Stanford University stunned City Hall yesterday by abruptly withdrawing from a nationwide competition to build a science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, leaving it to upstate Cornell University to create a lasting legacy for the Bloomberg administration.
The nation’s No. 2 engineering school was outbid by Cornell, which was willing to pay more to build on a Roosevelt Island site that required toxic cleanup. Stanford, meanwhile refused to agree to a bill for remediation that wasn’t capped, sources said.
“We were looking forward to an innovative partnership with the city of New York, and we are sorry that together we could not find a way to realize our mutual goals,” Stanford said in a six-paragraph statement.
City officials immediately began talking up the prospects of Cornell, which is now the odds-on favorite over NYU, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon.
Cornell late yesterday announced it had received an anonymous $350 million gift for the high-tech campus, the fifth largest donation ever to a US university.
But Stanford’s announcement to pull the plug on its $2 billion project came out of the blue, months into the administration’s bold plan to lure an institution of its prestige to help secure both the city’s position as a high-tech leader and Mayor Bloomberg’s legacy.
Multiple sources said Cornell simply outmaneuvered Stanford.
“Cornell was willing to agree to everything and anything,” one source said. “Stanford was a much tougher negotiator, and they and the EDC [the city’s Economic Development Corp.] just couldn’t get on the same page on a number of issues.”
Stanford had previously raised concerns about the city discussing the possibility of selecting two universities to run two separate science campuses.
But sources insisted yesterday that, in the end, that issue was not the stumbling block.
The city was willing to provide free land and about $100 million in infrastructure improvements to the winning school. But Roosevelt Island has toxic soils and Stanford was concerned that the city wanted it to share in the risk if remediation costs skyrocketed.
“The city felt in the last few days there wasn’t a strong commitment by Stanford,” one source said.
While Stanford President John Hennessy was gung-ho on Roosevelt Island, some trustees and faculty were not.
One insider said they had secretly visited Hudson Yards on the West Side — much more valuable land that the city wasn’t willing to surrender.
Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin told The Post last night, “There was a level of risk and liability involved that our attorney and board could not agree to.’’