I WENT to find my aunt Ruth in Judson Church among the disgruntled at a public hearing last month about New York University’s latest proposal to expand its Greenwich Village campus. It was a couple of weeks before the local community board denounced the proposal outright. A light mist was falling. I climbed the church steps. Beyond the long tables, where children drew with crayons, a bobbing sea of homemade placards demanded, “Flowers Not Towers.”

I had been one of those children at the long tables years ago. This sort of meeting felt like home, in the neighborhood where I had grown up in a cheerful culture of endless protest at a time when N.Y.U. was not yet one of the biggest and most ambitious private universities in the country but still a modest school proudly catering to working New Yorkers like my mother and Ruth.

The storm over NYU 2031, as this latest expansion proposal is called, has escalated into one of the city’s most acrimonious land-use battles. No wonder. The plan is so clearly oversize that it’s hard not to see it as a stalking horse for what school officials figure they can get permission from the city to build. The proposal envisions constructing some 2.5 million square feet (the rough equivalent of the Empire State Building) over the next 20 years on a pair of superblocks owned by the university below Washington Square Park. The blocks are now dominated by midcentury tower-in-the-park faculty residences called Washington Square Village and University Village.

Common sense and the billions of dollars that the project would cost suggest the university would be hard pressed to build half of what it’s outlining during the next decade or two. The question is which half of NYU 2031 ought to get a go-ahead, if either. The school, meanwhile, is expanding its satellite campus in Brooklyn and its medical center in Midtown. Universities in the city move their campuses from time to time. Columbia did it in the 1890s, quitting Midtown for Morningside Heights. N.Y.U.’s ultimate development may lie beyond the Village. In any case, this latest proposed expansion should not be the start of some new open-ended phase of growth in the neighborhood but the end of it.