From City & State’s Heard Around Town, May 9, 2012:

In a New Yorker article last month, Stanford University officials expressed misgivings about the Bloomberg administration’s behavior in negotiations on a proposal to build a New York City tech campus — a proposal that was eventually scuttled before Cornell University won the bid. The negotiations reportedly left Stanford President John Hennessey “seething,” and he accused the city of changing the terms. The university’s general counsel, Debra Zumwalt, told the magazine that the city had belatedly added millions of dollars in penalties, and said that she had “never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” Asked yesterday to respond to the comments, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insisted that the city “dealt fairly with every applicant” but that the city would never give away something so valuable — the land and the millions in upgrades — without some guarantees. “I just don’t know the woman,” he said about Stanford’s counsel. “I don’t know her. I can just tell you that my experience, mostly with John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, was nothing but great. He’s a great, educated, smart guy, good leader, and it’s just a shame that it didn’t work out.”

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