I’ve written about NYU and Poly here on AVC a few times, most recently when I gave a commencement speech earlier this year. Poly is one of the great successes in NYC over the past ten years. In 2005, it was a struggling engineering school in downtown Brooklyn and NYU hadn’t had an engineering school since the mid 1970s.
In 2008 NYU and Poly agreed to affiliate and put themselves on a path to eventually merge the schools. In 2012/2013 NYU and Poly officially merged and Poly became the NYU Poly School Of Engineering.
Over those ten years, Poly has risen from a middling engineering school to one of the top 50 engineering schools in the US. Applications have risen, as have test scores, and graduation rates. The faculty has stepped up and has been joined by a bunch of new dynamic educators and researchers. It has been a joy to watch this transformation which happened because a “jewel of a school” joined a juggernaut called NYU which brought it brand, capital, and leadership. I’ve had a front row seat to this transformation because I’ve been a Trustee of Poly and NYU and joined both boards because of the affiliation and planned merger.
But it gets better. Today, NYU and Poly are announcing that the school will now be called The NYU Tandon School Of Engineering because Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon have bestowed a $100mm gift on the school, to be matched by a $50mm capital campaign. These funds will be directed at faculty and academic programs which are the essence of a university.
For me, this feels like a company I seed funded just did a growth round. And that always feels good because it means that the plan worked.
Besides the phenomenal generosity of Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon, I think I would be remiss not to mention some of the other folks who made this happen; Jerry Hultin, who led Poly during the merger, Sreeni who leads the school now, Dave McLaughlin the Provost of NYU who championed the idea of the merger, and John Sexton and Marty Lipton, whose leadership of NYU over the past twenty years has transformed not just NYU, but also Poly and many other things. Of course there were many others who made this happen, but these people deserve mention for the courage of their leadership. Turnarounds don’t happen without courageous leadership.
The biggest winner in all of this is New York City. I got involved with Poly and NYU because I was acutely aware that the shortage of strong engineering schools in NYC was having a negative impact on the local tech sector. Poly’s engineering school has always been quite large, with almost 2,500 graduate students. But it was not thriving and it needed to. Now NYU Tandon, Columbia, and Cornell Technion are a “golden triangle” of high quality engineering schools in NYC. So much has changed on this front in the past ten years. Now we have the fertile ground for technology to match the entrepreneurial spirit and capital that NYC has always had. This is a big deal.
