This place is teaming with baddies. (Cornell)

After they came after our hummus, it was only a time before they came for our mobile app engineers.

Anti-Israeli groups set on depriving New York of two of its most important commodities have moved on from the dowdy old Park Slope Food Co-op to the shiny new Roosevelt Island tech campus. What do both have in common? A commitment to the environment and Israeli imports. Curbed has spotted a new group, New Yorkers Against Cornell-Technion, dead set on stopping the new tech campus, Mayor Bloomberg's biggest achievement since the smoking ban, because of the affiliations of Cornell's lesser-known (on these shores) partner.

According to the New Yorkers Against Cornell-Technion's website, Technion is complicit in every nefarious Israeli deed from the settlements to circumcision.

What the public was not told is that The Technion is complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians, specifically by designing military weapons and developing technologies that are used to drive Palestinians off their land, repress demonstrations for their rights, and carry out attacks against people in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere.  For these reasons, The Technion is directly implicated in war crimes.

Furthermore, The Technion practices institutional discrimination against Palestinian students by severely restricting their freedom of speech and assembly, and rewarding Jewish students who, unlike Palestinians, perform compulsory military service in Israel.  This is in direct contrast to Cornell University’s founding values of universalism and inclusion embodied in the university’s motto “any person any study”.  Any collaboration with The Technion makes a university likewise complicit.

Emphasis theirs, and while there is no mention of circumcision, Alan Dershowitz would agree that that cannot be far off.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Mr. Mayne's Cooper Union collossus. (Wikimedia Commons)

A gravelly voiced Californian who has won "the Nobel of architecture" and an upstate ivy are now poised to transform Roosevelt Island. From Cornell's shortlist of high-profile designers, the university has chosen Thom Mayne, Pritzker Prize winner and principal of LA-based firm Morphosis, to design the school's new satellite campus, to be called CornellNYC Tech.

Mr. Maybe told The Times he believes the new Cornell campus will set the standard for the next generation of university design, even if he has no idea yet what form it will take.

Mr. Mayne said the Cornell project presented an opportunity to contemplate what an academic building should look like in the information age. Should it have the bullpen environments of tech start-ups or the more cloistered layout of established universities? How should it use space to foster collaboration while also carving out areas for quiet reflection?

“There is no modern prototype for a campus,” Mr. Mayne said. “You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.”

There are no snazzy architectural images yet, nor can Mr. Mayne speculate about what shape the building will take or what materials he might use. “I haven’t even seen the site plan yet,” he said. The only certainty is that Mr. Mayne will not inaugurate Cornell’s new campus by designing some kind of ivory tower.

“I like being able to tell you that I don’t have any bloody idea what it’s going to look like,” he said.

Dan Huttenlocher, the dean and provost of the new campus, told WNYC it was Mr. Mayne's cutting edge work in the East Village that helped him beat out the likes of SOM, which designed the master plan for Roosevelt Island that helped beat out Stanford, and Rem Koolhaas, who designed a celebrated new building for the architecture school in Ithaca.

“That building has engineers and scientists and artists and designers brought together into a common space,” Mr. Huttenlocher said, referring to 41 Cooper Square. “Therefore, it really has to respect the different cultures of some different communities and bring them together in some interesting ways.”

mchaban@observer.com

It’s not often that a city has the confidence and resources to plan so far ahead. But that’s New York for you.

Plans submitted by Stanford, Columbia and Rockefeller universities, along with a consortium led by N.Y.U., all have merit and wonderful possibilities. But the plan envisioned by Cornell University in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is, we think, the best. We urge the mayor to choose the Cornell-led plan when he announces his decision in January.

Cornell and Technion would base their campus on Roosevelt Island (a vision they share with several competitors). They hope to construct two million square feet of campus space, enough to serve nearly 2,000 students. The main building on Roosevelt Island would be 150,000 square feet, and would be heated and cooled from 400 geothermal wells. The facility would be the ultimate in green technology.

The Cornell plan has its neighbors in mind, too. The plan calls for creation of 500,000 square feet of green space on the island featuring great views of midtown and the Upper East Side.

While both N.Y.U. and Columbia obviously are hometown institutions, Cornell’s proposal is stronger, and let’s not forget, Cornell’s roots are in New York as well. The creative partnership with Technion is another strong selling point. Cornell president David Skorton noted that Technion has been “the driving force behind the miracle of Israel’s technology economy.”

