped because it did not have enough laboratory space to bring in more researchers, officials said. The business school set up offices in Midtown.

“It has been a tremendous inhibition for scientific research particularly, but also for virtually every area,” said Alan Brinkley, Columbia’s provost. “Many departments we
re at a point where the simple absence of offices made it impossible to hire.”
“That is still true,” Dr. Brinkley added. “It will be years before the space in Manhattanville opens up. But this gives us the ability to envision a very different future.”
Columbia has already purchased or has contracts to buy many of the properties in the area that it plans to move into, and is negotiating with the owners of other properties. The possibility that it will seek help from the government in acquiring some property through eminent domain remains on the table.

But even as the university waited for zoning approval, it hired planners and architects to begin sketching ideas. The Italian architect Renzo Piano will provide the overall design for the first buildings, which will include the business school, the arts school, the School of International and Public Affairs and a science center to study mind, brain and behavior.

“What gets unleashed now is the energy to complete the academic planning among faculty, the architects’ work on the design, and the engineers’ work on implementation,” said Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president at Columbia.

He said he anticipated that Columbia would begin demolition by next summer.

Mr. Kasdin and Mr. Bollinger said they hoped that some buildings would be completed in four to five years. By 2015, they plan to have added about 1.5 million square feet of usable space. As schools and departments move north from the Morningside Heights campus, that will free up space on the main campus, particularly for the arts and sciences.

The new acreage will have a very different feel from Columbia’s neo-Classical main campus, designed more than a century ago by McKim, Mead & White and set around a quadrangle.

The new campus will not have a quadrangle or gates, but will be more integrated into the community, the university says, with coffee shops and stores along the sidewalks of 125th Street. It will be akin to New York University’s core campus, but with an overarching design.

Mr. Bollinger said the prospect of new space had already helped revitalize the university’s fund-raising. He said that after Stanford and Harvard, Columbia raised more money last year than any other university in the competitive “Ivy plus” group, which includes the Ivy League and several other selective universities.

Columbia officials say their expansion will also create opportunities for the community, some defined through negotiations with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation and some that the university simply wants to pursue.

Maxine Griffith, Columbia’s executive vice president for government and community affairs, said one call she received on Thursday was from a neighborhood resident who said:
“Congratulations. Now you’ve got to keep your promises.”
She said Columbia planned to do just that.

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