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A NOTE OF IMPATIENCE frequently creeps into the voice of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger when he talks about the university's vast planned Manhattanville campus. When it's finished, sometime around 2030, the $6.3 billion expansion project will boast 16 buildings housing research facilities, classrooms and dorms on a 17-acre parcel stretching from Broadway to 12th Avenue, and from East 125th to East 133rd streets. But getting to that point is proving difficult.
"We certainly weren't anticipating so many challenges," Mr. Bollinger says, referring to a multiplicity of political and legal wrangles since the plan was formally announced in 2004. "I didn't think it would take quite this long."
Although the school has yet to officially revise the target date of 2015 for finishing the campus's four-building first phase, Mr. Bollinger concedes that it could take until 2020.
However, Columbia has put the pedal to the metal on expediting Manhattanville since the New York State Court of Appeals ruled on June 24 in favor of the state's right to invoke eminent domain to seize property on Columbia's behalf. The school expects to break ground on the first building, the 362,700-square-foot Jerome L. Greene Science Center, this fall.
Closely cropped Ivy
"COLUMBIA IS MOVING forward," says Robert Kasdin, the school's senior executive vice president overseeing the plan's development and execution.
With about 100 square feet of interior space per student--the smallest among Ivy League schools and less than half that of the next-worst, Harvard University--Columbia has been short of space for decades. Addressing that need was one of Mr. Bollinger's mandates when he came on board in 2002.
"People have a hard time innovating if there's no space in which to do it," Mr. Bollinger says.
True, as recently as August, U.S. News & World Report ranked the university fourth-best in the country--up from eighth place last year--but its research funding has tumbled. For example, while Columbia ranked fifth in grant dollars received from the National Institutes of Health in the early 1990s, it ranked 14th last year.
"This expansion is vital to Columbia's mission, and we were determined not to let the roadblocks in our way keep us from moving ahead with it," says Mr. Kasdin.
Instead, the university pressed ahead even as it awaited...