Hoping to replicate our Apple in The Big Apple, New York City has invited Stanford University to consider creating an engineering school in the city that would confer a Silicon Valley degree in the global center of culture and commerce.

“Stanford has served as an intellectual incubator for the emergence of Silicon Valley and has the potential to do so again,” said Stanford president John Hennessy, announcing the news at Thursday’s Academic Senate meeting.

“The concept as laid out by New York plays to many of our strengths, particularly the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes this university,” he said. “The challenge is one that Stanford is highly qualified, perhaps uniquely qualified, to take.”

New York does not have a top-ranked applied science research and graduate school, despite its 630,000 students. Without that, it has fallen behind the Bay Area, Boston and other regions in its efforts to attract new high-tech companies — and the jobs they create.

For Stanford, “the advantages are several,” said Hennessy. “Remember that we are a university that serves the nation. And I think, taking a page out of the president’s State of the Union address, this is a chance for the university to create a center of innovation and vibrancy that offers the kind of economic growth that exists in Silicon Valley.”

Competitive process

Worried that New York is not home to enough technology-based startup companies with the potential to become big employers like Google, last December the city’s deputy mayor for economic development, Robert K. Steel, announced that New York would seek a “top caliber academic institution” as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering. There is a precedent for the city — Cornell University has a major medical school there.

Universities — unlike New York’s traditional sectors of finance, insurance and real estate — are a recession-proof employment engine. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is seeking to expand the city’s economic base, making New York an “idea capital” where universities are the center of a metropolis built on ideas and intellectual capital.

It is a competitive process, and at least 19 universities have expressed an interest, including ones in India and Israel. The top American contenders, in addition to Stanford, are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell and Purdue.

But Stanford is well-positioned to meet the objectives laid out by New York officials, according to Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin, and is working on a formal “expression of interest” to submit to the city. A small team from Stanford visited New York earlier this month to meet with city officials.

New York is seeking a university with world-class academic programs, a demonstrated ability to attract very talented students and a demonstrated track record of being able to turn research discoveries into economic benefit. Of the contenders, Lapin said, Stanford is believed to have spawned the largest number of startups.

If accepted, Stanford’s new campus would be far larger, and more permanent, than the university’s existing centers in Washington, D.C., and overseas.

Integrated campuses

Stanford and New York officials envision a center focusing on information technology, with one department of computer science and a second in electrical engineering. Its first phase would include 25 faculty, 125 Ph.D. students and 250 or more students seeking master’s degrees.

The faculty would initially come primarily from the School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Business, including experts in information technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Some new faculty would be hired for the campus. Others would come from the main campus, rotating through for one- to five-year assignments. Biology professor Robert Simoni called the idea “exciting, and very interesting to watch.”

Graduate students would earn their degrees in New York, not Palo Alto, although the curricula of the two campuses would be integrated, Hennessy said. Stanford would plan to use its long experience in distance education to allow East Coast and West Coast locations to share courses and support cross-country research collaborations.

Four possible sites are under study: two in Manhattan, one in Staten Island and one in Brooklyn.

The graduate school would serve as the first phase of a larger effort that could someday expand to include undergraduate students, said Hennessy, offering such topics as art history, urban studies and “ethics and banking,” said the Stanford president, to the laughter of the crowd.

If successful, it could serve as a model for future far-flung campuses, Hennessy said.

“The day is coming when universities will be in more than one location,” he said. “The university that figures out how to make it work, and work well, will be in a significantly advanced position.”

Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-920-5565.