1973 Merger - A Brief History of the Start of the NYU-Polytechnic Relationship

With the cash strapped engineering school at New York University on its last limbs in the late 1960's and early 1970's, there was a period of talks to merge the NYU engineering school with the Polytechnic Institute if Brooklyn. This would involve NYU selling their University Heights campus in The Bronx, and consolidating at the campus of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in Brooklyn, New York. Most of the engineering faculty who had been teaching at University Heights campus moved to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Together they became the Polytechnic Institute of New York (Tandon School of Engineering News Staff, 2011).

This section explores the propositions of the merger and then the actual merger itself, providing a brief summary of both. It then dives deeper into the feelings and opinions of the faculty + students as compared to the higher administration of the institutions (i.e. the president's office and the boards of each institute). In addition, archives of the State of New York will provide the viewpoint of the state Board of Education in comparison to that of the individual institutions. While this section is more brief than the section on the 2014 merger, it is meant to provide a background as to why certain people and entities felt the way they did when the 2000's came up and another merger was in the talks. The 2014 merger was complicated at best, and this section provides a bit of background before diving deeper into the 2014 merger.