NYU Engineering School Responds: No, We Will Not Change Our Name Back to Polytechnic

Screenshot via NYU.edu

UPDATE, Monday evening: Kathleen Hamilton, director of marketing and communications for the newly named NYU Tandon, has informed Patch that there is no chance school officials will re-consider the name change. ”The name is the name at this point,” she said.

However, the school’s dean, Katepalli Sreenivasan, has begun a series of town-hall meetings to address students’ recent anxiety over the Poly legacy. ”The dean has asked for students’ input on ways that the name Polytechnic could be incorporated somehow into the university — perhaps reflected in a building, or a scholarship fund,” Hamilton said.

The school also considering giving current students the option of having their transcripts “not only say the name now, but underneath it, ‘formerly Polytechnic,’” she said.

Original story below.

More than 1,200 students and alumni of NYU’s prestigious Polytechnic School of Engineering campus in Downtown Brooklyn — renamed the Tandon School of Engineering earlier this month — are demanding, via online petition, that NYU President John Sexton restore their school’s name back to its former glory.

“No donation, no matter how significant, should allow for 161 years of heritage and educational excellence to be erased overnight,” the Change.org petition says.

The donation in question is, indeed, of some significance: Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon, university affiliates and Wall Street billionaires, gifted the then-NYU Poly campus $100 million in early October.

“We feel privileged to be able to participate in the transformation that is happening at NYU and at the School of Engineering,” Chandrika Tandon said at the time.

The university wasted no time replacing the school’s over-century-old name with that of its favorite new benefactors. Today, few traces of the Poly legacy remain on NYU’s engineering website.

From students’ angry online petition:

“The Polytechnic School of Engineering is referred to by students, alumni, faculty and employers alike as ’Poly’ and has gained a reputation under this name. The name of our university and its reputation are a source of great pride, to students and faculty alike. Changing this name to include that of a benefactor, would hinder both personal pride and reputation.”

A petitioner named Carol Escamilla writes that while she “greatly appreciate[s] the donation made by the Tandrons [stet],” she believes that the school’s name change will be a ”major setback and create chaos.”

Another petitioner, Natasha Taylor Berube, says the change is “singlehandedly wiping away our hertitage [stet]” and ”proves that NYU is all about money.”

Patch has reached out to the university to see what it would take for officials to reconsider their decision — or if that’s even a remote possibility at this point. We’ll update when we hear back.