A Case Study on Cornell’s Real Estate Development
Cornell University has its foundation rooted in land value. As one of two private Land Grant universities (the other being Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it is a beneficiary of Morrill Acts of 1862, which grants federal land to endow colleges for the advancement of practical knowledge in agriculture, science, military science and engineering in response to the industrial revolution and changing social class. Accordingly, three of seven Cornell undergraduate colleges are state-supported statutory or contract colleges. The school operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for educational missions.
Compared to a modest investment profile, Cornell’s land ownership is substantial. According to the website of Cornell Real Estate Department, the Ithaca central campus comprises of 745 acres of land, while Cornell plantations (farms, pastures, woodlands, natural areas) in Tompkins County totals about 11,000 acres, or 4% of the county’s lands. Cornell also owns 6,000 acres elsewhere in New York and another 2,000 acres across the country, for a total of 19,000 acres of land and buildings. With for instance more than 420,000 acres of mineral rights, mostly in the central and southwestern states, the university is actively leasing oil, gas, timbering and telecom rights from its lands.
The Cornell Business and Technology Park in Ithaca and the new Cornell Tech in collaboration with Technion — Israel Institute of Technology on New York City’s Roosevelt Island are two notable efforts addressing industry collaboration and innovation.
The Cornell Business and Technology Park is a suburban office and lab park established in 1951. It works to promote seamless commercialization of Cornell technology, to maintain Cornell’s competitiveness in recruiting and retaining faculty and students, as well as to contribute to Cornell University’s financial strength . The park has more than 80 companies in 26 buildings with a gross floor area of approximately 700,000 square feet on 300 developed acres, 200 of which being commercial and the rest residential. According to its website, a large concentration of spaces are wet labs and clean rooms.
The outcome of the park is questionable. For 14 years till 1965, GE was the park’s only tenant, despite intentions to attract other industries to establish a research campus. Whereas expansion started and sustained from late 60s to the last decade, a closer look at the directory of tenants reveals a good number of them to be Cornell or local administration offices, or healthcare providers, seemingly incompatible with high-tech incubators. A spatial mix of disparate program in this case might not translate to a self-reinforcing ecosystem.
Just as the business and technology park as a proven concept never evolved beyond an investment instrument and a tax generator under the management of the real estate office, Cornell tech is at the center of university leadership attention. To a large extent, this proposed campus with a size less than 2 percent of the park, promises a new direction in restructuring education centered on innovation and entrepreneurship and impacts beyond money.
Cornell Tech is the university’s initiative to create a new graduate campus in New York that won a seven-way bid in 2011 with a key announcement of a $350 million gift from billionaire alumnus Charles Feeney. The 10-acre campus, centered on applied sciences, technology and entrepreneurship, will house 1,400 students, professors and tech company workers on the narrow Roosevelt Island by 2017 and grow to accommodate 5,400 people by 2037. Cornell’s $2 billion proposal for the campus is matched with free city land and up to $100 million in publicly paid improvements, dedicated as part of New York’s effort in being the next tech hub.
Campus architecture at Cornell Tech is shaped less by the technology of labs but collaborative necessity. The first phase of the campus includes an academic building containing 6 classrooms and otherwise huddle rooms and open spaces, a corporate co-location building, a student residence, an executive education center, a privately operated hotel and125, 000 square feet of outdoor public space. With groundbreaking expected in 2014, Cornell is soliciting partnership with developers to construct the hotel/conference center, the residence and the co-location building for leasing. Also on site will be Department of Commerce’s first patent office on a college campus and the only one in the city, offering USPTO and DOC resources and an innovation and outreach coordinator.
The hardware of the new campus is matched with new academic programs with a deeper connection with industry. A one-year MBA program is offered where students spend the first three months of the program, which starts in May, in Ithaca, to take general business courses and socialize. The program will then operate out of the 22,000 square feet of swing space donated by Google in the company’s Chelsea building before moving to a permanent home on Roosevelt Island in 2017. Its curriculum features modular, condensed courses, practicums and a requirement that all students spend part of the year working in a project with a partner company and another in a start-up environment. Lengths of courses could be one day but never semester long, and “no course is expected to meet for more than four days over a two-week period.”4 The content and purpose of these courses, though still titled academic, resembles on-the-job workshops and training sessions designed to meet problem-solving demands. Also available are a one-year industry-focused Master of Engineering program in Computer Science, and a two-year Master of Science program in information systems with a specialization in Connective Media, both sharing the condensed, utilitarian nature.
Moreover, the location in New York has been an advantage in hiring adjunct faculty from industry, and Cornell-Tech has been in talks with Google and advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Though in a temporary location, Cornell Tech is in operation, with its first students completing a semester in spring 2013.
The juxtaposition of the two campuses reflects a shift of mentality in how the university situates itself against, or alongside with industry. Diverging from a linear process of knowledge production implicit in the business and technology park, where commercialization of technological research implies the exit of one enclave, entering of another gate and the directional route in between. The time and physical discontinuity between university and industry is removed by deliberate real estate planning on the new Cornell-Technion campus. Reinforced by the interwoven architecture, Cornell Tech’s identity bear certain ambuity, and perhaps intentionally a lot of flexibility for transformation over time. As academic education becomes more temporal and casual, the role of a student or a faculty interchanges swiftly with that of an intern, an entrepreneur and a professional, in a matter of hours. In fact, when the divide is no longer legible from every level, one may wonder, why planners of the new campus even bothered to situate academic and commercial in separate stand-alone buildings, instead of naming them all flexible co-location facilities.
Where the park acts quite singularly as an investment real estate with benefits of local economic development, the performance of Cornell Tech is more nuanced. By location, it is a tangible billboard to state the suburban schools’ presence in the tech-innovation era, however obscure at this stage as an inflated media campaign with glittering Architectural renderings to recruit students and faculty. The return, however, is visible; Cornell’s 2012–2013 annual report praised the intrigue generated by the project, seen as “bringing high-level attention the Ithaca campus as well” in terms of interest in recruiting graduates and research funding.5 The organization of the new campus suggests a need for the university to reinvent itself, perhaps in response to online educational tools and in defense of the place-making aspect of a physical campus.
The relationship between the experimental satellite and conventional main campus, or whether there is a substantial tie, is worth further investigation. To the New York-based students and faculty, the core campus might seem a temporary stage set of idealism, hosting the drama of their short initiation into Ivy-League elitism with its associated alumni network. To those pure-blooded Cornellians back in Ithaca, the New York campus could resemble a career office with a revolving door leading to the real world. If Cornell Tech is meant to be prototypical, its scaling-up might transform the old campus, bringing corporate insertions and adaptive reuse of academic facilities ; if it is rather to redeem and supplement a stasis in quiet Ithaca, more speculations bearing Cornell’s name might pop up in faraway lands.
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Author’s note: project updates on Cornell Tech since the article’s completion are not yet incorporated.
