By Martin Tessler
Kudos to The Villager and Al Amateau for his report on “N.Y.U.’s applicants most ever” (Feb 3). The reported details on New York University’s applicant and enrollment growth unveil a unique financial gamesmanship that N.Y.U. has been pursuing in marketing Washington Square to hopeful applicants over the globe.
Let’s connect the dots and do the math:
• 42,242 applications for the 2015 class
• 41,000-plus applications for 4,800 places in Washington Sq. = 36,200 applicant rejections
• A nonrefundable charge of $70 per application, or 36,200 x $70 =
• $2,534,000 annual revenue
It does not take a professor from N.Y.U.’s esteemed Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to comprehend how the magic of a Washington Square location is generating $2.5 million in annual income for N.Y.U. Who needs the stock market when the time-honored real estate investor’s dictum of “Location, Location, Location” is paying gigantic dividends for an institution that pays no taxes on its noncommercial property? Similarly, it does not take a professor of finance from N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business to comprehend that N.Y.U. has a major financial interest in perpetuating a wide-ranging growth model centering on Washington Square.
It is the international reputation and popularity of Greenwich Village and its nucleus of Washington Square and surrounding environs that is the key attraction generating those applications. This phenomenon is, of course, aided and abetted by N.Y.U.’s marketing program aimed at students eagerly wanting to experience college in a highly popular Greenwich Village neighborhood culture in which NY.U. is ensconced. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that N.Y.U.’s 2031 Plan delineates an area around Washington Square that it calls its “Core” and a surrounding area beyond that it designates as its “Neighborhood.” Can 3 million square feet of growth centering on Washington Square ensure a steady stream of $2.5 million in income from a hopeful, oversupply of applicants? I hasten to add that the 42,242 applications for the Class of 2015 represented an 11 percent increase over the previous year, so it can be assumed that the $2.5 million will increase by a conservative $250,000 annually.
The social and physical cost of this transmutation to the Washington Square neighborhood has had an impact on the surrounding residential neighborhood where Washington Square Park and landmark buildings, such as Judson Memorial Church, are being overshadowed by hulking institutional buildings. This massive growth has spawned N.Y.U.’s own private bus system to tie its outlying student dorms to Washington Square, without the university’s asking the students to integrate themselves into the community fabric by using public transit. This belies the N.Y.U. rhetoric of “being in the Village and of the Village.”
This ongoing battle centers on N.Y.U.’s determined expansionary hegemony over the Village in its quest of becoming “The First Global University.” Its pending request to rezone a 9-block area west of Broadway from residential to commercial fails to recognize it is part of a larger residential community. This singular growth of N.Y.U. and its institutional needs, which are distinctly at variance with the surrounding residential community, is at the core of opposition to its vast 2031 expansionary model. Could the linkage of $2.5 million annually generated by N.Y.U. at Washington Square be the catalyst of neglecting repeated recommendations from community groups and Community Board 1’s invitation to expand in Lower Manhattan?
There is no question that the historical tie of N.Y.U. to the Washington Square neighborhood has been a fundamental one in formation of the cultural world of Greenwich Village that extends worldwide beyond the local neighborhood. However, this culture has been transmuted in recent years from that of a neighboring educational community to an institution dominated by its own self-absorbed ambition of marketing itself as the global messiah of higher education.
This messianic mission, moreover, focuses on a continued in-gathering of students to the finite neighborhood of Washington Square, whose 365/24/7 residential community has been telling the N.Y.U. administration that 3 million square feet of singular-institutional growth is not feasible here. If N.Y.U. really has the growth and welfare of New York City at heart, as it publicly claims, it will expand in Lower Manhattan, which needs and wants this development.
It is imperative that the body politic of “electeds” who will eventually rule on N.Y.U.’s 2031 Plan need to hear from the public on this vital development issue if Washington Square is to survive as a landmark residential neighborhood.
Fellow Villagers, we need to speak up at our community board, to our elected representatives and to our neighbors to make sure that we move forward as a community, but it does not mean being inundated by the singular vision of N.Y.U.’s global dreams.
