3 responses to “The NYU Building/Expansion Controversy”

1. Marie Monaco

   August 4, 2012 at 5:39 am

   I am an NYU faculty member opposed to the NYU 2031 expansion plan. I do not live in faculty housing or anywhere near the construction site. I am concerned that NYU is embarking on a project that it cannot afford, either fiscally or academically. Instead of committing resources to support faculty and students and to develop new programs that address the current crises in higher education, such as affordability, NYU is obsessed with expansion, both locally and abroad, as a means of bolstering its bottom line. Yet the details of this business plan are opaque; repeated attempts by representatives of the Faculty Senators Council to obtain this information have failed. We are told to trust that ratings agencies and the Trustees know what they are doing; however, many of us remember that in the late nineties the Trustees, against the advice of the faculty, engineered a merger of NYU's hospital with that of Mt. Sinai, promising a huge financial return that ended up being a huge deficit for NYU. The merger was subsequently dissolved. In addition, I have watched as NYU has gradually turned historic Greenwich Village into its own personal campus, destroying landmarks and obliterating the ethos of a unique New York community. A recent survey of the faculty by the Faculty Senators Council revealed that 66% of those who responded were opposed to the 2031 plan, and, at last count, 37 departments have voted, either unanimously, or near unanimously to oppose the plan, including the Stern School of Business and the Economics Department. The NYU administration is not listening.

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2. TruthToPower

   August 4, 2012 at 10:15 am

   Another dismayed member of the University's faculty here — faculty whom the NYU administration has unwisely provoked with its aggressive and completely out-of-scale expansion, in both size and cost, at a time of great economic uncertainty and skyrocketing student debt. Other colleagues are likely to weigh in with a detailed explanation of the faculty’s principled alternative “green” plan to NYU 2031. All that I will say briefly, on this count, is that we managed to do more in the past month or two alone in putting together our own road map to more sustainable and cost-efficient growth for our University — though never, at any point, formally included in the internal process that yielded the current behemoth, either by our administration or the City Council — than Pres. Sexton and his high-priced senior administration have accomplished over the course of five+ years, culminating in what can only be described as a real estate raid, virtually entirely devoid of any real discernible academic justification. And the faculty did it with brains and good fiscal and environmental sense — and, mind you, without spending a dime of our students' tuition money.

   I would instead like to provide an overview (and apologize in advance for the length, but this growing crisis has had a long history). To date, 37 Schools, Centers and Departments have passed individual resolutions, voicing their opposition to the expansion plan, as proposed. The departments registering their disapproval represent the full spectrum of disciplines, including the various humanities, literature, art and music, business, economics (featuring no fewer than three Nobel Prize winners), social sciences and the bench sciences. (All of the individual resolutions, with their precise wording, can be found here: http://nyufasp.com/ ). Entire Schools and Centers voting against the plan include the entire Stern Business School (in a vote of 52-3, which should tell your readers something about the economic viability of the expansion, expected to come with a price tag of $4-6 billion), Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the Silver School of Social Work and the Center for Neural Science. The majority of departmental votes have been unanimous. A faculty group launched earlier this year, called NYUFASP (NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, has repeatedly expressed its profound concerns, both internally and publicly, regarding the ill-conceived expansion. The organization represents over 400 faculty members, both tenured and non-tenured, across the University, including a number of high-profile Silver and University Professors. In addition, a Faculty Senate Council survey this spring revealed that nearly two-thirds of all voting respondents were opposed to the plan (including 85% of the College of Arts and Science faculty), with 40% strongly opposed. And speaking of 40% … only four out of ten NYU faculty members live in the two towers-in-the-park residential blocks (Washington Sq. Village and Silver Towers) that are to be devastated by the plan. The charge of NIMBYism with regard not only to concerned Greenwich Village residents and their families but also extending to the faculty (sadly, an argument pushed by NYU’s very own President), is therefore misleading at best, though hardly unexpected.

