New York University and Polytechnic University are resuming discussions, left off three years ago, about a merger, said N.Y.U. President John Sexton and Provost David McLaughlin in an Aug. 7 e-mail to students and faculty.
At the same time, Jerry Hultin, who became president of Polytechnic two years ago, posted a letter on the Poly Web site notifying students and faculty that the Poly board of trustees voted last week to reopen merger talks with N.Y.U.
N.Y.U. disbanded its own College of Engineering when it sold its University Heights campus in the Bronx in 1973. Sexton noted that, at that time, many N.Y.U. Engineering faculty members went to Poly.
“Though N.Y.U. obviously has thrived during the intervening years in all disciplines, the absence of a school of engineering and applied science has been felt keenly in a world increasingly reliant on technology,” Sexton said.
A campus in Brooklyn, where Poly has been located since it was founded in 1853, would be a wonderful neighborhood to be a part of, Sexton suggested. The merger would enhance various N.Y.U. disciplines, including multimedia and medicine, Sexton added.
Poly has more than 3,000 students, about half of them undergraduates, in its Brooklyn locations, and N.Y.U. has more than 50,000 students, 19,400 of them undergraduates in the Village and other Manhattan locations, as well as in foreign programs.
