NYU's 25-year plan calls for it to make large expansions into Governors Island and downtown Brooklyn, the university announced yesterday. That space would be used for both academic and residential building, possibly making undergraduates in some departments travel between Washington Square and other, remote areas for class.

As much as half of the 6,000 additional square feet NYU says it will need by 2031 would come from outside of Greenwich Village - on Governors Island, in downtown Brooklyn and in midtown Manhattan, near NYU's Medical Center.

The plan, which calls for the university to expand by 6 million square feet by 2031, had been criticized by Village community groups for the amount of space NYU plans to acquire.

But yesterday NYU officials said that between 2.4 and 3.2 million square feet of that space would come from outside of the Village. Governors Island and downtown Brooklyn could provide as much as 1 million square feet each - in total, four times the size of Washington Square Parks.

"It provides an academic and residential center where we can incrementally grow and build off of," said Will Haas, NYU's director of planning.

Within those broad areas, NYU has not identified any specific sites for expansion; instead, it has identified possibilities that it will consider.

Meanwhile, NYU and the groups controlling Governors Island have been in talks since the '90s about NYU possibly expanding there. In 2006, NYU said it declined offers to develop the 182-acre island, which was previously inhabited by the U.S. Coast Guard.

But the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation recently moved to redevelop the island piece by piece. NYU is now speaking to GIPEC about attaining development rights on Governors Island; NYU officials say they intend to file a development proposal once GIPEC puts out a request for them.

NYU is also planning to create a Health Corridor by buying additional buildings near NYU's Medical Center. A new building that would hold the Dental School, the Nursing School and the Child Study Center is already planned in that area; the project is still raising funds, but should be completed in three to five years.

These expansions may force some students to travel back and forth between NYU's various locations, though officials said they would set up schedules so that no student had to make more than one such trip each day.

"That's something we've been thinking about very intently," Haas said. "Travel is really the most tricky issue."

SMWM partner Cathy J. Simon, whose architecture firm is working on NYU Plams 2031, said that it is not unusual for universities nowadays to expand onto remote areas outside of their central campus.

"Harvard, Brown, Stanford and UC San Francisco - everybody is looking to expand," she said.

Byron Cheung is deputy campus editor. Chris James is deputy city/state editor. E-mail them at university@nyunews.com.