A source tells Betabeat that Mayor Bloomberg has a “big announcement” about the city’s tech campus slated for his 11.30am appearance at Tumblr’s 21st Street offices today.
Does that mean the New York City Economic Development Corporation is finally revealing a second-place winner for the campus competition? Nope! Although a decision was expected in January, city officials say they may have underestimated the time frame based on the ease of its negotiations with Cornell-Technion. (Stanford dropping out the race probably streamlined the process as well, we imagine.) While the Roosevelt Island campus nabbed the city’s entire $100 million grant, the EDC is optimistic that some kind of financing negotiations can be worked out to support one (or all!) of the remaining proposals: NYU in Downtown Brooklyn, Carnegie Mellon at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or Columbia in Manhattanville.
In the meantime, we did get the early word on one big personnel decision as far as Cornell and Technion’s $2 billion Roosevelt Island applied sciences extravaganza. Professor Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Cornell University’s Dean of Computing and Information Sciences, has been named Cornell Vice Provost and founding Dean of the new campus.