The Tech Campus Moves Downtown

Cornell Tech. Photo Credit: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0

My latest City Journal article from the Winter issue is now online. It’s called “The Tech Campus Moves Downtown” and is about states and universities making geographic moves to better position themselves for the 21st century. It talks a lot about the University of Illinois and its Discovery Partners Institute plan, as well as Cornell Tech.  Some excerpts:

Much of today’s technology economy is located where a critical mass of talent and capital converge: on the campuses of elite research universities, in settings with strong entrepreneurial cultures. The key role that universities play in this equation is prompting some states to rethink the geography of their key academic institutions, looking to position them more effectively as engines of the local economy.

A case study for the challenges that states face in strengthening their knowledge-economy prowess can be found in Illinois. The University of Illinois’ renowned computer science and engineering programs have produced a Who’s Who of tech startup founders, including Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (YouTube), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Tom Siebel (Siebel Systems), Jerry Sanders (AMD), and Max Levchin (PayPal). It’s a track record to be proud of. From the state’s perspective, though, there’s one big problem: none of these accomplished people built his business in Illinois.
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Why do Illinois’ tech brains often escape to the West Coast? A commonly given answer: geography. The University of Illinois’ flagship campus is located in downstate Urbana-Champaign, a small region of only 240,000 people about two hours’ drive on I-57 from the state’s economic capital in Chicago. This disconnect between the location of a state’s flagship school and its economic capital is not unique to Illinois: other states should be rethinking their geographic strategy for the twenty-first century as well.

The location of most American universities is an accident of history…Most of their sites were chosen more than 100 years ago, for reasons no longer relevant…As states’ populations swelled and their economies expanded, cities with colleges began to diverge. Some states had established their flagship public institutions in the state capital or in another city that grew to be the state’s economic center. These included Ohio State in Columbus, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Texas in Austin. But others—like Purdue, Penn State, and Missouri—were located in cities that grew with the college but remained small urban areas, “college towns” to this day.
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Cornell, a private Ivy League university that is also New York’s land-grant college, has made just such a geographic realignment. As a private school, it’s free from the political complications besetting state universities, and thus is able to make moves more rapidly than these public institutions. Cornell’s main campus is located in the upstate college town of Ithaca. Its medical school has long been based in New York City, and it recently opened a second major New York City operation: Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, a partnership with Technion–Israel Institute of Technology.
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New York City’s motivation to get a technology-focused university is clear. Less attention has been paid to Cornell’s motivation. According to Dan Huttenlocher, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, one motivator was that the city was a complementary venue to Ithaca for realizing the university’s research ambitions. “We are focused on the digital transformation of the economy and society,” he says. “So many issues of the world are urban issues.” The critical mass of industry and the density of people make New York City a good place for those looking to be on the leading edge of digital transformation. It didn’t hurt that Cornell could tap into huge pools of donor money to win the competition and launch the campus. The school has raised $770 million in private funding so far.
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Cornell may be the best-known case of a top college making a big geographic move, but it’s happening elsewhere, too, as the case of Michigan State’s medical school demonstrates. University medical schools have long been located in a state’s big city, geographically separate from the university’s main campus. These schools require a critical mass of patients to operate at a scale more easily attained in a large metro.

That’s part of the rationale for Michigan State College of Human Medicine (MSU-CHM) relocating its medical school headquarters to Grand Rapids and building a major medical school campus there.
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Illinois is arguably the state with the most to gain from some type of geographic realignment. It’s been a topic of conversation and debate for years. Former governor Bruce Rauner put forth the most aggressive solution to date, one that draws heavily on the Cornell Tech approach. The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), to be located in Chicago’s South Loop, is envisioned not as a degree-granting institution but rather, in partnership with other universities and corporations, as a center for cutting-edge research in areas like big data and food and agriculture. DPI anticipates rotating faculty and students from the University of Illinois and other schools, as well as hiring its own faculty. The state has already appropriated $500 million for the project and is exploring partnerships with Israeli universities.
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Leaders in Urbana-Champaign are alarmed at the prospect that university assets might move to the Loop. Laura Frerichs, director of the University of Illinois’ Research Park and economic-development director for its Urbana-Champaign campus, emerged as a major DPI opponent. She believes that there’s no inherent limitation in her community’s ability to retain talent and build a technology economy. She points to local examples of technology success, such as Wolfram Research, the global software company behind the well-known Mathematica platform, which is headquartered locally and employs 350 people. The research park that Frerichs runs has attracted numerous major firms, including ABInBev (formerly Anheuser-Busch), Caterpillar, and AbbVie.
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The biggest political risk to DPI is the state’s transition to a new gubernatorial administration. Rauner lost his reelection bid to Democrat J. B. Pritzker, who criticized the DPI plan. Yet Pritzker has championed Chicago’s technology sector. He has invested in Chicago technology firms and was the driving force behind the creation of a facility known as 1871 (named after the year of the Great Chicago Fire) as a sort of headquarters institution of Chicago tech. He clearly understands the logic of DPI. As governor, he’ll likely want to put his own stamp on it and perhaps rebrand it, not cancel it. Then again, relying on rational behavior in Illinois politics has never been a winning bet.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s not just STEM focused moves either. The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has been making a push into Arlington.

A related point occurred to me last week when I gave a talk to some MBA students at Chicago-Booth. I was told that most MBA students there actually live downtown now and take the train to Hyde Park every day. In fact, every person who attended my talk lived downtown (I did a survey). It makes me wonder if the school made a mistake when it built its new business school building, the Harper Center, in Hyde Park instead of downtown.  MBA students already don’t engage much with the rest of the school, so this would have been a feasible move.

from Aaron M. Renn
https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/03/22/the-tech-campus-moves-downtown/