NYU 2031 Resources

Advocates for NYU 2031

Voices across the city are speaking out in favor of NYU 2031. Discover what the plan's many supporters and advocates have to say—including comments from alumni, students, concerned citizens, faculty, administrators, and numerous authorities on higher education—at the Advocates for NYU 2031 page.

John Sexton, President of New York University, Advocates for NYU 2031

New York University's success and essence is derived from its location in Greenwich Village. The strength of the "Core" at Washington Square is fundamental to the success of a University that increasingly extends its network of talent flow—students and faculty—across both New York City and the world.

The University currently has five separate academic and research hubs in New York: the "Core" at Washington Square, the 1st Avenue Health Corridor, Downtown Brooklyn, Fine Arts on the Upper East Side, and a Midtown/Financial District presence for continuing and professional studies. Activities and growth are taking place across these hubs, particularly in Downtown Brooklyn and the Health Corridor. But with the exception of its operationally separate and distinct health/biomedical presence in the 1st Ave Health Corridor and engineering presence in Downtown Brooklyn, these hubs are modest. The vast preponderance of NYU's intellectual and academic assets are located at its Washington Square Core.

The University is comprised of 18 different Schools, each of which engages in its own specialized training, research and education, and each of which has its own unique space needs. Over the last few years, the University has for the first time, set out to understand, coordinate and better manage the space needs of the individual schools and provide a framework that organizes and prioritizes those needs and where they should be located. The goal was to limit the ad hoc and inefficient planning and real estate strategies that had poorly served the University and strained its relationships with its surrounding neighbors.

During the past decade, the University also engaged with the individual Schools to reorganize, renovate and right-size their physical space, based on decompression needs and projected faculty hiring. That exercise allowed us 1) to meet a set of critical space needs; 2) to make informed decisions to move some schools and programs outside the Core as appropriate (i.e., moving Nursing to the Health Corridor).

What remains now is a set of pressing space needs with very limited existing opportunity for future development within the Core. It is only by utilizing the Superblocks for added mixed-use academic and student and faculty residential spaces that NYU can meet the space needs of its schools, departments, programs, faculty, and students over the next two decades.

The Superblocks provide unique opportunities. They enable NYU—which has been accustomed to making the best of retrofitted space in 19th and 20th Century buildings—to have de novo space designed to meet the needs of a 21st Century institution of higher learning. They enable NYU to time the creation of space more carefully to academic need and planning, rather than relying on the vicissitudes of the real estate market. And they enable NYU to save substantial money by building on land it already owns, rather than paying for new land. The inability to develop these blocks to meet the needs of its schools will arrest NYU's academic momentum and advancement, particularly in the fields of the performing arts, the life and physical sciences, and k-12 education training and research.

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