   Suffice it to say, never before have so many Departments at NYU joined together to express their apprehension with regard to the proposed direction that our University is taking, doing so in the face of fear that comes with speaking out against not only your employer but also your landlord. We felt from the start that such overwhelming opposition from the faculty should be taken seriously by those who are responsible for overseeing the University – that is to say, our President and trustees – and ensuring its fiscal and intellectual health. Sadly, we were wrong.
   Attempts by the faculty to gain access to the business plan underlying the 2031 expansion have been met throughout with silence. The Finance Committee of the Faculty Senators Council has also repeatedly requested the financial information on the plan and has been denied. Even the City Council was denied a look – if, indeed, there was something to see. (In a sad indictment of the entire political process, this hardly dissuaded the Council from passing the plan regardless.) As recent articles have shown (see Jennifer Levitz’s recent “Economy Tests Harvard,” Wall Street Journal), even the likes of Harvard and Yale, both boasting exceedingly more generous endowments than ours ($32 and 19.4 billion, respectively, dwarfing our modest $2.8 billion), they are tightening their belts. NYU? Our administration is spending seemingly without a care in the world, and not only locally, as NYU 2031 attests, but globally (Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, more recently Sydney). We’re fast becoming a global brand, rather than an institution focused on and investing exclusively in its academic mission.

   The most significant worry of the faculty, by far, is that this plan will be financed on the backs of students – that is to say, from tuition dollars – resulting in increased student debt, as numerous recent articles warn, the most punishing and unforgiving debt there is. NYU currently has the most indebted student body of any private university and the sixth most indebted of all national universities. And tuition is set to rise another 3.8% this fall alone. Meanwhile, thanks to our admissions policies, our student body is getting larger and larger. Should the student debt bubble burst, NYU might find itself, as it did almost exactly forty years ago, on the brink of insolvency.

   Meanwhile, the notion of needing to grow in size in order to remain competitive, the idea that bigger is invariably better, is not supported by compelling evidence. NYU does not need to expand in order to excel, an argument summarized in a New York Times Op-Ed piece titled “Expand Minds, Not the NYU Campus” (April 25, 2012), penned by three NYU colleagues. At the core of the faculty’s argument is the distinction between the necessity for space (and the smart, creative use of existing and repurposed space) and the need for a university to constantly grow and growto achieve excellence. The first is a reality; the second is a fallacy and, in the present case, a potentially dangerous one. Many of the elite colleges and universities have progressed by making innovative changes in curriculum and replacing outdated facilities with newer ones, without expanding their student body or carrying out massive building programs. Before embarking on such an expensive, disruptive plan as outlined in the 2031 proposal, the Board of Trustees, along with the administration and faculty (albeit never included), should have given very careful thought to defining what makes NYU the one-of-a-kind institution that it is, and move forward with a plan that takes advantage of NYU’s unrivalled strengths. One of NYU’s most important assets is, of course, its coveted location in the heart of Greenwich Village. The 2031 plan will not only significantly alter the character of the Village, but will further alienate the community that has historically been and continues to be a vital part of NYU’s appeal – the culturally and intellectually vibrant, diverse community that so many of our students (and new faculty colleagues) cross states, often oceans, to join.
   The proposed construction, when completed, will transform an attractive, residential, relatively green and open neighborhood into one more closely resembling midtown, and will devastate what, until now, has been our great locational endowment and one of the biggest factors in attracting faculty to the University. And yes, one of the damaging consequences of NYU 2031, many current faculty invariably will be induced to find employment elsewhere rather than endure the living and working conditions that two decades of demolition and construction would entail. Loss of top faculty would almost certainly result in the subsequent loss of top students.

   And so, we cannot define the stakes more clearly: We are concerned that the multi-billion dollar NYU 2031 expansion plan may severely damage our University, miring it in academic mediocrity – and debt. We disagree with Pres. Sexton’s premise that “Space translates into talent.” We believe instead that exceptional people – distinguished by exceptional knowledge, commitment and vision – is where talent resides. In short, our administration is using the wrong unit of measurement for academic excellence. It is not buildings or square footage. A university is not the sum of its architectural footprints or global satellites. Higher education is not just another corporate business to be measured by monetary means. What we have always been concerned with the most, as educators, is the value of an NYU degree.

