Governor’s Island might actually be an easily digestible place for expansion. There are no residents to fluster or pesky zoning laws to strip away. And there’s available space! Lots of it! As we reported last year, when Bloomberg released the blueprints for the City’s master renovation of the island, the large swaths of vacant space seemed as though they were waiting for NYU to arrive.

Or were they waiting for Stanford? Or Cornell?

It turns out that Bloomberg isn’t exclusively wedded to NYU’s plan for a one million-square-foot urban studies campus on the island. He put out a call to institutions across the country last year, promising lots of land and $100 million in aid to whichever can come up with the best plan for a new applied sciences campus in the city. The Request For Proposals (RFP) for the initiative, whose deadline is coming up on October 28, identifies three potential locations for the campus: Roosevelt Island, Brooklyn Navy Yard and, yes, Governor’s Island.

The idea is to build a tech mindhive in the city. The RFP will favor applicants that emphasize “those fields in the applied sciences that lend themselves to commercialization which will result in job growth in the City.” A breeding ground for the next Google, but maybe not the next Norman Foster.

What this means for NYU’s island aspirations is still unclear, but they’ve been reigned in significantly. “We’re in the middle of trying to figure out what we’ll do with the RFP,” said Alicia Hurley, NYU’s point person on government affairs. An urban planning campus doesn’t fit within the RFP’s parameters, and with the NYU Poly campus already covering engineering and related fields, NYU isn’t about to build another.

Governor’s Island may be creeping off the 2031 map. “We will continue to study it as well, but as we’re looking at all these schools responding to the RFP it starts become one of many options,” Hurley said. The main requirement NYU has for whatever site they’d try to plunk down those one million new square feet is that the land must be heavily subsidized or simply given to the university by the city.

“That’s what made Governor’s Island so appealing, because we always thought we could make a deal, that if we went and renovated the buildings they’d give us a $99-a-year land lease or something,” Hurley said, not missing the chance to rebut the popular urging from expansion critics and Village residents that NYU stretch out in the Financial District instead. “It’s not like the city is going to heavily subsidize that! Look at the Condé Nast deal!”

Stanford has proposed building a campus on Roosevelt Island, promising $1 billion to turn that eerie, crumbling smallpox hospital into a gleaming genius magnet. Cornell and Carnegie Mellon have submitted their concepts for campuses as well, and in total 18 proposals have emerged from 27 institutions, according to the Daily News. The deadline is October 28, when an expert panel on all things tech-lucrative will pick a winner.