Bloomberg Chooses Cornell to Make New York a Silicon Valley 2.0

According to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will announce today that Cornell University has won the city's competition to open a new technology-based campus on Roosevelt Island.

Update 12:35 p.m.: Our colleagues over at Atlantic Cities try to nail down what new Cornell campus means for Roosevelt Island and New York City more broadly.

According to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will announce today that Cornell University has won the city's competition to open a new technology-based campus on Roosevelt Island. The facility will be a 2,000-student satellite campus of Cornell, based out of Ithaca in upstate New York, focusing on high-tech studies in order to turn city into an East Coast startup hub akin to Stanford-Silicon Valley pairing out west. The move to the Big Apple isn't unprecedented for Cornell, which already has its medical school in the city. The Times makes the call for who won in the move:

For the mayor, it is a chance to leave a lasting legacy that he hopes will make the city a world leader in computer engineering and transform the city’s economy. For Cornell, it could mean a chance to be the kind of incubator for new businesses — and the lucrative patents that come with them — that Stanford University has been in California and M.I.T. in Massachusetts, and to elevate its already-prestigious engineering and computer science programs to the uppermost ranks.

The implicit losers are of course the universities that didn't get the shiny new Roosevelt Island campus. Those includes Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, and most notably Stanford, which preemptively pulled out of the competition on Friday on "disagreements over the proposed location — Roosevelt Island — and other facets of Stanford’s application." Cornell seems to be well-funded enough to overcome whatever hurdles Roosevelt Island poses: the university received an anonymous $350 million donation for the new campus last Friday.