That’s precisely the role that Mr. Bloomberg believes the new school will play in the city’s economy. The mayor has argued that the city needs a cutting-edge science and engineering campus to create the Silicon Valley of the future. He’s willing to invest $100 million in public funds for infrastructure improvements in and around the site of the new campus, in hopes that the project will create 400 new companies and more than 20,000 jobs over the next 30 years.

This is precisely the kind of bold, forward-looking thinking that vaulted New York over its competitors in the 19th century. Now, in the early years of the 21st century, Mr. Bloomberg is looking for people and innovators who can reimagine New York’s economy for the marketplace of the near and distant future.

The mayor discovered that there is no shortage of institutional talent eager to implement his vision. The Cornell-Technion proposal happens to be the strongest plan in a strong and exciting field.

The new director of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Stephanie Wiles. (Photo: Janine Bentivegna Photography)

Stephanie Wiles, the director of Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum, has been picked by Cornell University to run its Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Ms. Wiles will replace Franklin W. Robinson, who held the position for nearly two decades.

Ms. Wiles is a university museum veteran. Prior to running the museum at Oberlin, she served as curator of Wesleyan University's Davison Art Center, after beginning her career at New York's Morgan Library, as a curator in its department of prints and drawings. She holds an M.A. in art history from Hunter College and a Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York's Graduate Center.

The Johnson Museum, which is housed in a 1973 building designed by architect I. M. Pei, is home to 32,000 works of art, including about 15,000 photographs. A new wing, measuring 16,500 square feet, will open to the public on Oct. 15.

Prior to the opening of the Johnson Museum, Cornell's art collection was shown at the Andrew Dickson White House on campus, where the late artist Willoughby Sharp organized the 1969 exhibition "Earth Art," one of the first major museum exhibitions about contemporary artists using the land to make work.

A building permit application filed this month with the Department of Buildings lays out plans to construct a 20-story tower at 1299 York Avenue, by 69th Street. The school, which has a partnership with New York-Presbyterian, had previously announced plans for a $650 million, 350,000-square-foot biomedical research center at that location.

The university was tight-lipped with specifics last week. Weill Cornell spokeswoman Myrna Manners declined to confirm the original cost and size figures, saying those were rough estimates released in late 2006 to celebrate a large gift to the university. Ms. Manners also declined to provide updated estimates, or an architectural rendering of the building.

“It’s at a very preliminary stage,” she said of the project, adding that a long approval process awaits. But, she added, “there are no obstacles.”

The new project would join Weill Cornell’s new 13-story ambulatory care center, which opened in January 2007 just up the block, at York and 70th Street. Both buildings are designed by New York architecture firm Polshek Partnership, which is also handling projects at the university’s upstate campus in Ithaca. A separate project, unaffiliated with Cornell, is adding medical condominiums on East 75th Street to provide doctors in the clinic-packed neighborhood with office space.

So far, there's no master list that actually says which members proposed which items, although Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno has released his version.

While we're waiting for the rest of the information we want, here's a sampling of some of the discretionary spending in the budget:

Money for the Long Island Maritime Museum ($22,500) and other educational projects, listed here.

Funding for the Nan Shan Senior Center of the Chinese American Planning Council ($2,000) and other senior centers, here.

Money for the Cornell University fluid milk pricing study ($60,000) and other economic development, transportation and projects, here.

-- Azi Paybarah

Before speaking to Cornell University students about corporate corruption, Alan Hevesi's addressed his own corruption scandal. According to the Cornell Daily Sun, Hevesi said, "Don't believe everything you hear. That's my quote."

The paper also reports that Hevesi dismissed the investigation by the Albany District Attorney into the matter of the state employee who spent time chauffeuring his wife because "he's investigating in response to a candidate calling him up three weeks before an election."

-- Azi Paybarah

Tomorrow's debate at Cornell University will represent John Faso's best chance yet to slow the progress of the Eliot Spitzer juggernaut, even if the timing is less than ideal -- coming just days after his first ethics controversy of the campaign. And as Tom Suozzi learned, Spitzer is a front-runner who isn't afraid to attack his opponents at the podium.

Even though Faso has one ad running now, the debate will be the first time many New Yorkers are seeing his face. (The ad is an attack piece that doesn't even mention Faso's name, except to say that he paid for it.)

Any ideas on how Faso might go after Spitzer beyond the requisite tax-and-spend stuff?

-- Azi Paybarah