UK: New Tech Universities To 'Reblance Economy'

When David Willetts, the minister for higher education in Britain, announced this month that the government was “inviting proposals for a new type of university with a focus on science and technology and on postgraduates,” a New Yorker could be forgiven for feeling that the plan sounded familiar.

Just a couple of weeks before, a collaboration between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology emerged as the winner of a competition to build a campus in New York dedicated to applied science; by nurturing engineering and high technology, city officials said, they hoped to reduce New York’s reliance on financial services.

Although the Industrial Revolution was born here, with James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine and George Stephenson’s locomotive, Britons have long worried about their country’s decline as a manufacturing power. In recent decades, it has been the City of London, Britain’s financial district, that has been the country’s main source of jobs and economic growth. But the lingering effects of the financial crisis have made British officials just as anxious as New Yorkers to, in Mr. Willetts’s phrase, “rebalance the economy.”

In a speech at the Policy Exchange, a London research organization, Mr. Willetts made his intellectual debt explicit, saying that a major city in Britain might want to donate land for the new university, “as Mayor Bloomberg has just done so successfully with his competition for a new graduate school.”