Over the weekend it was announced that Stanford had bowed out of a NY city-sponsored competition to build a huge engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, and Cornell, which is still in the running, just upped the ante.
Cornell University said that it has received an anonymous $350 million donation to back up its bid for a proposed engineering campus in New York City.
The city of NY will also kick in $100 million. Good times. Well Cornell wants to build the campus in league with the Technion, Israel’s version of MIT. As I say often, Follow the money.
From the Cornell University Chronicle, on the intimate connections between the schools. Again I wonder about the fundraising aspects of this alliance:
It should not be a surprise that Cornell and The Technion — Israel Institute of Technology have formed a partnership to propose building a new campus in New York City focused on technology, innovation and commercialization. A web of collaborative research and a shared mission have been connecting them for at least two decades.
“They are two institutions that are land-grant to the world,” said Carol Epstein ’61, a member of the Cornell University Council who also sits on the International Board of Governors of the Technion and the National Board of Directors of the American Technion Society…
Cornell faculty are just as likely to teach in Israel. Zygmunt Haas, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has just settled in for two semesters in the electrical engineering department at the Technion, at the invitation of the department chair, teaching a course in his specialty, wireless networks. An administrator at Technion can quickly reel off the names of 15 Technion faculty members, past and present, who have studied or taught at Cornell.
Cornell President David Skorton also has had Technion connections. He and Technion President Peretz Lavie developed a good relationship when Skorton led an American Jewish Committee Project Interchange tour of Israel with other university presidents in the summer of 2010.
As my friend Dennis Loh asks:
Why is US (NYC) courting Israel, a pariah-state, to develop a high-tech state-of-the-art grad school in NYC? The main issue I have is what it implies for the future. Are American students, post-doctoral fellows, and professors going to be working with/for an institution that is fully-partnered with Israel? Given Technion’s position in Israel (discrimination against Israeli Palestinians), it raises some very serious questions regarding NYC’s role in “legitimizing” Technion. Will US-based brains, resources, and hard work to be “automatically” shared with an Israeli institution? For example, an Asian foreign student working hard at such an institution will indirectly be “helping” Israel. There are so many aspects to this proposed collaboration and the questions should be raised NOW (in public) before the final selection is done in January.
UPDATE: Mayor Bloomberg is reported in today’s Times to be going with the Cornell offer. Note that in the piece there is NO mention of the Israeli connection. Huh.
If you are worried about this excellent news, you really have no idea how extensive the partnerships are between Israeli and American universities. Or between American and Israeli companies for that matter.
That you would want to stop the Technion from participating shows the reality of how you view BDS. It is really an all out attack on Israeli institutions, even ones like the Technion were many Arab Israelis study.
Apparently, mayor Bloomberg is in such a hurry to clinch the deal (probably before people start questioning the wisdom of the deal) that he will be announcing the winner (Cornell/Technion) next Monday instead of mid-January. It gets more and more suspicious how this whole thing is playing out.
“Why is US (NYC) courting Israel, a pariah-state, to develop a high-tech state-of-the-art grad school in NYC? The main issue I have is what it implies for the future. Are American students, post-doctoral fellows, and professors going to be working with/for an institution that is fully-partnered with Israel? Given Technion’s position in Israel”
Why not just partner with the US MIT ..a superior school.
This appears to me to be just more Israeli worming into every facet of the US.
The funniest thing I have seen lately is US governors going to Israel to seek business partnerships to create jobs in their states.
Why didn’t they go straight to Microsoft and others that have shifted plants to Israel and created jobs there to get them to keep their production and jobs here in the US?
It’s all bizarre.
If this was the old South Africa that discriminated also against its peoples the outcry would be deafening.The Zionist reach is long and persuasive to conjoin these two institutions in infamy.
Isn’t Cornell part of the Poison Ivy League, the anti justice league of America,that keeps producing underwhelming overhyped tools of Zion?
It’s like a non stop rehabilitation scheme for serial liars and serial criminal behavior.Will it be a one way idea theft program,with all the proceeds sent Israeli way?Forget about industrial espionage,they won’t have to anymore.
Americans are getting tired of Israel,and this stuff is a slap in our face,again.
Just of curiosity-how is the Technion discriminates an Israeli Arabs? You know, so you friend would be accused of making up things?
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