A note from Dean Hubbard

This note was just sent out to the CBS community by Dean Hubbard. It's related to the buildout of the Manhattanville campus, which will be the b-school's new home within a few years.

Dear Colleagues:

I am very excited to report that Columbia University has entered the next - and crucial - phase of the planning process for its new Manhattanville campus: the formal public review and comment period under the City's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP. This milestone is an important one in the Manhattanville development timeline, one toward which the Business School and the University have been working assiduously for several months.

With the beginning of ULURP, the Manhattanville project has been set on a structured and transparent trajectory with a predictable schedule. The City of New York established ULURP as a means to standardize the procedure through which construction and other projects affecting the land use of the city are reviewed publicly. The ULURP process takes approximately seven months and consists of several progressive stages of review. More details on each of these stages and the approximate time allotted to each are included in the attached fact sheet. The successful completion of the process will result in the re-zoning of the area and will give the University authorization to proceed with building plans.

I cannot stress enough that Manhattanville will be nothing short of transformational to the School, and especially to the student experience. Current planning more than doubles our instructional space, which will allow us to separate academics from recruiting and student activities. We will also more than double the number of private study rooms and will add multiple student lounge areas for informal study, networking, and social interaction.

Manhattanville offers a number of additional advantages for the School: Most importantly, the new site gives us the opportunity to remove physical constraints and enable excellence; it allows for the future growth of the School; and it provides option value unmatched by any other proposal. And as we dramatically transform the School’s physical and student culture environment, we will empower faculty research through research centers and facilities for collaboration that will advance the School’s capacity to generate cutting-edge ideas. Bringing together our talented people and enhancing connections to the business resources around us are of course big plusses.

Over the coming months, I look forward to keeping you informed on our progress as we work toward our goal to design state-of-the-art facilities that match our status as a premier business education institution. As always, you can find additional information on the entire Manhattanville project at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/neighbors/pages/manplanning.


With regards,



Glenn Hubbard