6/25/08 -- The New York State Education Department's Board of Regents gave the NYU-Polytechnic merger its approval on Tuesday at its June board meeting - the final approval the deal needed to go forth.
NYU will now effectively own Polytechnic University, a Brooklyn engineering school, which will be renamed the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
Just after 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, the State Education Department's Board of Regents - a 16 member regulatory body - approved an amendment altering Polytechnic's educational charter to include the affiliation. The amendment will become effective July 1.
"This is a great day for NYU, for Poly and for New York. For NYU, it reconnects the university to an engineering research and education capacity that we have not had for over three decades," NYU Provost David McLaughlin said in a statement. "For Poly, it connects a venerable school of engineering and technology to a national research university."
The deal was delayed after Polytechnic's Alumni Association voiced strong opposition to the merger.
The group's concerns prompted multiple state investigations into the deal, and a vote by Polytechnic's Board of Trustees on the deal was postponed for one month after state Sen. Kenneth LaValle (R-Long Island) requested a delay to investigate. LaValle, who is the chairman of the state Senate Committee on Higher Education, issued a report last month detailing the findings of the committee's four-month investigation.
The report - the first independent look at the contentious negotiations - dismissed most of the alumni association's claims but sharply criticized Polytech's Board of Trustees on three points:
• Polytechnic's use of a three-year-old real estate appraisal in negotiations.
• The exclusion of dissenting trustees from the board's merger committees.
• Polytechnic President Jerry Hultin's failure to tell the Board of Trustees about merger negotiations until six months after they began.
For the next few years, Polytechnic will operate as a separate entity, run by its own Board of Trustees, until it gradually integrates with NYU's other schools.
McLaughlin added: "For New York, this important step forward in the relationship between NYU and Poly holds the prospect of sparking major advancement of our city's stature as a world capital for science, technology and engineering."
Jane C. Timm is the university editor. Email her at jtimm@nyunews.com.
