NEW YORK CITY-Beginning what he calls “a new period in my life,” Trinity Real Estate’s former president, Carl Weisbrod, is moving into academia. Before he teaches his first class, though, he’ll be back in an accustomed role, which is to get something off the ground. He was founding president of the New York City Economic Development Corp. in 1990 and later served in a similar capacity at the Alliance for Downtown New York; at New York University, he’ll spearhead the development of the university’s new curriculum in global real estate.

“I’m going to spend the first several months trying to plot this out,” Weisbrod tells GlobeSt.com. Working closely with James Stuckey, divisional dean of NYU’s Schack Instiute of Real Estate, Weisbrod will help guide the implementation of courses and recruitment of faculty for the new program. He’ll also continue to serve as a consultant to Trinity Real Estate, where he oversaw a six-million-square-foot commercial portfolio.

Weisbrod says it’s too soon to tell what those courses will look like. He adds, however, “The world has become increasingly global. We think of real estate as being perhaps the most local of issues and disciplines, but in fact it also has become increasingly global.”

Given this globalization, Weisbrod says, “There are lessons to be learned throughout the world and opportunities to teach throughout the world: things that we do well in this country and things that we could learn from others.” He says it’s a critical function of any university to provide such opportunities, “and particularly important as real estate and real estate finance are increasingly globalized.”

Weisbrod spent 12 years as a trustee of the Ford Foundation; in that capacity, he says, he’s had an opportunity to see some of the issues that have arisen with the majority of the world’s population now living in cities. “That creates a huge number of challenges, both physical and social,” says Weisbrod. “As this urbanization of the world has accelerated, sometimes we tend to look at social challenges and physical challenges separately.” Integrating these two sets of challenges, and devising solutions that address both, is one of Weisbrod’s interests that could help shape the development of the new curriculum.

Over a career that has spanned four decades in both the public and private sectors, “I’ve been working on issues that I really love and areas I really love,” says Weisbrod. “I felt it was time to take a step back and first, teach some of the things that I think I’ve learned over the decades and second, take the opportunity to get a broader perspective on real estate, development and the like.”

The chance to “cross-fertilize” at NYU drew Weisbrod to the Schack Institute. “One of the great things about NYU is that there are opportunities for students in different schools to take courses that involve several different disciplines,” he says. “A lot of the work I’ve done over the past 30 years has been involved in different disciplines: real estate, finance, construction, business, law, public policy. The opportunity to integrate all of that at NYU, particularly under Jim Stuckey’s leadership as dean, is very exciting.” Weisbrod will formally join NYU in January and teach his first class there in fall 2011.

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Paul Bubny

Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.