Meet the press: Engineering dean Lance Collins (left) and NYC Tech vice president Cathy Dove, MBA ’84, are interviewed about the project.

While many Cornellians support NYC Tech—more than 20,000 alumni signed a petition in favor of it, and both the undergrad and grad student assemblies passed resolutions endorsing it—the project has its detractors. Most vocally, critics of Israel's actions in Palestine have decried the Technion's role in the nation's military-industrial complex; in a statement, one group of concerned Cornellians claimed that "more than any other university in Israel, the Technion, which is involved in the research and development of military and arms technology, is directly implicated in war crimes" and demanded that the University sever its ties with the institute. In a letter provided to CAM, H. William Fogle Jr. '70 wrote, "My greatest concern about the Cornell-Technion partnership is that it expresses the University's tacit approval of Israel and the security policies of the Jewish state—policies that most nations find criminal, in defiance of international law, and morally repugnant."

Skorton counters that higher education offers the opportunity to transcend national boundaries and conflicts, calling it a way for people to "interact with each other despite what their governments are doing—despite whether their governments are even talking to each other." Cornell, he says, "is in a very unusual, if not unique, position to bridge some of these gaps." He notes that the Medical college is the only American institution to grant an MD degree overseas—in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar—and that Cornell has close ties to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. "And now we have a partnership with one of the greatest entrepreneurial higher education organizations in the world, the Technion," Skorton says. "So I am even stronger in my belief that we will benefit from working with colleagues who have the same goal: to improve life by discovery and innovation." And, he adds, "we don't use the actions of governments as criteria for whether we will interact with the people of those countries."

But the Technion partnership hasn't been the only cause for criticism. In the Daily Sun, ILR student Jake Walter- Warner '12 argued that Cornell is going through a midlife crisis as it approaches its 150th birthday. "The NYC Tech campus," he wrote, "is our billion-dollar bright red sports car." In April, Moody's Investors Service—while upgrading the University's overall outlook from negative to stable— cited NYC Tech as a potential future liability. "Although the university has received a $350 million gift from a private foundation and a $100 million grant from New York City to support capital and operations of Phase I of the project," it noted, "funding sources and full scope of future phases are uncertain."

Some faculty have expressed concern about the project, criticizing the administration for not involving professors more fully in the proposal and worrying how it might take attention—and funding—away from both the humanities in particular and the home campus in general. "The Ithaca campus has to be, in effect, the anchor," linguistics professor Abby Cohn '78 said at a faculty forum on the subject, as reported in the Daily Sun. "And if we become too out of balance, it's going to hurt all of us."

Skorton acknowledges that the project's potential effect on Ithaca is a reasonable concern. Even during the celebratory press conference announcing the win, he fielded a question on the subject, prompting Bloomberg to quip that "the Ithaca campus is not closing." As Skorton put it in an interview with CAM in late February: "This has hit the media like a storm— somewhere over 2,000 hits in the first couple weeks—so you could imagine that people would wonder if heads are going to be turned too much Downstate." He stresses, though, that "everyone should remember that when fully built out, the campus will have about 300 faculty—but we have over 1,600 faculty in Ithaca. When fully built out, the campus will have 2,000 to 2,500 students—but we have 22,000 students in Ithaca. Ithaca is going to remain the home of the University, and the heart and soul of the University."

The president points out that the budget for the tech campus will be kept separate—and that just as Cornell has pledged not to borrow money for Ithacabased construction, it will do the same for the initial phase of NYC Tech. He and other project leaders have frequently cited the adage of a rising tide lifting all boats—that the tech campus will benefit Cornell University, the City of New York, and the wider world. "This wild amount of visibility that we're getting, I believe, will increase attention to Cornell in ways that are positive," Skorton says. "Alumni who have contacted me—and I mean many, many alumni, all over the world—feel even more proud, if that's possible, to be a Cornellian than they did before. But it's not a matter of triumphalism; it's not a matter of pounding our breast and saying how great we are. The point is that we can really do something to change the world."

Another benefit, supporters say, is that NYC Tech will give Cornell a more palpable urban presence, beyond the Medical college and the host of programs the University already offers in the city. In fields other than the medical sciences, they note, Cornell has long had a tough time luring faculty and students who crave city living. "It's going to attract the kind of faculty member and student that just hasn't come to Ithaca," Huttenlocher says. "That will broaden the University's ability to attract the best and the brightest people. It could be a huge advantage for Cornell over time. You can imagine people who balance their career and home life in ways that they spend a portion of their career in New York and a portion in Ithaca. You can imagine younger faculty members living in New York City, then having kids and moving up here; the kids graduate from high school and they move back down to New York. If it's one university, you could have a career that's partly urban and partly rural and never have to switch schools."

Then there's the promise of addressing Cornell's ever-thorny "two-body problem": how to offer meaningful employ ment to the spouse or partner of a prospective hire. "It will be a relief valve in dual-career circumstances that have been a stubborn problem for us in the Tompkins County area," Collins says. "We just don't have enough job opportunities for spouses who don't want a faculty or campus occupation. So this will provide us with more flexibility along those lines."