Verizon Gift to Fund Cornell Executive Education Center

A $50 million gift from Verizon will fund development of a new executive education center at the Cornell Tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, the school announced this week.

The center will be part of the first phase of the campus, which began construction last month and is expected to open in the summer of 2017. The campus is the new applied sciences campus of Cornell University, which will offer graduate programs in business, computing, and engineering in partnership with the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology.

“This is a transformative gift that will help enormously to advance our mission of bringing academia and industry together,” said Cornell University President David J. Skorton. “The campus will welcome everyone interested in using technology to advance the economy and to make the world a better place, and the Verizon Executive Education Center will be at the center of it.”

Cornell Tech Dean Daniel Huttenlocher described Cornell Tech as “a place for technology innovators and leaders in New York City and around the world, and we are thrilled that Verizon is joining with us to create an executive education center built to provide novel educational and collaborative programs focused on the digital age.”

A longstanding relationship between Verizon and Cornell

Verizon’s gift is the latest chapter in a corporate partnership with the university that spans decades, and includes hiring students for internships and graduates for full-time positions.

The new center’s programs and events will create a platform for Verizon to develop customized center-based programs for its executives and its customers, and will facilitate direct collaboration between other companies and Cornell Tech students to bring cutting-edge ideas to market.

“Our donation to Cornell Tech is an investment in the future and fits perfectly with our mission to use communications technologies to solve big challenges and make people’s lives better,” said Verizon Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam. “The Verizon Executive Education Center will be a magnet for developers, entrepreneurs, educators, and innovators across all industries, building on the great talent and creativity we already have in the tech sector here in New York City.”

Cornell Tech aims to have an impact on city

The site of the new executive education center is one of the most ambitious New York City developments in recent memory. New York City awarded the bid to develop the site to Technion-Cornell in 2011, beating out Stanford University in a potential partnership with the City College of New York. Stanford pulled out of the competition at the last minute when it became clear that Cornell would receive approval for the project.

The 2.1 million square foot campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River is being partially funded by US$350 million in gifts from Charles Feeney, the founder of Duty Free Shops, and a US$133 million gift from Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan.

When completed, the 12-acre campus will house 2,000 students and hundreds of faculty and staff. The first phase of construction includes an academic building that will be one of the largest net-zero energy buildings in the United States, with all of its power generated on campus.