   One hardly needs to be an academic to appreciate that the defining qualities of a top educational institution are, instead, the retention and hiring of exceptional faculty; a fair but rigorously demanding admissions policy (NYU currently admits roughly a third of all applicants, as compared to Columbia’s 10%); much better student-to-faculty ratios; smaller classes, featuring more seminars, colloquia and tutorials; and more generous financial aid packages. The current expansion plan, in contradistinction, threatens to do the very opposite: hike tuition even higher than its already-alarming rates (currently around $58,000 if one adds room & board), place even more undergraduates into our already-oversubscribed classes and – in light of the endless construction zone that will be Washington Square Village and Silver Towers – drive away many of our best colleagues, all the while making the recruitment of new faculty (to replace those who have departed) as difficult as possible. Meanwhile, there is the issue of waste. The number of renovated yet empty, as well as warehoused, apartments in NYU housing is staggering. There are no fewer than 60-70 vacant units in Washington Square Village alone. Another 30 or so stand empty in Silver Towers. Please believe us when we say that there is no shortage of space; rather, space is often squandered.

   Again, NYU is not a multi-billion dollar corporation and does not need to expand in order to excel. At 22,000 undergrads, plus graduate students – over 45,000 students in total, twice the size of Columbia’s student body – NYU is more than large enough, at base. We would argue that it is currently overgrown. What we should be doing, collectively, is turning to new solutions in sustaining and improving our academic mission. Massive new projects within the “footprint” of the Super Blocks – in danger of collapsing under its own financial and destined to completely poison NYU's relationship with its surrounding community – are not required. Growth in space should instead be internal and incremental, as needed – that is, better use of existing and recently purchased space (the Forbes Building a prime example), careful building renovation, technological upgrades and a focused educational mission.

   It is this kind of responsible, smart growth that will help not only the University but New York City in a substantive way.

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3. VL

   August 4, 2012 at 11:15 pm

   My partner and I were recruited to NYU a decade ago; I have since left, but I still live in the Village and have been following the NYU 2031 plan with as much puzzlement as dismay–until I read this thoughtful post by the ever-astute Corey Robin on why elite universities are expanding across the globe: http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/20/elis-comin-hide-your-heart-girl/ The reasons typically given have never made sense to me (see TruthToPower's excellent summary above). But here is the key, from Robin's essay:

   "Well meaning voices on the right and the left are crying foul. Setting up shop in Singapore, they say, is inconsistent with the university’s values. With a very few exceptions, no one has asked the obvious question: what if it’s not?

   "While I was at Yale, a very smart labor leader told me something I’ve never forgotten. Everyone at Yale, he said, thinks of the place as a pyramid, with the president at the top, the provost and deans beneath him or her, and the faculty beneath them. The reality, however, is that Yale is an upside-down pyramid. The president is at the bottom (the rest of the administration and faculty don’t matter at all), and it goes up and out from there to the board of trustees (aka “The Yale Corporation“) and the rest of corporate America.

   "The fact that the Yale administration has consistently and roundly ignored faculty opinion on this Singapore matter should tell you something about who calls the shots—even on vital questions of the university’s academic mission—and whose values matter most. As Charles Bailyn—future dean of the Singapore campus, member of the Yale faculty, and son of Bernard Bailyn, arguably the most influential historian of the American Revolution in the last half-century—said: 'The vote won’t derail our work.' "

   I recommend reading the whole post.

   Recent events at UVA and elsewhere have given us a rare public glimpse of the private power that Boards of Trustees wield. My own experience at NYU SoM confirmed that Boards composed entirely of business people not only have enormous control over the Deans and the President, but little understanding of or appreciation for scholarship. It's disturbing to see someone of Sexton's intelligence being bent to the will of the NYU board, but he seems committed to keeping his job. (The last Dean of the SoM who didn't kowtow to the Board lost his.) This is not just an NYU problem. All universities are heading the same direction, because unbridled capitalism has reduced us all to consumers or workers. Thus is the world made safe for capitalism, but not safe.

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